ТОП просматриваемых книг сайта:
Dying Breath. Wendy Corsi Staub
Читать онлайн.Название Dying Breath
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780786044559
Автор произведения Wendy Corsi Staub
Жанр Триллеры
Издательство Ingram
“I don’t think so, Tess.”
“You don’t want him there.”
“It’s not that I don’t want him there.”
It’s that he doesn’t want to be there.
And that he doesn’t belong there anymore.
His choice, not mine.
“Then you should invite him,” Tess persists. “I mean, it’s not like you’re divorced, or anything.”
No.
A trial separation—that’s what they told their daughter—and each other.
But in Cam’s mind, it was permanent—if only because she sensed that it was permanent in Mike’s.
“Will you invite him, Mom?”
“Maybe,” she says, because it’s easier than saying no.
Just as trial separation is easier to say to a child than divorce.
For now, Tess seems satisfied with that “Maybe.”
And, hell, I will ask Mike, Cam thinks. Let him be the one to say no…
Or not.
The Fourth of July is more than a month away.
You just never know.
By then, she’ll be into her second trimester.
By then, Mike will know she’s pregnant.
The shark has an innate need to hunt, to kill, to feed. It glides stealthily, concealed in the depths, circling the unsuspecting victim.
Great Whites in particular will cleverly blindside a moving target with a ferocious, debilitating strike. The weakened, wounded victim doesn’t stand a chance when the mighty beast moves in for a frenzied kill. In its wake, there is nothing but a trail of blood and discarded remains.
A shark’s prey is selected opportunistically. Any flesh and blood will do.
Not so in your case. Not so at all.
Sometimes a year, maybe more, can pass before the desire begins to stir.
And sometimes, not more than a couple of weeks go by before it strikes all over again. And again.
It can’t be helped, nor the hunger denied.
It’s just the way things are, the way they have been since she left.
So. A shark’s tooth.
The time has come again to find her.
Claim her.
Cam doesn’t really expect the pregnancy to change anything between her and Mike. Not the big picture, anyway.
He chose to leave; she doesn’t want him back by default.
She didn’t even think she wanted him back at all, for that matter…
Not at first.
But lately, it’s as if a haze has begun to lift a little and she’s been able to see certain things more clearly. Not just her marriage, but the past in general, and the future as well…when she allows herself to think about it at all.
Cam watches her daughter take another tortilla chip and dredge it through the small bowl of salsa. She tries to think of something else to ask. Or say. Or do.
She can’t just sit here, hands clasped so they won’t feel quite so…empty.
Will it be like this from here on in? she wonders, reaching for a chip—not because she’s hungry, but because she has to occupy fingers that wouldn’t mind being wrapped around a stemmed wineglass right about now.
“I made chicken soup for dinner,” she informs her daughter unnecessarily.
Tess makes a face and tilts her head toward the fragrant stockpot on the stove. “I know, I saw. Why?”
“What do you mean, ‘why’? And how come you’re making that face? You love homemade chicken soup.”
“Right, and you haven’t made it in years.”
“Not years.” A year, though, probably. At least.
Cam, who once considered cooking her favorite hobby, has been shamefully lax in that department.
“So why are you making it now, on the hottest day ever?”
Because I’m pregnant and I’m craving it, that’s why.
Of course she doesn’t say it.
Tess doesn’t know about the baby.
Nobody knows, other than Cam’s ob-gyn. When Dr. Advani—a kindhearted, tiny woman she’s been seeing for years—confirmed the pregnancy, Cam cried.
It took the doctor a moment to realize the tears weren’t exactly joyful.
“If this baby wasn’t planned, you should know that you do have options,” she began, to Cam’s immediate horror.
“No! No, I could never—I…. I want the baby. I just…”
…want my husband, too. I want all of us to be a family. I want to feel the way I did when I was pregnant with Tess and the future was full of promise.
Granted, back then she and Mike were broke. But that was their only real problem, and it was a surmountable one.
This time, Cam is alone, thirty-seven years old and facing what feels like a treacherous mountain whose summit is still obscured by that fog of uncertainty.
But what choice does she have? All she can do is climb, one step at a time, praying she doesn’t lose her grip and fall.
“It’s good for you,” Cam tells Tess. “Chicken soup. That’s why I made it.”
“I just feel like something lighter.”
“That’s strange. You don’t look like something lighter.”
Tess looks up sharply.
Cam wishes she could take back the stupid quip. She said it because it popped into her head; because it’s what Mike would have said. A typical Mike line.
“Whatever.” Tess glowers.
Cam sighs and crunches another tortilla chip, trying not to long for a Margarita to wash it down.
Margarita?
Ha. Who is she kidding?
Tequila straight up would do the trick, no salt or lime required.
But that, of course, is out of the question.
She hasn’t touched a drop of liquor in over two months.
She stopped drinking a few days after Mike moved out—but not necessarily because her husband had decided, out of the blue, that he no longer wanted to live here and she found herself alone with Tess.
Maybe she would have eventually figured out that she couldn’t continue to numb herself with booze.
The reality: she stopped because one morning she woke up, threw up, and understood what was wrong with her before the test confirmed it.
Pregnant.
In this life of hers, filled as it’s been with stupefying twists and turns, that was one of the most monumental shocks of all.
It was second only to her startling recognition of Paul Delgado’s face on that mailbox flier on a dreary afternoon more than fourteen years ago—and the realization that her visions involved real people. That the terrified pleading she heard might very well have been their last words; that the ragged gasps that filled her head might have been their dying breaths.
For