Free The Law of Bound Hearts by Anne Leclaire Page B

anything of Sam.

Sam
    They had returned to Sam’s bed. Sam was wrapped in Lee’s arms. His hand stroked the length of her back. His fingers and palms were just rough enough to feel good against her skin. Her head rested on his chest and his chest hairs tickled her nose, but she didn’t move. She wanted to stay like that forever. Hidden and safe.
    Lee spoke first. “What’s her name?”
    Sam drew a long, shuddering breath. She was torn between the need to hide the scabbed and shameful wounds of her past and the desire to give him that same secret history, as if it were a gift. “Libby,” she said. “Short for Elizabeth. Elizabeth Faye.”
    â€œLibby,” he said.
    At the sound of her sister’s name on his lips, in his mouth, she felt the tickle of panic in her stomach. She willed it away. This was Lee. Her Lee. A man she could trust, a man who salvaged boats, rescued cats. A man who knew celestial navigation.
    He drew his finger along her cheek, lifted back a strand of hair.
    â€œIs she older or younger?
    â€œOlder. By two years.”
    â€œAnd how long has it been since you’ve talked?”
    How could she make him understand? His older brother Jim was an organic farmer out on the far end of Long Island, and when they got together it was easy to picture them as boys, playing basketball together, horsing around. She could never envision Lee and his brother lashed together playing Siamese twins. Each of them stood alone. There was affection and brotherly love between them, but none of the passion she had shared with Libby. Was that kind of passion—the kind that could change into hate—possible only between sisters?
    â€œSix years.”
    A look of puzzlement passed over his face, and something else, too, something she couldn’t identify—disappointment?—just a flash, but she felt a thrill of panic, as she had when he spoke her sister’s name.
    â€œYou’re kidding,” he said. “You haven’t spoken to your sister for six years? What the hell happened? A fight?”
    She wasn’t ready to talk about the fight. Nor was she prepared to talk about the recent past, the woman Libby had somehow turned into—the wife, the mother of twins, living in a home of false abundance, in a wealthy midwestern suburb, capable of deceit. If she was going to tell him anything about Libby, she would have to go back to a less emotional time, back before everything went wrong, back when Libby was the bold and rebellious one, the rule breaker, afraid of nothing, when Libby was her idol. She rolled over onto her back and stared up at the ceiling. He laid his hand on her stomach.
    â€œWhen we were teenagers,” she began, “Lib used to drive my mother mad.”
    â€œHow?”
    â€œYou name it, they fought about it. There was always a running battle between them, a contest of wills. Makeup and music, curfews and clothes, the fact that Libby refused to wear a bra. The truth is, I think what my mother saw as caring, Libby saw as control.”
    â€œAnd you?”
    â€œI didn’t draw my mother’s wrath the way Libby did. Partly because I wasn’t rebellious by nature and partly because I was invisible in Lib’s shadow.”
    â€œHard to imagine you invisible.” He stroked her belly.
    â€œYou didn’t know Lib back then. She was the kind of person that made a roomful of people pay attention when she walked in. But she didn’t care about that. She never cared what people thought. That’s what made her so powerful. And it’s what made my mother so afraid of her. People in town were always going on about something or other that she’d done.”
    â€œLike what?”
    Sam thought back over the Libby stories. What she most remembered about those years was the tension between her mother and Libby. She had felt like a sponge wedged between them, absorbing and deflecting anger, lying low and