Shadow Creek Read Online Free Page A

come to his senses, as he had after running off only days before their wedding, and come back to her.
    What’s wrong with me?
    It’s my own damn fault, she’d chastised herself now. I knewwhat he was like when I married him. I knew from the first minute I laid eyes on him in the lobby of that small chalet in Switzerland, tanned and fit and holding court in front of a roaring fire, surrounded by adoring ski bunnies, that he was trouble. Exactly the kind of man she’d spent her entire twenty-one years up to that point trying to avoid, a man of grand gestures and small cruelties, as charming as he was unsubtle. She knew the type well, having been raised by just such a man.
    “It doesn’t mean anything,” she’d told her friends, the same words her mother had said to her.
    Well, maybe it didn’t mean anything to men like her father, men like Evan, Val understood, but it meant the world to the women who loved them.
    And, ultimately, where did all that fortitude and forbearance leave them?
    It left them nowhere.
    They got dumped anyway.
    Her friends had breathed a collective sigh of relief at Evan’s departure. “He’s a moron,” her closest friend, Melissa, had pronounced. “He doesn’t deserve you,” their mutual friend, James, had agreed. “Believe me, you’re better off.”
    Her mother had been too drunk to say anything.
    Val could still picture the stricken look on her mother’s face after her father had announced he was leaving her for one of his much younger conquests. “It doesn’t mean anything. He’ll be back,” her mother had assured Valerie and her younger sister, Allison. But he never did come back, eventually marrying again and fathering two more children, both girls, daughters to replace the ones he’d so easily abandoned. Meanwhile Val’s mother had gradually morphed from a bright, engaging woman into a joyless and bitter old crone whose main source of comfort was a bottle. Is that what Val wanted for Brianne?
    “Brianne, do you need some help?” Val called out now, shutting the front door on the oppressive July heat and returning to the foot of the stairs.
    Evan was giving her pretty much everything she asked for in the divorce—the house, the white Lexus SUV, substantial alimony, more than generous child support. Within days of moving out of their large home in Brooklyn, he’d settled into Jennifer’s small condo in Manhattan, seemingly none the worse for wear.
    I should hate him, Val thought again.
    Except that you don’t stop loving someone you’ve loved almost half your life just because they treat you badly, she’d discovered, regardless of whether or not you should. Still, it wasn’t fair that a woman celebrating her fortieth birthday would be pining over a man who’d openly betrayed her, as if she were a lovesick teenager crying for the one who got away.
    Although he wasn’t just any man. He was her husband of almost two decades, her husband for another month at least, until their divorce was final, despite the fact he was already engaged to somebody else. He was the love of her life, a man she’d traversed the globe with repeatedly, helicopter skiing with him in the Swiss Alps, white-water rafting with him in Colorado, trekking with him to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro. “The only woman who can keep up with me,” he’d said … how many times?
    “The only woman I’ve ever really loved.”
    It had been while they were hiking in the Adirondacks that she had suddenly dropped to her knees and surprised them both by proposing. “What the hell,” he’d proclaimed with a laugh. “It’ll be an adventure.”
    An adventure it had certainly been, Val thought now, trying—and failing—not to succumb to nostalgia. Those firstfew years before Brianne was born had been such a heady rush that it had been relatively easy to overlook Evan’s wandering eye, to tell herself that she was imagining things, and when that proved impossible, to hold herself at least partly