Hot Secrets Read Free Page A

a solid, loving family. She’d lost her family to tragedy at twenty, but nothing could ever erase two decades of love.
    Jack had turned into the finest man she knew, thanks to his rock-solid character and a few lucky breaks. These kids, too—born and raised in degradation—could turn their lives around. All they needed was to know that it was possible.
    If you believed something was possible, you could make it come true. Caroline believed that from the bottom of her heart.
    At the end, there was utter silence in the room, so different from the squirming and punching and shouting at the beginning. It had started to snow and in the silence you could hear the odd needle of sleet embedded in the snow as it hit the windows. Though the kids suffered in the cold, with frayed clothes and inadequate shoes, the few heads that turned to the window smiled at the snow falling like clouds, making the lit store windows along State Street glow with an unearthly light.
    Caroline was glad that a sense of beauty hadn’t been beaten out of them yet.
    “So, kids.” She put the book away carefully and leaned forward, looking each child in the eye. Unconsciously they leaned forward, too, watching her. Realizing that she saw them. Was listening to them.
    I was invisible , her husband had said of his early life in shelters. Nobody saw me except you.
    “What happened? How did Jim show his love for his wife?”
    It had been a suggestion of her father, to volunteer at the shelter—she who had grown up with so much. Her eyes had been opened and she’d discovered an entire new layer of reality. Including befriending a tall, gangly boy who’d been hungrier for learning than he’d been for food. She’d brought him books he devoured until she realized he was also literally hungry, and started bringing sandwiches together with books.
    He’d disappeared one Christmas and she hadn’t seen him again until he showed up twelve years later—a man so completely changed she hadn’t recognized him.
    These kids felt as invisible as Jack had felt. There were more and more of them in this recession—women and children falling through the cracks. Unseen, unwanted, unloved.
    Small arms were waving, like branches in the wind in a tiny forest. “Me, me, me!” they cried.
    Caroline smiled. She was determined to let every kid speak, be heard. Then they would troop across the street to Sylvie’s tea shop, where hot chocolate and muffins and a gift book for every child awaited. The Hunger Games. Because Jim and Della were the ideal, but Katniss . . . Katniss showed that you could grow up in terrible circumstances and you could still fight back—and prevail.
    “Okay, Jamal.” She pointed to a kid in the front row, whose eyes had grown larger and larger as the story progressed. She knew each kid’s story—she’d insisted on it. She wanted to know who they were, what their lives were about. Jamal had no father and five half-siblings, all from different men. “How did Jim show his love for Della?”
    “He sold his watch so he could buy a comb for her.”
    Yes, indeed. She’d read The Gift of the Magi a million times but it still made her smile.
    “That’s right. And why did he have to sell the watch?”
    Silence. The reason was so very close to their lives. “Because he was poor,” one girl whispered finally. “They were both poor.” Shawna, who was twelve but so thin she looked eight.
    “He could have stolen the comb and kept his watch,” Caroline gently suggested. Twenty small heads nodded. Yes indeed, he could have. “Why didn’t he?”
    Silence once more. Why Jim hadn’t stolen the comb was not very clear to them. In their world, a lot of people stole. It was just a question of not getting caught.
    “Because . . .” a shy voice said, a slight lisp on the s . He couldn’t be seen because he was behind Mack, who was huge for his age, but Caroline knew who it was. Manuel. Manuel, whose mother had been put in the hospital five times in