Free No Strings Attached by Randi Reisfeld

he’d bet, had the same instincts as he did about Leonora. Ali? Nah. He sighed. It was time to do something he’d never done in his entire life.
    Clean a bathroom.

Harper’s Reverie
    Harper was psyched that she’d brought her bike, since Cape Cod was made for cyclists. Miles of paths, flat and hilly, laced the landscape, offering radically breathtaking scenery. She’d grown up on city streets, where the only nature was Central Park, if you didn’t count the odd sprouts of weeds popping up between cracks in the sidewalk. Strange, but she found riding past the windswept sandy beaches and over grassy meadows a balm for her raw wounds.
    She’d read somewhere that if you allow yourself to just empty your head, surrender to the grandeur of Mother Nature, your own problems seem smaller, your pain less intense.
    Still waitin’ to feel that way, she conceded.
    Her aunt, twice widowed, believed in the opposite: that being frenetically busy, darting from one adventure to another,helped, “Because pain can’t hit a moving target,” she’d counseled.
    Harper hunkered down and pedaled faster.
    When she’d fled Boston for the summer, she hadn’t been consciously thinking about anything beyond survival. ’Cause if she so much as glimpsed Luke, with or without his new squeeze, she would not be able to breathe. So she’d grabbed on to the first lifeboat she’d found: the Web posting that had led her here.
    In a perverse way, Harper almost welcomed the bickering of the housemates, the carping of her campers; didn’t even mind Katie as much as she made out. All the noise helped keep her mind off Luke. And where her mind went, maybe her heart would learn to follow.
    Late Saturday afternoon, Harper was riding along one of her favorite daffodil-lined back roads into town. Her cell phone rang, and her stomach twisted. No way would it be Luke, she scolded herself. She had to stop hoping.
    The caller ID read MOM .
    Harper could swear her mother was a mind reader: Susan could see Harper and know what she was thinking, no matter how far apart they were.
    â€œWhere’d I catch you?” Susan asked. “On the beach somewhere?”
    â€œClose. I’m biking into town to buy some stuff.” Her list included orange juice, to make up for the half gallon that Alihad unintentionally taken from Katie. And the locksmith, so Mitch wouldn’t find out that Ali had lost her keys—again.
    Her mother wasn’t big on small talk, anyway. Just a few minutes into the conversation, Susan launched into the real reason she’d called: Harper’s heartbreak. “Keeping all that hurt bottled up inside won’t help,” said her mom, “and running away won’t solve it.”
    Harper sighed. “So what will help, Mom? You’re the expert.”
    Her mother didn’t flinch. “Opening up, talking about how you feel. And time. Getting over him will take time.”
    How much time? Harper wanted to ask. How much time had it taken her mother to forgive her father, who’d said, “See ya” before Harper had been born?
    When she’d first realized that all her friends had dads—even dads who didn’t live with them—Harper had pleaded with her mom to get her one. For years, Susan had managed to change the subject artfully, to divert her attention, citing all the loving friends and relatives they did have.
    Had her mother forgiven her father by that time?
    Years later, when Harper was old enough to realize what any onlooker knew in an instant—that the sight of her with blond, blue-eyed Susan meant her father was likely African-American—she pushed harder to know the truth: “Who is he? Why can’t I meet him?”
    Reluctantly, Susan agreed to make contact. Days, weeks, then months went by—Harper had counted—with no reply, no news. Suspecting her mom hadn’t made the call at all, Harper demanded to