The Good Daughter Read Online Free Page A

magic happen.
    Kit shuddered rereading it. There were so many things wrong with the message—and Sebastian—that she didn’t even know where to begin. She should never have given him her cell number. Why hadn’t she realized that once you gave a man your number, he could, and would, haunt you for the rest of your life? But then, why had she thought that meeting men online was a good idea either?
    Annoyed with Sebastian, angry with herself, Kit turned off her phone, slipped it back into her purse beneath the table, and kicked herself yet again for joining Love.com in the first place.
    She couldn’t imagine what had possessed her to join back in September—
    No. Not true.
    She knew exactly what had possessed her.
    Desperation.
    In September, three months after the end of her ten-year relationship with Richard, a relationship that had probably stalled out eight years earlier, Kit did some serious, if not panicked, soul-searching, and concluded that action was needed.
Desperate
action. She was closing in on forty—the big birthday was January 28—and Kit couldn’t wait for love to find her. She’d have to find it for herself. And so, after watching a late-night TV commercial promoting Love.com, she signed up for a one-year membership, since she had no idea how long it’d take to find true love.
    At first it’d been exciting poring over profiles, exchanging messages, setting up the first few dates. But it had taken only a few dates to realize many men weren’t truthful on their profiles. Theyeither used photos from ten or twenty years ago, or padded their height while decreasing their weight. But weight and height discrepancies weren’t a serious issue. The personalities were. Or lack of.
    Kit had never thought of herself as particularly difficult to please—after all, she ended up staying with Richard for ten years—but her dates from Love.com were invariably uncomfortable. Some were boring. Others made her uneasy. And then there were the few that were plain humiliating. But Kit, Irish Catholic and from a sprawling opinionated family, was made of stern enough stuff that she attempted to endure all, determined to at last find the Real Thing. The Real Thing being love, marriage, and babies—and preferably in that order.
    But after three months of online dating hell, Kit no longer craved True Love. She just wanted to be left alone.
    So in December, after a particularly horrifying date, Kit closed her account at Love.com, and her profile promptly disappeared. But the damage was done. A dozen different men had her number and e-mail address. And while most of those dozen men had moved on to greener, fresher pastures, there were a few like Sebastian who couldn’t.
    Kit suspected it was time to change her number. Such a shame since she loved the order of the digits. It’d been her cell number for twelve years now and the numbers looked good together. They suited her. But difficult times called for difficult measures.
    Resolved to take action, Kit forced her attention back to the conversation.
    “Now I’m supposed to go home and make dinner and smile and act like everything is okay,” Fiona was saying. “But I can’t. Everything isn’t okay and I’m sick of acting like it is.”
    “Then don’t go,” Polly answered.
    Kit frowned. Polly wasn’t helping. Of course Fiona had to go home. Fiona was married. “You can’t avoid going home, but youcan, and should, talk to Chase. You have to make him understand how you feel. Does he know how unhappy you are?”
    “I’m sure he does,” Fiona answered. “All we ever do is fight.”
    Kit and Polly exchanged swift glances again. “But does he understand
why
you’re fighting?” Kit persisted, having just gone through a six-month roller-coaster ride with Meg when her eldest sister derailed her marriage by having an affair with her boss because she felt unloved at home. “Guys aren’t like us, Fiona. They don’t read between the lines very well. You have to let him