Shiver Read Free Page B

second.
    “Happy birthday, Mom,” she whispered to the empty room, hoisting the stemmed glass as if Faith were in the room. She took a sip of the crisp Chardonnay. “Here’s to us.” Her mother had always told her she was special, that being born on her mother’s birthday created a unique bond between them, that they were “two peas in a pod.”
    Well…not quite.
    Not by a long shot.
    A very long shot.
    “Now, please…go away,” she whispered. “Leave me alone.”
    She drained her glass, corked the bottle, and stuffed it into the refrigerator door. She had no more time for mind-numbing nightmares, for a past that sometimes nearly devoured her. Tonight, all that was over.
    Determined to get her life on the right track, she set her glass onto the counter too quickly. It cracked, the stem breaking off, cutting the end of her thumb. “Great,” she growled as blood began to surface. Just what she needed, she thought sourly. Opening a cupboard, she found a box of Band-Aids. As blood dripped onto the Formica, she undid the little carton and discovered only one jumbo-sized Band-Aid in the box. It would just have to do. Awkwardly she slipped it from its sterile packaging and wrapped it around her thumb twice.
    She managed to swab the counter and toss the broken glass into the trash before walking through a mud room and slapping on the light of the garage. There, propped against a stack of wood, was a sign that said it all: FOR SALE BY OWNER . She picked it up then carried it to the end of her long drive. She hung the blue-and-white placard onto the hooks of the post she’d set into her yard late that afternoon.
    “Perfect,” she told herself, even though she did have one or two twinges of nostalgia about selling the place. Hadn’t the little bungalow been the very spot where she’d tried once before to start over, a haven chosen as the ideal place to patch a broken marriage, a quiet retreat where she’d fostered so many hopes, so many dreams? She’d crossed her fingers when she and Luke had bought this house. She’d prayed that they would be able to find happiness here.
    How foolish she’d been. Now, as dusk gathered and purple shadows crawled across the grounds, she glanced at the cottage—a cozy little clapboard and shingle house that had been built nearly a hundred years earlier. It sat well back from this winding country road. The original structure had been renovated, added to, and improved to the point that the main house consisted of two small bedrooms, a single bath, and an attic with a skylight that she’d managed to turn into her in-home office. The attached building had once been a mother-in-law apartment, which Abby had converted into her photography studio, dark room, and second bathroom.
    Five years earlier, she and Luke had found this property, declared it “perfect,” and had spent several years here before everything had fallen apart. Eventually he’d moved out of the house and onto other women…no, wait. It was the other way around. The women came first. Starting with Zoey. Before the wedding.
    Not that it mattered now.
    Luke Gierman, once a respected newscaster and radio disk jockey, had become New Orleans’s answer to Howard Stern as well as a chapter in her life that was finally and indelibly over. It had been more than a year since the final papers had been signed and a judge had declared the marriage officially dissolved.
    Snagging the hammer from the ground where she’d left it earlier, Abby stepped back to study the sign, to make certain it hung evenly, to read once again the words and phone number indicating that this home was on the market.
    She had been determined to set her life straight, had heeded what all the experts had suggested, though, in truth, she’d thought a lot of the advice had been useless. She’d tried to give their marriage a second chance but that hadn’t worked. They’d split; she’d stayed with the house. Her friends had all warned her about suffering