Good Intentions Read Free

you wearing perfume?” the child asked accusingly. Then before Lynn could reply: “Are you going to change your clothes?”
    Lynn looked down at the white jeans and red-striped jersey she had changed into when she got home from work. “I’m not wearing perfume,” she answered steadily, “and what’s wrong with what I have on?”
    “It’s not very businesslike,” Megan said succinctly.
    “It’ll have to do. Have you changed yet?” Lynn asked pointedly.
    Again the look that reduced cities to rubble. Lynn felt suddenly lost. Why had she agreed to meet this man? Wasn’t it bad enough that her husband had left her for another woman? Wasn’t it humiliation enough in a small town like Delray Beach that the woman he’d abandoned her for was, from all accounts, neither especially young nor particularly pretty? Did she really have to suffer through the woman’s husband as well? Did the fact that their respective spouses had left them for each other mean they were, in some perverse way, related?
    She’d made her bed with painstaking care—there were few things she hated more than climbing into an unmade bed—straightened up the living room, and finally tucked a strangely clingy Megan into her four-poster brass bed, completing all these tasks only moments before she heard the front doorbell ring.
    “There’s someone at the door,” Megan called out, chillingly wide awake.
    “I know, sweetheart,” Lynn said as she passed her room, lowering her voice to emphasize that it was time for the child to be asleep, then proceeded to the front hall, making minor adjustments to her hair along the way and trying to maneuver her lips into a smile. Taking three quick deep breaths, she’d thrown open the front door.
    “Lynn Schuster?” the man on the other side had asked.
    It wasn’t that peculiar, she told herself now, leading him back into her living room, that she should feel such a strong physical attraction for this man. She and Suzette (the name stuck in her throat) obviously shared the same taste in men. Was Marc Cameron a lawyer as well?
    “Are you a lawyer?” she asked, resuming her position on the sofa, thinking that by being the one to ask the questions, she retained at least a semblance of control.
    Marc Cameron walked to the large front window of the comfortable, predominantly green living room and stared out into the starless night. “You can almost hear the ocean,” he said, more to himself than to her, then: “No, I’m a writer.”
    “Really? What do you write?” She bit down on her lower lip. She had sounded too curious, too interested. Now he would go into a long explanation of the sort of things he wrote and she would be powerless to stop him.
    “Books,” he said simply, then: “Don’t ask me their titles because you won’t have read them and my ego’s at a low enough ebb as it is.” He tried to smile but quickly abandoned the attempt. “I also write the occasional short story for various artsy New York magazines, and lots of silly articles for local publications, profiles of visiting celebrities, that sort of thing. Are you really interested?”
    “Well, I …” She realized she was, but didn’t want to say so.
    “I understand you’re a social worker.”
    Lynn nodded. “For twelve years.”
    “Do you enjoy it?”
    “What’s not to enjoy? Poverty, violence, neglect, abuse. I’ve got it all.”
    “I would think that it might get depressing as a steady diet.”
    “Well, to be honest”—why was she being honest?—“I’d been thinking about making a switch before all this happened. Now, well … I guess one major change at a time is enough.” She cleared her throat although she didn’t have to, surprised to hear herself continue. “The trick is not to allow yourself to get emotionally involved. You have to divorce yourself … Sorry, that was a rather unfortunate choice of words.”
    “This picture was taken a few years ago,” Marc Cameron remarked, changing the subject, as