You Can Run Read Online Free

case,” Morgan said. She turned to me. “Look on the bright side, huh, Robyn? Maybe she’s gone for good. If she is, you definitely won’t have to do another project with her.”
    â€œYou know what?” I said. “Let’s change the subject.” Because, boy, if there was one thing I didn’t want to think about, it was Trisha Carnegie.
    Morgan cheerfully changed the subject—to her-self—and that, I thought, was that.
    I was wrong.

M ostly I live with my mother, but I spend every other weekend at my father’s place, and I drop by to see him whenever I’m in the neighborhood. This was my father’s weekend, although you wouldn’t know it based on how much I had actually seen him. He wasn’t home when I got back after my afternoon at the library, and he still hadn’t returned by the time I went to bed, although he did call to tell me not to wait up for him. He was gone again when I rolled out of bed on Sunday morning. I did some homework, went for a late-afternoon run in the park, and came back to his still-empty loft. He must have come in while I was in the shower because after I had dried my hair and changed, I found him sitting in the living room. He had a file folder open on his lap, but he was staring out the window, thinking. He kept right on thinking, even when I asked him a question—twice.
    So I tried a new question. “Big case, huh, Dad?” My father used to be a cop. Now he has his own private security company. Business is booming, which, if you ask me, doesn’t say much about the state of the world.
    He nodded distractedly. Whatever he was thinking about, he seemed to be deeply immersed in it. I repeated my earlier question for a third time. My usually alert father seemed to catch only one word.
    â€œBirthday?” he said. A look of alarm appeared in his eyes. “Is it your birthday already?”
    â€œRelax, Dad,” I said. “You haven’t missed it yet. It’s still three weeks away.”
    His face flooded with relief and he flashed me his trademark Mac Hunter grin, the one my mother said had made her weaken, as she put it, in the first place.
    â€œI can’t believe my baby’s going to be sixteen,” he said, shaking his head. “Why, I remember the day you were born as if it were yesterday.”
    â€œThat’s not the way I heard it,” I said. The story my mother told was that my father had been working on a big case when she went into labor. He had promised her he’d get to the hospital, and he did. A day late.
    He shrugged.“Okay,” he said,“so maybe I remember the day after you were born a little better.” My father has a guy’s-got-to-do-what-a-guy’s-got-to-do attitude to his work. It still drives my mother crazy, although she has to be more careful about complaining now. A few years before my parents separated, my mother had gone back to school. She’s a lawyer now and puts in long hours at the office, which means that, like my father, she isn’t always able to get home at the time she promised.
    â€œSo is it okay, Dad? Can I spend my birthday here this year?”
    My father lost the faraway look in his eyes and focused in hard on me. “Won’t your mother have something planned?”
    â€œShe hasn’t mentioned anything,” I said, even though I knew that she would probably want to take me out to dinner to celebrate. My mother is very big on special occasions.
    â€œThe whole time I’ve been living here,” my father said, “you’ve never spent your birthday with me.” He peered harder at me. “So what gives?”
    I looked back at him and tried to decide whether he would blab my reason to my mother if I told him. But I didn’t have a chance to make that decision because the intercom buzzer sounded. My father lives on the third floor of what used to be a carpet factory. He owns the whole building