Before Ever After Read Online Free Page A

by.
    “You do know that this is mad, right?” Shelley said. “I can’t believe we’re even letting ourselves think for one second that what you’re suggesting could be true. There must be some logical explanation. A relative, perhaps? A look-alike? A … er … clone?”
    “A clone? This isn’t science fiction, Shelley.”
    “Oh, and your theory that I was married to a remarkably resilient and well-preserved old man is more plausible?”
    Paolo walked over to her and held her by the shoulders. “Shelley, when you saw that photograph on the computer, you knew in the same way I did that that was the person we loved and lost. I know it’s him. And so do you.”
    Paolo was right. If there had been any doubt in Shelley’s mind of the identity of the man on her computer screen, the pendant around his neck had torn it into a million pieces.
    But knowledge and acceptance are two very different things. Shelley rejected the truth not because it challenged reason but because admitting that Max was alive was more painful than believing he was dead. That he was alive only meant one thing—that he had
chosen
to leave her—and that she could never accept. She buried her face in Paolo’s chest and wept.
    Shelley shoved the remnants of her breakfast down the drain. She had half a mind to jump in after them. She couldn’t be shredded more than she already was. “Tell me everything,” she said, “from the very beginning.”
    Paolo stared at her from the kitchen island. “Are you sure?”
    “Yes.”
    “Very well.” He inhaled deeply. “The short version begins with the eggs and cheese your garbage disposal is grinding away. The long versionbegins with a car crash along a blind curve in Naples. Which one would you like to hear?”
    Shelley looked at the mush disappearing in her sink. “Car crash.”
    “Car crash it is,” Paolo said. “My parents were in a car accident when my mother was pregnant with me. My father died instantly while my mother survived long enough to deliver me through an emergency C-section.”
    “Oh, I’m sorry. Um, maybe we should have started with the eggs instead.”
    “It’s okay. Chickens saved the day.”
    “Pardon me?”
    “French chicks, to be exact,” Paolo said. “Luckily for tiny premature me, as my grandfather often liked to remind me, the French chicks and their ingenious incubators at the Paris zoo inspired a doctor in the late 1800s to develop a similar incubating apparatus for humans. And so here I am today, fully indoctrinated with my nonno’s fervent belief that you can get through life’s tightest jams if you are fortunate enough to have a chicken on hand.”
    Shelley smiled despite herself, remembering the way Max had doted on his hens. “Well, Max did love his chickens.”
    “And eggs.” Paolo grinned. “Nonno made absolutely the best baked eggs and cheese. It was sort of a tradition with us. The last time he made the dish for me was when he attended my college graduation,” he said. “A week after he returned to Italy, his fishing boat was found capsized on the lake. They never found his body.”
    Shelley thought about the empty casket she had buried at Max’s funeral.
    “Soon after that, I learned about the will Nonno had left and its conditions,” Paolo said. “ ‘A trade,’ as he liked to call it. Next to his philosophy on chickens, you see, the importance of learning that nothing came without a price was something that Nonno took pains to teach me since I was a toddler crying for juice. Before I learned how to speak, I mastered how to hoard stuffed toys to exchange for the things I wanted.”
    “I assume his will did not require you to produce a teddy bear,” Shelley said.
    “No, but Nonno did ask for two things. The first condition was that I hold down a stable job for at least three years. The second was that I care for Alessandra in the lifestyle she had grown accustomed to.”
    “Alessandra?”
    “His pet chicken.”
    “Of