Free The Lost Daughter by Lucy Ferriss Page B

had been lighthearted, just passing through, operating on a hunch that she was still at the address her mom had mentioned on an old Christmas card. Surely, she had thought, a decade and a half was long enough. “I’d like to see you from time to time,” he said at last. “If that’s okay. I’m not going to, you know, invade your life or anything. But you’ve been in my head since I moved back.”He shifted his gaze to the coffee cup, which she had drained. An ironic smile played on his mouth. “I’d like the connection, Brooke.”
    “Well, that’s fine,” she said. Her tongue felt dry. “And you could meet Sean at some point. And Meghan.”
    “Sure,” he said, nodding.
    Though he wouldn’t do that for a while, Brooke thought as she drove back to Lorenzo’s. She wouldn’t ask him to. Not only that. She wasn’t going to tell Sean whom she’d met, or why. Once she started, there would be no stopping, not with Sean so watchful of her these days, so eager to know why she wouldn’t go off the Pill, what was up with her.
    When she had rolled into the familiar gravel lot at Lorenzo’s and turned off the ignition, she fished out her cell phone. Her heart, where Shanita had pressed her hand, felt swollen. Think, she told herself. Whatever Shanita said, it was better to lift away from the heart, into the head, where you could think.
    “When I get home,” she said to Sean after they’d discussed their mercurial daughter, “let’s talk. Okay?”

Chapter 4
    T he sky over Hartford was the deep blue of summer evening as Alex emerged from Max Oyster Bar. It had been an awkward business dinner. Restructuring, they called it, and Alex knew when he accepted the transfer from Mercator Investments that he would be the fall guy for a number of these closings in the Northeast. The guys who had taken Alex to dinner couched their desperation in grim jokes. A bear market was an eighteen-month period when your wife got no jewelry and you got no sex. Well, no one would lower the boom on the Hartford office right away. They were too close to all the insurance companies the town boasted, with their own financial network. Alex would recommend a half dozen staff cuts and a performance review of the guy who’d downed three vodka tonics. From here he’d go to Albany and repeat the drill. For now he needed to stretch his legs. He left his car in the lot and walked west.
    Maybe, he thought as he headed toward the lowering sun, Brooke had married an insurance guy. He should have asked. So much of her life he couldn’t know. What did he want from her?Friendship, he told himself. He’d lost track, after all, of the others they’d known from those days. It wasn’t as if they had done each other any wrong, however Brooke had reacted in those years. She seemed fine, now. Maybe, if he made enough trips to Hartford over the months, if they shared more lattes—he smiled as he thought of her sipping at his; old habits die hard—he would find a way to tell her the truth. What he’d done, those years ago. What had happened to the baby, what he had done with his own hands.
    That old adage, the truth will set you free. A few well-dressed strangers hurried past him on their way to the train station. Were they free? You couldn’t tell. Who would have claimed, two years ago, watching Alex stride into Shinjo Station on his way to the Tokyo office of Mercator Investments, that he was bound up in the chains of a lie? It wasn’t as though he had felt the lie pressing on him, year upon year. He had gone on—with his job, with Tomiko, with Dylan. If he hadn’t seen Brooke this afternoon, he might not have thought of that long-ago night for months, or years.
    Long shadows fell across the street in the slow August twilight. If he walked far enough, Alex thought, and then drove the two hours back to Boston, he might get a night’s sleep for a change. With Tomiko’s hands massaging him, he used to nod off in less than a minute. But he would never