Custody Read Online Free Page B

man came, too.
    Today she’d been sitting by the stone for almost an hour when she saw him arrive, clad, in concession to the heat, only in khakis, a blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and a tie. Today he looked less like a warrior and more like someone who had once played college football. He strode up Lilac Path, a level below Kelly’s mother’s grave, and right within her line of view—she didn’t have to go out of her way to see him. She couldn’t help seeing him.
    Still, when he knelt at the foot of the grave, Kelly, out of respect and the wish to give him privacy, rose and quietly moved away. She would walk. She always walked around the cemetery after visiting her mother.
    The MacLeod plot lay along Lilac Path, just before the land dropped down to Chrysanthemum Path. Kelly took the higher road to avoid interrupting the man in his devotions,and strolled along Cherry Avenue. She paused for a moment by the modest granite slab marking e. e. cummings’s grave. Cummings had written: “if most people were born twice, they’d improbably call it dying.”
    Wandering past stone and marble monuments, mausoleums with stained glass and wrought-iron portals, past statues of winged angels and fallen soldiers, Kelly wondered, not idly, whether or not cummings was right. Might her mother be alive somewhere, on another plane of existence about which mortals could only dream?
    If so, then Kelly’s father and his parents were alive there as well, in which case Kelly doubted very much that that particular corner of heaven was all sweetness and light.
“How could you!” Kelly’s grandparents would demand. “We trusted you. You betrayed us, and you betrayed your daughter as well.”
    Maybe that would happen. Could happen. Maybe not. Everything Kelly had read or heard on the matter made it seem that once humans left this earthly realm they left behind the woes and worries that had plagued their lives.
    Which meant that if there would ever be justice, it had to happen here and now in the world we know. Kelly believed fiercely that one individual could make a difference, that what people do in their lives could tip some kind of invisible scale toward good or evil. She was determined to do what she could to weigh in on the side of good.
    Preoccupied by the vague and immaterial thoughts she allowed herself on Sunday mornings, Kelly wandered beneath a bent, witchlike tree, its branches already bearing the hard green knots that would, one day, be apples. The lane curved, forked, and led down to Lake Hibiscus. The sun gleamed on the still surface of the water. Blinking, she reached into her pocket for her sunglasses, overlooked a fallen branch on the path, tripped, and tumbled down, falling flat.
    She wasn’t hurt, but she felt like an idiot. She sat up, brushing leaves from her hands.
    “Are you all right?”
    The man came along a path toward her.
    For the first time she saw his face directly. He was handsome in a brawny, healthy way, and Kelly felt herself blush. She’d gone down fast, breaking the fall with her hands, but still skinning one of her knees.
    “I’m fine. What a dope. I must have been a funny sight.” Several locks of her hair had come loose and hung in her eyes. She yanked off the barrette so that all her hair tumbled downaround her shoulders, an incorrigible mass that went wild in humidity. She captured it all in her hands and fastened it up on the back of her head.
    He grinned. “More startling than funny. I thought an angle had toppled off her pedestal.” He offered his hand to help her up.
    Reluctantly, because she always felt too tall with most men, she placed her hand in his. With ease he pulled her up, his grip firm. He was strong.
    “Thanks.”
    “You’re quite welcome.”
    She took her hand back, but their gazes held. His eyes were blue, patriot blue. His face was rugged, but not tense with the nerves of a warrior: he looked intelligent and tired and very slightly overweight, and kind. Flushing,