Kindred Spirits Read Online Free

mingle with her memories of her friend, rising to the heavens. “To you, baby,” she whispered, presenting her glass for an invisible toast. “Wherever you are.”
    There was a soft knock. Since her secretary, Janis, would know better than to interrupt when the smell of cigarettes wafted from under her door, it had to be Scott.
    Scott was the Deloutte in Deloutte Watkins, the saint who’d mentored her straight out of law school and rewarded her with an associate’s position after she passed the New York Bar. When she and Jeff decided to move to Connecticut to raise their family, Scott stoically wished her well and promised there’d always be a spot waiting for her should she ever change her mind. As if she would ever think of returning to the law, she’d scoffed to Jeff.
    But Scott knew her better than she knew herself. Once Amanda and Jonathan were teenagers with their own lives and activities, no longer eager for their mother to meet them at school or hold their hands as they crossed the street, Carol began to grow restless. Feeling useless and, she would later realize, probably clinically depressed, she called up Scott and, over an exquisite lunch of beef carpaccio salad, launched into a monologue about how her days had blurred into years of carpools and laundry and school committees, how she’d lost her identity, had lost her reason for getting out of bed. Much to her horror, she couldn’t stop the words from flowing until Scott reached across the table, took her hand, and asked if part-time, two days a week in the New York office, one day at home, would fit the bill.
    “Yes,” she’d said with a sigh, nearly melting with gratitude. “Yes . ”
    Now she was a junior partner, putting in twelve-hour days while Scott was a dashing widower, physically fit, though graying at the temples. So far, their dates had been quiet dinners and nothing more.
    So far.
    Scott pulled up a chair and tented his fingers, judiciously keeping his disapproval of her cigarette to himself. “How’re you holding up?”
    “Numb.” She yanked down her skirt. “The funeral’s a week from today, in the morning. I’m staying to clean out her closet with Mary Kay and Beth, but then I’m hightailing it out of there as soon as the last box is packed and taped.”
    “Not eager to return to the old stomping ground?”
    “I’m looking forward to seeing my friends. That’s it.” She tapped an ash, the sickening apprehension returning as she considered what lay ahead.
    She did not relish making an appearance in Marshfield and dealing with the stares and whispers. Few in town had not heard the rumors about how she’d stormed out of her seemingly solid marriage, simply abandoned her charming pediatrician husband and comfortable house for no valid reason.
    “Worried about seeing Jeff again?” He regarded her without judgment. Scott was not one to let jealousy get the better of him. He was too much of a lawyer to succumb to such a barbaric emotion and he was too much of a good lawyer to consider the possibility of inadequacy.
    Carol studied her cigarette. It would be so easy to nod and say , Yes, it’s Jeff . Scott would see right through her, though, and then he’d ask more questions. There was no choice but to come clean.
    “Not exactly.” She took another sip of the martini, which unfortunately was growing warm. “The night I left Jeff. . . something happened.”
    “You said you had a huge fight.”
    “Right, but. . .” She was going to come off like such a jerk. An ache spread across her forehead, sign of impending doom. “Before that, though, there was an incident at the school board meeting.”
    Carol chose her words carefully. “I was extremely tired that night. It was the day the Barnegat decision was overturned and, like I said, Jeff and I had been sniping at each other for months and not really talking. I’d been begging him to go with me to marriage counseling, but”—she took a last draw—“he couldn’t stand