The Willing Read Online Free Page A

seemed unkind, like I was deliberately rubbing salt into an open wound.
    Carrie took it in stride. "Leg's giving him trouble again," she told me, yawning. "You want to come around, try a few wheelies?"
    "I'm good." I didn't want to bring my problems into their home. "Meet me for lunch later?" With our biorhythms all out of whack, Carrie and I often got together around five in the afternoon to grab a bite to eat. Normally I'd be rushing from work around that time, but today my agenda was perfectly free. Madam Madrigal hadn't even booked me for a party.
    Well , I thought, almost free . I still hadn't decided if I was going to answer Oliver's summons.
    I heard Carrie sigh into the phone, dubious. "You sound off. Sure you don't need me to come over?" She'd never had trouble reading my moods. I could still remember the first time we'd met and the concussion our clash earned me. It had been a bewildering but very literal run-in. Carrie was driving home from her folks' place and all but hit me with her Beetle. I still teased her about befriending people by knocking them off their feet.
    My throat tightened. Carrie was one of the few people who knew exactly what I did for a living. Both the legal and not so legal aspects of my work were familiar to her. She wasn't thrilled, but she'd never judged me for it openly or asked me to quit. She had told me once, in the beginning, that she often saw teenage girls come into the clinic, still just children themselves and eight months pregnant—red-eyed, too, because their parents had just discovered that their little angels weren't so little anymore.
    There were all kinds of choices in life, all kinds of deals we made as women. She didn't believe in pointing fingers.
    I urged Carrie to get back to bed. "Had a bit of a weird night," I confessed, "but I'm okay. Are you working again tonight?" Sometimes she had a night off. I tried to keep track, but the scheduling at the hospital seemed to follow no rhyme or reason—or at least none that I could understand with my high school diploma and two years of an undeclared major.
    "Yes," she said. "You, too?"
    Much as I wanted to, I couldn't explain on the phone. I settled on "not exactly" and promised to meet her a little later, for our blatantly deferred routine lunch.
    I tried to follow my own advice and give sleep another shot once I got off the phone with Carrie. No luck. Eventually, sick with dread and restless with nerves, I turned on the TV and went to run a bath.
    My apartment is practically a shoebox and my landlord never cares to answer his phone when something doesn't work, but it does have the single benefit of a real bathtub arranged just so I can see through the door into the living room. I've spent more than a few evenings just soaking my feet and watching West Wing reruns until the water turns cold. Few things in life are more perfect than that.
    Bath salts and I had never quite seen eye to eye, so I went for store-bought bubbles and let the faucet run. It would be a while before my personal version of nirvana was ready. I spent that time checking mail—both snail and not—and washing the mountain of dishes that had piled up in the sink. Once I was finished with that, I took to brushing last night's wig: even the most mundane tasks would do to keep me from thinking about Oliver and his boorish arm-twisting.
    It was just my luck, then, that just as I was sliding into the near-overflowing tub, enjoying luxury otherwise well beyond my means, his smarmy face should appear in full alabaster glory on my TV screen. I groaned, letting my head thump back against the enamel rim. Fear of electrocution meant I didn't have the remote on hand to change the channel, so I sat there, soaking while the newscasters announced the merger of Emerson Industries and an internet start-up whose name I only vaguely recognized.
    Oliver's all-white, all-even teeth flashed on screen as he was shown shaking hands with none other than Cecil Holland. The footage