It Comes In Waves Read Free Page A

was another entirely. For weeks, her daughter had been careful with her alibis. This was brazenly sloppy. Lazy and fearless, the way someone gets who is about to leave a marriage or take a new job.
    Didn’t Lizzie know who she was dealing with? Claire and Foster’s plan had been months in the making, crafted as cleverly as a historic heist: da Vincis taken from the Louvre, or millions from a Swiss bank. Her daughter would have to do better than that.
    â€œHe’s one strike away from being expelled, Zee. Just one.”
    Almost to the top, Lizzie stopped and turned slowly. The unspoken threat passed between them; Claire watched her daughter’s eyes flash with understanding. Such was the tenuous rope bridge of teenage daring. Halfway out, would it still hold?
    â€œYou can’t say anything, Mom.
Please.
”
    Claire folded her arms, feeling taller now. “I will if I have to.”
    Lizzie just stared at her. Then, still silent, her daughter squared her shoulders, turned forward, and took the final step to the second floor. In the next minute, her bedroom door slammed. Claire’s heart raced, panic sizzling through her all over again.
    Memories swirled: a tiny, indignant Lizzie in her room, filling a plastic shopping bag with stuffed animals and toys, announcing she was running away and moving to the library where she could sleep on the giant ladybug floor pillows and cook her meals in the plastic play kitchen. Claire and Nick had chuckled; Lizzie had fallen asleep ten minutes after her tantrum, the bag still clutched in her little hand.
    Why had she, Claire, not appreciated how lucky she was then, how easy it was to parent someone so small? You could render doorknobs unusable with plastic covers, bolt cabinets with childproof locks. All you had to do to make a house safe was ensure that medicine caps were screwed on tightly and cleaning products stowed out of reach.
    But how did you protect a fifteen-year-old from the dangers inside her heart?
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    N ight crawled across the sky, leaving a dusting of stars in its wake. At two a.m., Claire woke with a thumping in her chest, not sure if she’d heard the clap of a closed door or dreamed it. She threw back the sheets and slipped out into the hall, chastising herself with every step, even as her pulse raced, slowing only when she cracked the door enough to see the lump of her daughter’s sleeping form outlined against the blue light of a nearly full moon.
    Sinking back into bed, Claire couldn’t quiet her thoughts. The standoff she and Lizzie had endured played in her mind, then images of Lizzie alone and preparing dinner in a tiny RV kitchen (not much bigger or more real than the library’s plastic version!) in a huge, barren parking lot, pitch-black except for the flickering bulb of a single light pole, waiting for Colin to come back.
    Claire lunged across the bed for her phone on the nightstand, too undone to feel any remorse for the late hour.
    After three rings, a woman muttered, “Hello?”
    Oh, the good old days when her ex-husband’s girlfriend was instructed to never answer the phone during their separation; now Nina was Nick’s answering service.
    â€œNina, put Nick on the phone.”
    â€œYou can’t just call in the middle of the night anytime you feel—”
    â€œPut Nick on the phone,
please
.”
    There was a huff, muffled voices, a rustling of sheets, and then Nick’s weary voice arrived. “Claire, don’t talk to her that way.”
    â€œLizzie skipped school today.”
    Nick sighed. “So she skipped. I skipped classes. I survived.”
    Claire frowned up at the ceiling, skeptical. What had Nick skipped? Gym? Lunch? Tonight Lizzie had looked down from that top step with the fierce determination only a teenager in mad love wears on her face. Nick couldn’t understand that kind of devotion, how deep love ran when you were young.