Feather Bound Read Online Free

hacksaw crazy. Just a timid sort of shame.
    Shame. Maybe that was why I wasn’t running yet.
    â€œSorry,” he whispered, lying against the gravestone. “I really didn’t mean to scare you. I just… “ He glanced up at me again, fast and fleeting, before gathering himself and focusing instead on the fresh grave dirt beneath him. He patted it twice and stood, slowly. A solemn mask grayed his face, aging him suddenly. “See you around, Old Man,” he told the headstone.
    Old Man?
    With one graceful movement, he swept past me, taking a modest swig of whatever was left in his bottle. Ericka’s driver started to make liberal use of the car horn, but I could only stare – at the young man and his bottle of booze.
    â€œOh, and Deanna? You are Deanna, right?”
    The young man stopped before he’d gotten too far. My heart had almost given out when he’d said my name, because it was right at that moment I’d finally realized who he was. Except it was impossible.
    No way. That can’t…
    He smiled at me. “See you at the reception,” he said, and walked off.
    I crumpled Mom’s bracelet beneath my fingers. “Hyde?”
    Â 

3
    INHERITANCE
    Â 
    Hyde Hedley.
    â€œNot Hedley,” he would always say, back when we were kids. He’d had another name before being adopted by the Hedley family at age six. Thompson, maybe. Johnson? The fanfare that came with the Hedley name made it hard to remember. But he always corrected me as if he were afraid that he’d forget himself one day.
    The Hedleys, see, were as philanthropic as the next billionaire couple. With all of Manhattan’s elite busy donating infinitesimally small fractions of their endless wealth in order to distract everyone from the fact that they lived three streets away from starving families, how exactly could one stand out amidst all the white noise? Especially a mogul whose struggling fashion magazine was, at the time, desperate to secure a major advertising deal with a family-oriented department store chain?
    And Ralph Hedley, at the end of the day, was a businessman.
    â€œHe’s a chess piece, the poor boy,” I heard Mom tell Dad one day, after Hyde’s first visit to our Brooklyn flat – where we used to live. “Come on, honey, you know it’s true. As horrific as it sounds, I wouldn’t put it past Ralph. You know how he is. Don’t know why you keep defending him.”
    Chess piece. It didn’t occur to me what Mom had meant until after Hedley died. I mean, it’d be pretty tough to win the good will of a family-oriented store while your marriage was failing and your childless wife was trying to kill herself, which is what the rumor mills had been churning out back then. Why give cash to poor, socio-economically disadvantaged kids when you can just adopt one from an East Brooklyn orphanage? The latter had more headline potential.
    Hedley spent quite a lot of time boasting about his son to the press – incredibly intelligent for his age, fast-adapting, motivated, athletic, bright future ahead of him at the company, etcetera, etcetera. And not once during the two years I knew Hyde did I see the two of them smiling together, except for when they were having their pictures taken.
    He was a good kid, though, Hyde. He’d have a driver take him across the bridge to Brooklyn every weekend to play with me and Ade. He came to my birthday parties with extravagant gifts that I’d eventually have to send back because either I didn’t know what they were, or they wouldn’t fit through my front door. He was mischievous and brash, but tender and sweet all at once. He was my friend.
    Then he died.
    â€œSo, you think that your childhood boyfriend arose from the dead and will at any second crash his father’s funeral reception?” Adrianna had a way with words.
    I glared at her while she lifted her glass of non-alcoholic wine off the