Little Black Dress with Bonus Material Read Online Free

for her mother’s brain.
    â€œHow long?” she asked, hating the fear that she heard in her own voice. “How long until you bring her out?”
    He rubbed tired-looking eyes. “Two or three days on the short side, I guess, but possibly a week.”
    Had he just said “a week”?
    Toni’s chest compressed as she considered all the things on her schedule for the next few days and beyond: the consultations, menu tastings, meetings, fittings, and facing Greg after the proposal that never was. If she added another plate to the ones she juggled already, she’d surely drop something. But Toni knew that it couldn’t be this.
    â€œWhy now?” she whispered, though she hadn’t meant to say it aloud. It was a selfish thought, and she regretted it the instant she said it.
    â€œWho knows?” The doctor shrugged slim shoulders, further rumpling his coat. “It’s just one of those things nobody plans for,” he remarked, as if her question was real, not rhetorical.
    When Toni didn’t respond, he filled the silence with medical chitchat, explaining in layman’s terms that Evie had experienced a cerebral hemorrhage, blood on her brain, and though the surgery seemed to have gone well, there was too much swelling still to know if it worked. When she came out of the coma—if she came out—she wouldn’t be able to speak coherently, not at first, and he warned that she may never fully recover, even with rehabilitation.
    Toni had the perverse need to laugh and tell him that wasn’t possible. Evie Ashton had nerves of steel, a spine made of rebar, all those superhuman traits that few besides comic book heroes possessed. She couldn’t imagine anything incapacitating her mother for long.
    Except maybe a stroke and a drug-induced coma, she thought. “If I talk to her, will she hear me?”
    Dr. Neville raised his eyebrows. “It certainly can’t hurt.”
    â€œOkay then, I should do that.” Toni stood, gripping her purse like a life vest. “I want to see her now, if I may.”
    â€œIt’s awfully late . . .”
    â€œC’mon, doctor”—she hadn’t driven down to Blue Hills like a bat out of hell on a winter’s night for nothing—“give me two minutes, please.”
    He sighed and held up his fingers in what looked like a peace sign. “You’ve got exactly two and then we’re kicking you out.”
    â€œDeal.”
    Toni’s legs wobbled as she walked warily into ICU and glimpsed the thin, sheet-draped body in the bed, tubes and leads attaching her mother to machines that blipped and beeped all around her. With Evie’s eyes closed, she appeared to be asleep and dreaming. Toni wished like hell she could pretend that’s all it was.
    Despite her determination to be tough, all grown-up and adult, she choked up. She was simply a child with a sick mom, and there was nothing that could’ve made her feel more helpless.
    In an instant, she sank into the bedside chair and reached for Evie’s hand, a pathetic-sounding, “Oh, Mama,” slipping out between trembling lips. “It’s me, Antonia,” she said. “I’m here with you, okay? I’m back, and I’m not going to leave you, I promise.”
    She would stay for as long as it took.

Chapter 5
Evie
    M y granddad Joseph used to say that the women in our family either blew hot or cold. If they were serious and well-behaved, he swore that the blood of the German Morgans ran more fiercely through their veins. Granddad’s father, Herman—a scary-looking fellow I knew only by his steely eyes and grizzled beard in old black-and-white photographs—had been a Morganthaler from Mosel and a vintner by trade. When he’d settled in Ste. Genevieve County, Missouri, he’d gobbled up a hundred acres of farmland for planting grapes and had put down permanent stakes.
    â€œHe could make