It Comes In Waves Read Free

for Lizzie. Go back to Folly? It was unimaginable to her. She hadn’t been to Folly since Foster and Jill had turned everything upside down seventeen years ago. Not even for Foster’s funeral. How could she possibly go back for something as trivial as a television show?
    â€œNo,” she said firmly. “I’m flattered, I really am, but I can’t.”
    â€œI promise you won’t even have to get in the water if you don’t want to.”
    â€œNo, it’s not that. I have a daughter. She’s fifteen—”
    â€œSo bring her with you. We’ll gladly pay for her ticket too if that’s what it takes to get you involved. I’m sure she’d be thrilled to see where her mom got her big start.”
    â€œMy daughter doesn’t really know about all that. . . .”
    â€œThen what better way to show her?”
    Claire frowned, her patience thinning. He had an answer for everything, this guy.
    â€œYou don’t have to decide right now,” Williams said. “Just think about it. We’ll compensate you for your time as well as pay for all expenses. It would just be for a few days. If you give me your e-mail, I can forward a contract for you to look over.”
    Wait—were those sirens? Claire scanned the street as she recited her e-mail address, barely listening as Adam Williams read it back to her to confirm. What difference did it make? She just wanted him off the phone, wanted the line clear for Lizzie to get through. Maybe it wasn’t a prank call, but it was certainly a laughable proposition.
    â€œGreat,” he said. “So we’ll be in touch, all right?”
    â€œYes,”
Claire gasped, but it wasn’t in response to him. Through the shimmering curtain of aspens that trimmed her deck, she glimpsed Colin Jefferson’s black Mustang crawl up the hill, the car stopping short of what he no doubt thought was the boundary of visibility, but Claire saw it. Then she saw her daughter climb out from the passenger seat, look around, and wave him off. Claire hung up and rushed to the front door, relief obscuring her fury and filling her lungs like a balloon.
    When Lizzie reached the walk, she lifted her head and met Claire’s waiting eyes in the doorway. Claire stilled, frozen with the agony of motherly duplicity. She knew the importance of this moment, the line she had to draw in the parental quicksand she was in danger of sinking in or forever lose her daughter’s respect, yet all she wanted to do was throw her arms around Lizzie as if her daughter had arrived in one of the
Titanic
’s lifeboats, to hold her the way she used to when Lizzie woke from a bad dream or with a fever, like the time Claire had rocked her under the shower’s steam when Lizzie was eleven months old and miserable with a cold, her tiny, wet spine shuddering with coughs.
    Claire’s heart won out. “You came home.”
    â€œOf course I came home,” Lizzie said as she tromped up the stairs, wrinkling her forehead and nose in tandem the way only teenagers knew how to do. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
    Claire blinked. “Like what?”
    â€œLike you weren’t sure I would.” Lizzie scooted around Claire in the doorway as if she were a lazy summer fly who could be easily swatted. When her daughter continued her march through the apartment, heading for the stairs to her bedroom, Claire felt a spark of frustration and she seized it.
    â€œI called you three times, Zee.”
    â€œI had my ringer off. Sorry.” Lizzie climbed higher and Claire felt herself shrinking. She wished she’d never taken off her shoes. It seemed inherently impossible to be a parent in bare feet.
    â€œHow did you get home?” Claire demanded.
    â€œMoira gave me a ride.”
    Claire’s heart shrank with disappointment, then swelled with hurt. To be lied to as a parent was one thing; to be insulted with a bad lie