My Immortal Read Free Page A

upstairs or anything but I know how to change his mind, but I won’t tell you how because maybe a nun is reading this over your shoulder and I don’t want to shock a sister. Just my sister.
When is your retreat thingie done? We may have a wedding to plan.;-)

Hugs, Lizzie (in love)
Lizzie in love, I like that!
*document attached
     
    “Oh, Lizzie.” Marley gave an exasperated laugh and reread her sister’s e-mail three times. It was hard to pinpoint what was the most ridiculous thing about it. There was the juvenile enthusiasm for a man she’d just met. And overuse of the word like .
    But maybe more absurd than anything Lizzie could ever write was that Marley felt an unpleasant, swelling jealousy, an envy for her sister’s carefree selfishness. Intellectually, Marley was appalled by the reckless lifestyle Lizzie lived. But at the same time she resented the ease with which Lizzie leaped into new situations, relationships. Marley didn’t want to be Lizzie—she was too stable and cautious to willingly jump on a train wreck—but she wanted a piece of Lizzie’s exuberance. Marley wanted to be the one who made a mess, just once, and then walked away and let someone else do the cleaning up.
    She wouldn’t, of course.
    But she couldn’t hide from her growing sense of discontent, as spending the summer on a retreat at the Benedictine convent had proved. It had been an attempt to escape the needs and wants that swirled around her, pecking away at her emotions, leaving her worried and dissatisfied, but her strategy had completely failed. Her desires clamored even louder for attention. There was literally no peace, no retreat from her problems, her fears about her family, and her loneliness, so she was going home.
    “Bad news from home?” Sister Margaret asked.
    She glanced over at Margaret, who was charting her family’s genealogy on the other computer in the lounge. Marley was leaving the convent the next day on a mid-morning flight, but she had asked permission to check her e-mail and to let her family know she was returning home earlier than expected.
    “Maybe. I’m not sure.”
    “You sighed.”
    “Did I?” Marley stared at Lizzie’s smiley faces, perky and bouncing, just like Lizzie. “My sister, Elizabeth, she’s ‘in love.’” Marley made quote marks in the air. “But she just met this guy, and there is no mention whatsoever of my nephew, her two-year-old son. She’s left him with my cousin again while she’s off with this guy. I worry about her.”
    Marley hadn’t spoken to any of her family in over two months, since she’d arrived at the convent, which had been a painful attempt to distance herself from their problems, to stop trying to play savior for everyone. It had been the hardest thing she’d ever done, and now she felt doubt, guilt rising up from that well of worry her family always filled. The e-mail from Lizzie was dated mid-June and it was already late August. Marley had spent the entire summer in prayer and reflection, and by the end of her time at the convent had realized her ache to be a mother was coloring all her thoughts, all her actions, driving her unhappiness.
    It had led her to the decision to adopt a child and become a single mother.
    What had Lizzie spent the summer doing?
    Marley was almost afraid to ask.
    Especially when she replied to Elizabeth and her e-mail immediately bounced back.
    Her sister’s account had been closed.
    Marley frowned and opened the attachment.
     
     
     
    The Punishment of Lust looked good on his wall. Damien’s first instinct had been to frame the print in stark, sleek black, to mirror the austere nature of the painting, the bleak landscape. But then he had decided it was a better visual reminder to surround the image in a rich, gilded, ornate frame that echoed the France of his youth, the days when he had romped at court with Louis and Marie. Not his Marie, but the king’s Marie.
    It was that early life which had brought him here, to now.
    He