The Bridge Read Online Free Page B

down onto the corner of their bed. He bent
and twisted his broad shoulders to tie his sneakers, then stood to his full six feet as the moonlight streamed in from the bedroom window and reflected against his bald head. When he was about to leave, his wife, who’d been listening to him move about the room, decided to speak.
    â€œWhere’re you going?” Jocelyn asked in a sleepy voice as she lay unmoving beneath a single sheet.
    Lynch considered lying. He didn’t want his wife to know where he was going. More important, he didn’t want her to know that a woman he’d known since childhood had asked for his help. With the troubles they’d had in their marriage lately, he knew that Jocelyn would read more into it than was there.
    Things had changed in the six months since she’d lost the baby.
    Jocelyn had experienced complications five months into the pregnancy and was forced to go in for an emergency delivery that was supposed to be routine. The baby was a boy. They’d planned to name him Kevin. He didn’t survive. Jocelyn nearly died, too.
    Though she had come through the experience physically, she’d suffered a terrible emotional toll. And rather than cling to her husband, she withdrew from him. No sex, no communication, open bitterness.
    It played on Lynch, made him tense, magnified everything he felt. His wife knew that, and it worried her. Because somewhere deep down, she believed that he would eventually look elsewhere—away from the staid environs of Chestnut Hill—to find what she refused to give at home.
    She knew that a part of him longed for the raw energy of the projects. The Bridge, after all, was just like him. Concrete slabs, damaged and defiant, wrapped tightly around a steadfast will to survive. He still had old memories, old friends, and old connections in the projects. He claimed to want to forget them, but in reality, he cherished them. They gave him identity.

    His wife, though she would never say it, believed those connections to the projects impeded his ability to smooth out his rough edges the way she wanted him to.
    Even in the dark, Lynch could feel his wife’s concern. He turned away from her as he answered her question.
    â€œSomething came up at work,” he said vaguely. “I should be back sometime this morning. It shouldn’t take long.”
    â€œBe careful,” Jocelyn whispered in an anxiety-laden voice.
    He mumbled a response, then strode down the hall and into his daughter’s room. He stood silently beside her bed, watching her sleep, then brushed his massive hand against her face.
    â€œI love you, Melanie,” he said, sweeping her hair away from her forehead to get a better look at her.
    He stood for a moment, marveling at the young lady his daughter had become. She didn’t play the same childhood games as other girls her age. Rather, she immersed herself in black thought and high fashion—taking weekly shopping trips with her mother so the two of them could satisfy their cravings for revolution and Armani.
    But beneath all that maturity, she was the same as Kenya—a little black girl who could very well be missing, too. A girl who, in the scheme of things, didn’t matter much to anyone but her family.
    That thought crowded Lynch’s mind as he backed softly out of her room. He knew that it was only by the grace of God that he could still kiss his daughter good night. Not everyone was that fortunate.
    It was six o’clock by the time he started down Germantown Avenue, breathing in the morning through the open window of his unmarked Chrysler Grand Fury.
    The police car bounced along the cobblestones of the centuries-old street, the tires sliding on and off the trolley tracks that followed the winding road from affluence to poverty. Watching absently as the pristine sidewalks north of Mount Airy Avenue gave way to discarded beer bottles south of Chelten, he tried to think of where his best