The Kindness of Strangers Read Online Free

three-tiered spice cake filled with apricot praline cream. It was to be decorated in antique white buttercream icing to match the bride’s dress. Debbie had wanted real flowers on the cake—the same used in her daughter’s bouquet—but Sarah had talked her out of this. There was always someone who ate the flowers, after all, especially at a reception so large, and the chemicals from the flowers tainted the flavor of the cake. So Sarah and Gwinn would cover the cake with cascades and swags of sugar-dough roses, lilacs, orange blossoms, and hydrangea. Sarah could hear herself telling the students in the class she’d taught just months ago, “Don’t wait until the week of your cake project to start making flowers. Flowers can be made and stored for up to six months in advance. If you’re organized and give yourself plenty of time to complete a cake, it can be a work of art.”
    Yeah, right. If you’re organized. Sarah skimmed over the labeled boxes. They had plenty of Gwinn’s lovely roses and rosebuds. Plenty of lilacs. She’d need to get started on the hydrangea, though. As behind as she was, she looked forward to it. She’d stop at the florist and pick up real hydrangea to review. She’d study it, take it apart petal by petal to note the configuration and shape. She prided herself on making the flowers botanically correct, with petals as thin as the real thing.
    If she was going to the florist, she might as well check her stock of florist wire and tape. Moving one storage container, she bumped a roll of florist tape off the shelf and it rolled over near the rabbit hutch, behind a bale of straw used for bedding. Sarah cursed and followed it. As she bent to retrieve it, she spied a magazine jutting from under the bale of straw. A magazine that had obviously been hidden. With heavy arms she pulled it out and turned it over. A Hustler.
    Sarah tried to swallow the rage that boiled up her throat. Breathe. She opened the magazine to an image of a woman bent over, legs spread, presenting herself to Sarah.
    Breathe. Breathe. What the hell was she supposed to say about this?
    She stared at the woman, and as she did, she heard the sizzling in the kitchen. “Shit!” She ran up the stairs, dropping the magazine on the kitchen island, and stirred the smoking skillet. Some of the peppers had stuck to the bottom, but she was able to salvage the rest.
    Salvage. Hmm. A vocabulary word. Now she had a sentence for Danny.
    She stirred in the coconut milk, the fish sauce, and the Thai red chili paste. Her chest ached.
    She’d found a Playboy two months ago in Nate’s room, just weeks after finding condoms in his jeans pocket in the laundry. She expected the Playboy. He was sixteen, after all, soon to be seventeen. She hadn’t been surprised, or angry—mostly sad at having to navigate this territory without Roy. But Hustler ? She didn’t care so much that he had it, but for God’s sake, did he have to leave it in the most likely place for Danny to find? It exhausted her to think how she’d ask about this magazine. She was tempted to ignore it, seeing as how they had a platterful of problems already.
    She removed the skillet from the heat and covered it. Now all she needed was the seafood. The market that supplied all of the area’s restaurants had just opened.
    She couldn’t stop thinking about Nate as she drove over and hunted for what was best in the market that morning. The mussels would look dramatic with their black shells against the creamy pink sauce, but she settled for halibut and shrimp for the book club. Completing the meal would simply require poaching the seafood in the base while the rice cooked.
    Nate still hung heavy in her thoughts on her way home when she drove along the Oakhaven golf course and passed the sunny, welcoming house of her friend Courtney Kendrick. This yellow house, with its periwinkle trim and shutters, had been one of her favorites long before the Kendricks had moved into it four years