The Healing Read Online Free Page A

long black lashes fanned against fair Irish skin. Unfortunately, she had also inherited his thick bones, heavy musculature, and manly height, which her psychotherapist felt added to her self-consciousness. Of course, Karen felt guilty that she was fashionably thin and looked better in trendy clothes than her daughter, but there wasn’t much she could do about it. Sometimes she wished Lori had been born a boy. A son would’ve felt blessed to have his father’s build, especially if he wanted to follow in his footsteps and be a firefighter.
    â€œDad’s watching the Yankees game on television,” Karen said in a benign, noncombative manner.
    â€œThat’s all he does lately,” Lori replied.
    â€œWell, why don’t you go talk to him? Tell him about your day at work.”
    It seemed like a logical suggestion. Lori had never stopped being a “Daddy’s girl.” Even now she rarely passed his chair without flicking the brim of his baseball cap or giving him a quick hug around the neck.
    But when Karen went inside half an hour later to tell her husband and daughter that dinner was ready, she found Mike still staring at the TV and Lori upstairs in her room tending to her pet guinea pigs with her headphones on.
    Karen was too exhausted to be angry. She couldn’t fix them. She couldn’t change what had happened to them. And trying to stay positive in spite of it all was fast becoming one great effort in futility.
    She put dinner on the table, but nobody knew how numb she was inside.

chapter four
    Karen strolled down the dry goods aisle at the Wayside Market. It had morphed from a small country deli, where her grandmother used to send her for milk, into a gourmet food store complete with organic produce and a prime-cut butcher. It had been three months since Karen had moved to Southold, yet running errands still had a Twilight Zone effect on her. Places and things appeared familiar, but sometimes she had the feeling she had never really been there before.
    Her life was enough of a Twilight Zone without ordinary trips to the grocery store making her question her sanity.
    A box of cereal bearing a picture of a sunlit wheat field caught Karen’s eye. She picked it up. There were only three ingredients on the label. When she looked at the price, she almost laughed out loud. Six dollars? Who paid six dollars for cereal? Was it some kind of marketing experiment to see how much people would pay for just wheat flakes and a drop of honey?
    Karen put the sunlit wheat field back on the shelf and picked up some generic corn cereal. Lori liked it, and Mike hardly ate anymore anyway.
    She made her way to the front of the store. Just as she was thinking how things couldn’t get stranger, she spotted the woman in black in the checkout line. She was holding a small tin of tea and a package of deli meat. Definitely not a ghost, Karen thought. Wait till Helen hears about this. Without hesitation, Karen got behind her in line. She couldn’t help it; the woman intrigued her beyond reason. Even on a jaunt to the local market, the woman in black was wearing her trademark attire and carrying her straw tote. The only difference Karen could see was that her sunglasses were perched on her head, revealing large brown eyes that were earthy and serene. The woman in black didn’t turn around when Karen put her items on the counter, although she was courteous and direct with the cashier. She wasn’t standoffish or stiff; she was simply an entity unto herself.
    Before leaving, the woman glanced at Karen and gave a barely noticeable nod in her direction. Face-to-face, Karen could see fine wrinkles around her eyes, and the slight leathering of her suntanned skin showed her age, which was probably in the mid-sixties.
    â€œHello,” Karen said. She wondered if the gesture denoted recognition. Her gaze followed the woman in black as she set the sunglasses back on her nose and breezed out of the