Senseless Acts of Beauty Read Online Free

gray-green eyes and the streaks of rusty brown that splayed out from the center pupil, wondering as her breath fogged up the glass when she would come close to someone else’s face and see in their eyes the same starburst pattern.
    Riley’s eyes were brown. Soft brown, melted chocolate chip brown. Sadie hadn’t expected that. But after forty minutes of thinking about it, she realized that Riley’s brown eyes didn’t mean Riley couldn’t be her mother. Sadie’s seventh-grade science teacher had shown the class diagrams of Mendel’s peas, and once Sadie realized what they meant, she’d made a beeline to the library to pour over eye color and hair color inheritance diagrams for people. So she knew brown eyes were dominant. But she also knew that if her father had green eyes and one of Riley’s parents had light-colored eyes, then Sadie had a fifty percent chance of having green eyes with a brown-eyed mother.
    She’d worked it out a couple of times already, drawing diagrams in the dusting of dirt on the floor of the shed.
    “Sadie.”
    Sadie’s chest felt tight, like something was swelling up underneath her ribs. She’d been watching Riley since arriving in town by train more than a week ago. She’d followed her from a safe distance as Riley wandered the woods every morning, pausing for long instances to peer through her binoculars. Sadie liked Riley’s rolling laughter as she chatted with her guests on the back porch on sunny afternoons. Sadie liked that Riley spent most of her days barefoot. Now she stared at Riley’s face, taking it all in—the freckles that covered her skin, the curve of the lobe of her ears, the bow shape of her upper lip, the gleam of her two front teeth as she opened her mouth on a breath.
    “Sadie,” Riley repeated, “I’m so, so sorry.”
    Sadie grappled with that while the pressure under her ribs stretched so tight that she couldn’t suck in a breath. She grappled with that while the fire baked her right shoulder. Sorry for what? Sorry for not recognizing her own child right away? Sorry for giving her up for adoption? Sorry for not having stepped in after everything went wrong? Sorry for having wasted fourteen years they could have spent together under the rafters of this lodge, drinking the hot chocolate now curdling in her stomach?
    Or sorry because it wasn’t Riley, nearly fifteen years ago on August 22, who’d pushed her into the world?
    And all at once, the pressure under her ribs collapsed like a balloon popping, and she tightened her grip around her knees so she wouldn’t tumble off the hearth onto the hardwood floor.
    Riley said, “You’ve been hanging around the camp all this time, working up the courage to ask me that, haven’t you?”
    “I’ve been wasting my time.”
    “How frustrated you must feel.”
    Sadie mouthed the word frustrated . Frustration didn’t seem to say what she was feeling right now. For as long as she could remember, she’d been fed pretty much the same story told to every adoptee she’d come to know: That her birth mother had been a young woman, a brave woman, making a difficult choice when she was unable to take care of her own child. Her birth mother was someone like Riley, pretty in a country air, no makeup, soft in the middle kind of way.
    Well, she should have known that script was a sketchy fairy tale meant to stop a boatload of ugly questions. She thought she’d prepared herself for all possibilities. But now she realized that, over the past two weeks, she’d opened herself up to dreaming again.
    Sadie felt a tug and realized that Riley was pulling on the towel that Sadie had pressed between her knees. She loosened her grip enough for Riley to slide the worn terrycloth into her hands.
    Riley fingered the fading logo. “I imagine you’ve done a lot of work to figure out where this towel came from.”
    “Search engines are your friend.”
    Sadie reached for the mug to hide her face behind it. She tipped the cup high, but there