LITMIR.BIZ

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don’t know her, Ellen. She has a big heart and a trusting nature. Not a good combination for somebody who just came into millions of dollars.”

      “But you were just there last month.”

      “Last month she hadn’t announced on television that she was looking for her daughter,” he said.

      She set her wine goblet on the glass top of his coffee table, then crossed her arms over her chest. “How long will you be gone?”

      “Try to understand, Ellen.” He laid a hand on her arm, which felt cool to the touch. “I need to stay as long as Sofia needs me.”

      “But I thought you hated McIntosh. Didn’t you tell me that leaving was all you could think about when you lived there?”

      Now wasn’t the time to confide that even the three days he’d spent in McIntosh after Sofia won the lottery had been too long. He composed his words carefully. “How I feel about McIntosh and how I feel about my stepmother are different things.”

      “So you’re going to let things here slide? What about expanding your company? And the house? At that price, it won’t stay on the market for long.”

      He’d forgotten about the sprawling, contemporary house until this moment. It needed a new roof and a new heating system, but its spectacular views of the Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountains made it a bargain.

      “There will be other houses,” he said.

      She got gracefully to her feet. Her blue eyes locked with his. “In my experience, Tony, if you don’t seize your opportunities when the moment is right, you lose them.”

      After she was gone, Tony went into his bedroom, reached into the pocket of his pants and pulled out a small black velvet box. He snapped it open, removed an oval-cut, one-carat diamond ring and held it up to the light so that it sparkled.

      He’d been carrying the diamond around for the better part of two weeks, the same length of time he’d kept the champagne in the refrigerator.

      He shut the ring back in the box, opened his sock drawer and tossed the box inside next to a blank application for season tickets to the Seattle Supersonics pro basketball games. It would have to stay there until he returned from McIntosh.

      THE BEAUTIFUL rolling countryside of McIntosh and Sofia Donatelli’s heart-tugging plea replayed in Kaylee’s mind at odd moments over the next week, but her own predicament was much more pressing.

      Joey’s tummy ache had not been caused by too many hot dogs but by a lingering stomach flu the pediatrician claimed wasn’t serious. That was a matter of opinion.

      The restaurant where she was a waitress provided a sorely deficient benefits package. Not only had she been forced to pay fifty percent of the doctor’s bill out of her own shallow pocket, but she’d lost tips by staying home to care for Joey.

      Not that the tips had been all that great since Dawn’s departure forced her to change to an earlier shift. Even if Joey hadn’t gotten ill, she needed to face the fact that they could no longer afford to live in Fort Lauderdale.

      She’d spent the last few nights agonizing over where they could go. The inescapable conclusion was her father’s house in Houston that she’d fled while still a teenager.

      Kaylee had doubts over whether they’d be welcome, but last night she had swallowed her pride and telephoned, only to get the answering machine. So far, her father hadn’t called her back.

      For Joey’s sake, she tried to shove aside her worries. Her forced smile strained the corners of her mouth after she and Joey got out of the serviceable ten-year-old Honda she’d bought used five years ago.

      “What do you want for dinner, sport?” she asked as she opened the mailbox in front of her duplex and took out a stack of envelopes and junk mail.

      She’d picked up Joey from school ten minutes ago and worried that his color still wasn’t right. Had her boss’s insistence that she not miss another day of work caused her to rush his return?

      “Fish sticks,” he said.

      She hid a groan. He’d eat fish sticks seven days a week if she let him. But at least they were cheap and easy to prepare.

      “Yummy, yummy, yummy. Joey wants fish sticks in his tummy,” she said, ruffling his thick hair.

      He groaned. “I’m not three, Mom.”

      “Too bad. When you were three, you laughed at my jokes even if they were bad.”

      “They’re bad,” he agreed readily.

      She covered her heart with her hand. “You wound me,” she said dramatically.

      Joey giggled, that high-pitched boyish noise that never failed to warm her heart.

      “Got you,” she said.

      He giggled again. She ushered him from the mugginess of the late afternoon into the duplex, which was only slightly cooler because she kept the thermostat on a high setting during the day to save on electricity.

      Had she really been living here for six years? It seemed impossible but her rapidly growing son constituted proof of how quickly the time had passed.

      Still, she could barely believe that almost seven years had passed since she’d ditched her high school classes and spent the day at the mall charging purchases to the credit card she’d stolen from her mother’s purse. She’d felt completely justified because her mother had grounded her for some reason she couldn’t remember but at the time seemed grossly unfair.

      Night had fallen when she finally returned home to find her father sitting in his favorite recliner with the TV off and the lights out. His voice had been steady when he told her he’d given up trying to track her down hours ago.

      She remembered the fingernails of her right hand digging into her thigh as he went on to say her mother had collapsed that morning while waiting in line at the post office. She’d probably been dead before she hit the floor.

      Following her father’s lead, Kaylee hadn’t cried. Neither had she told him her last words to her mother.

      After the funeral, things had gone downhill fast. Without her mother around telling her what to do, Kaylee had done what she pleased. Within a month, she’d bagged her senior year and run off to Florida. Then she’d gotten pregnant.

      A kind social worker had gotten Kaylee a bed in a home for unwed mothers run by a charitable organization that also helped her get her GED. If not for the stroke of fate that had landed Dawn in the same home, Kaylee would have made the biggest mistake of her life.

      As the two girls had cried together over the children they’d never see grow up, somehow their tears had nourished their own emergence into adulthood. Then Dawn had come up with the radical, wonderful idea that they live together and help each other raise their babies.

      And so they had, a situation that had worked out beautifully until Dawn had fallen in love. Kaylee owed Dawn more than she could ever repay so she’d tried to be happy for her. And she was. But that didn’t stop her from being sad for herself.

      Not because Kaylee craved a man of her own—she’d learned the hard way that romantic entanglements could cause more problems than they solved—but because she’d lost her family.

      Kaylee crossed the main room to the controls on the wall, turning the air conditioning up but only far enough that they wouldn’t break a sweat. She hoped.

      She banished thoughts of Dawn, who she’d assured just yesterday over the phone that she was doing well, and concentrated on her greatest joy: her son.

      She swallowed the sudden lump in her throat that the old memories had formed. She hadn’t truly recognized how badly she’d treated her own mother until she became a mother herself.

      “What did you do in school today, Joe-Joe?”

      In

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