Free The Lost Daughter by Lucy Ferriss

Don’t know why I didn’t put it together, Meghan gets into his car.
Duh.
” He pulled a goofy face. “I guess I had a mental image,” he said, “and I—”
    And you didn’t figure I’d be with him, Brooke finished silently. She saw Meghan at the blue door and waved. “So you know Sean.”
    “He prints our pool brochures. I don’t know, maybe I thought you were divorced, I don’t know.”
    “Sean’ll be back tomorrow. Hi, Bug,” Brooke said to Meghan, who was dragging her bag of artwork. Recently she had been focused on kittens—kitten pictures, collages of kitten photos from magazines, a fluffy kitten resembling a sheep, made of glued cotton balls stuck to cardboard.
    Meghan glanced at the boy in Tad’s car. “Mommy,” she hissed, her eyes darting back and forth.
    The adults exchanged smiles. “You got a cute clone there, Mrs. O’Connor,” Tad said.
    “She gets it all from her dad,” Brooke retorted, shutting down the flirtation. When the Mazda had driven off, she tucked herself into the car and nodded at Meghan to do her belt. “You took your time,” she said.
    “Mommy, that boy Jason is
smelly
.”
    “Really? I didn’t smell him. How was your day?”
    “I don’t want to go to dance class. I hate dance class.”
    “That was your day? Hating dance class?”
    “Mommy.”
Meghan emitted a great, grown-up sigh as they exited the parking lot and headed toward the dance studio. Did Brookesigh like that? She glanced sidelong at her daughter. Tad Horgan had called her Brooke’s clone, but Brooke had looked different as a child—paler, longer in the face, with a bumpy nose she was glad not to have passed on to Meghan. It wasn’t as if, were they to adopt, there would be one who matched and one who didn’t. Would there?
    A half hour later she found a parking spot right outside Starbucks. “Here goes,” she said softly to herself. All day, she had been not-thinking about this encounter. She had not-thought about it while she set up the chrysanthemum display, she had not-thought about it while she’d argued with Shanita, she had silenced the shrinks, she had not-thought during the exchange with Tad Horgan. No, that wasn’t true. On no other day would she have told a man she’d just met that his legs looked like a soccer player’s. Unable to resist, she pulled down the visor and flipped open the little mirror. Deliberately, she had left no time to change clothes or put on makeup. If he wanted to see her, he’d have to see her as she was—grimy, disheveled, no hiding the crow’s feet. She pulled away the elastic holding her ponytail, finger-combed her hair, and shook it loose. There. That would do.
    Inside, she blinked in the sudden dimness before she made out his posture, the familiar tilt of the head, shoulders back, knees akimbo. “Alex,” she said as she wove her way around the espresso line.
    He stood. His hair was shorter, still dark, the same cowlick over his left eyebrow. As he stepped around the tiny table for a hug, he seemed both heavier and smaller than she remembered—only a couple of inches over her own height, and heavier not from weight gain but as if gravity pulled on him more. “You really came,” he said. He put his arms around her in a hug made clumsier by the chair-cluttered space. Quickly she pulled away, sat.
    “Was I late?”
    “No! I just—all those years, you wouldn’t see me. So I was ready to be stood up. Can I get you something?”
    “No, no. Just sit.”
    “And let you sip at mine?” He grinned slyly at her. Here came the past, trailing anecdotes. She never used to order fries or dessert, but would pick at his shamelessly until it became their joke.
    “I see you got a venti,” she said lightly, “so I figured you were ready to share.”
    He sat. What was so different about his face? “Glasses,” she said. “You never wore those.”
    He took off the wire-rims. “Six years now. I have astigmatism. Doctor in Japan nailed it, my first year