She Has Your Eyes Read Online Free

a whiff of my hair before giving me a kiss.
    “What’s she doing right now?” he asked.
    “I fixed her a plate of food. One for you too. It’s warming up in the oven.”
    “That was sweet of you, thanks.” He paused for a beat. “You really think it’s OK to leave her alone?”
    “We’ve already hot-wired the house; what more can we do? Listen, Dev,” I started, shifting my weight. “Is there any possibility that she really is your daughter?”
    He pushed me off his lap and stood up. “No fucking way. I was
always
careful.”
    David’s past had, for the most part, stayed there. Few consequences came back to haunt him, and certainly nothing of this enormity.
    “There’s no such thing as ‘always’ when it comes to birth control. Maybe something went wrong, something you didn’t know about.”
    He paced across the room. “Andi, this can’t be—
she
can’t be…”
    “She has your eyes, Dev.”
    He stopped and turned to me. I looked into his sienna irises, ablaze and frightened, and I knew what he was thinking, knew that he couldn’t bring himself to agree with me.
It was possible
. More than possible, even. And if it was more than possible, then what would it mean for him? Not just legally and financially, but emotionally? What would it mean for
me
? For us?
    It was eighty-five degrees outside, and I was shivering inside. And not because of the air conditioning.
    I sucked in my fear and went back into professor mode. “Let’s wait until her mom gets here,” I said, and made a feeble attempt at reassurance: “She’s probably just a drama-prone kid who’s rebelling.”
    “Why can’t she read the Twilight books like everyone else?”

chapter three
    An hour never passed so slowly. David and I changed our clothes to something more company-friendly and then ate as we watched TV in the den while Wylie sat in the recliner in the corner, glued to her cell phone, her thumbs tapping away furiously. She occasionally caught David staring at her accusingly, until she finally had the guts to say, “What,” in an irked tone.
    “I’d better not find anything about this on Facebook or Twitter or whatever,” he threatened.
    “I’m just talking to my friends is all.”
    “I mean it,” he said.
    She got up and demonstratively exited the room, and I followed her into the kitchen.
    “Wylie, he’s just upset about all this.”
    “Well, how do you think
I
feel?” she said, tears welling up. “Is he always like this? Because if he is then I don’t think I want him as my dad.”
    “He’s really not,” I assured her. “He’s scared, that’s all. Same as you.”
    “I wasn’t scared until I got here.”
    “Maybe that’s a good thing.”
    “So how come you guys don’t have any kids?” Her sudden change in emotion and subject caught me off guard.
    “We got together kind of late in the game,” I said. “In fact, David and I aren’t married.”
    “Were you married to someone else?”
    “I’m a widow.”
    She gasped. “Wow,” she said. “I usually only associate that word with older women. You know, like grandmothers.”
    The word still rang awkwardly for me too.
    “What happened?” she asked.
    “My husband was killed by a drunk driver.”
    There was a time when telling a stranger, or even a friend, about Sam’s death felt like the ground was going to open up and swallow me whole at any given second. Panic would flood my lungs and seize my heart. But since his death—four years next month—it had become something I’d learned to live with, like being nearsighted or having a bum knee. I’d grown detached, and not in the grief-stricken, denial kind of way. It was what my former therapist Melody Greene would’ve called “allowance.” However, any mention of him still seemed to summon his presence.
    She hesitated before asking her next question. “Were you there? In the car, I mean.”
    “Nope. I was right here. It was the night of our fifth wedding anniversary. He went to the store