The Lost Daughter Read Online Free

The Lost Daughter
Book: The Lost Daughter Read Online Free
Author: Lucy Ferriss
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Alex would admit it to himself, in the dark before dawn and much later—a moment where the spoon and the hand both squeezed too hard. Where the hard surface between them might have buckled just a little bit. But if it happened, when? On the way through the birth canal perhaps, exuberant that he had the thing now? Or perhaps just after, when he saw what must have been its face, and
yes
, there was a trace of life, not the kind of life he’d ever imagined but just the promise of it that he almost remembered from his own beginnings, before he was Alex or knew that he was anything. Over and over he would try to remember, to freeze the moment, but again it would pass, and only what followed would remain.

Chapter 1

2008
    T he afternoon of the christening party, the garden sparkled. It had rained the night before. Summer flowers rimmed the wet grass. The brick patio that Brooke had persuaded her boss, Lorenzo, to put in was large enough for the drinks table and a fair amount of milling around. The whole garden, in fact, had been Brooke’s project. The regular patrons of Lorenzo’s Nursery loved sitting in it. Drinking the iced tea the nursery provided, they would talk plants until they had persuaded themselves to try a new hosta or a wild geranium. The boost in sales since installing the garden was the main reason Brooke could co-opt the space for the christening. She and Sean had nothing like it to offer. Sean’s brother and sister-in-law, Gerry and Kate, whose son Derek was the focus of all the attention, lived in a crowded condo with a backyard the size of a shoebox. When Sean’s family got together, the event was bound to be boisterous. This time they were two dozen, not counting the children Sean’s family seemed to produce in droves. The garden at Lorenzo’s, even with soggy grass, was a godsend.
    “Poor little bugger’s exhausted,” Sean said. He nodded at baby Derek, still clad in Irish lace but drooling in his stroller, his big head dropped to his shoulder. “Not like our Meghan, here.”
    “Don’t remind me,” said Brooke, spilling more chilled shrimp onto the platter.
    “What’d I do?” Meghan, a bundle of six-year-old energy with hearing keen as a bat’s, cartwheeled between cousins across the wet grass toward her parents.
    “Screamed bloody murder all through the cleansing away of your sin,” Sean said. He kissed Meghan’s red hair. “You’d have thought it was an exorcism.”
    “What’s that, Mommy?” Meghan asked, taking a shrimp. She always asked Brooke about words, even the words her father used.
    Brooke smiled wanly. “Exorcism’s taking the devil out of you,” she said.
    “Doesn’t always work,” added Sean.
    Meghan stuck her tongue out at him and cartwheeled away.
    “D’ja see that?” Sean said to his brother Gerald. “Girl gives her father no respect.”
    It was a joke, but Gerry and Kate exchanged a look. Gerry said, “Our first was like that. Then she got a sister to look after. Set her straight soon enough.”
    Brooke felt her husband’s quick intake of breath. It had to come up. How could it not, at a family christening? Still, she gritted her teeth. Would they never let up? Sean had three brothers and a sister. Every one of them had produced multiple offspring except for the youngest brother, who was gay and lived on the West Coast. Though no one attended church regularly anymore, they all christened their kids and described themselves proudly as Irish Catholic. Once, when the mild allusions and teasing about Brooke and Sean’s only child had grown more insistent than usual, Brooke had turned toone of her sisters-in-law and asked if she didn’t think ZPG was a good idea. “ZP who?” the sister-in-law had replied, and Brooke couldn’t bring herself to press the point. In any case, the population growth of the O’Connor clan was far from zero, and Brooke’s in-laws considered that the number one—meaning Meghan—didn’t really count.
    Sean, Brooke saw as she
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