Teresa Medeiros Read Free

hearts by confessing that she felt more at home with the anonymous strangers battling their way through the snow-clogged city streets below.
    She set the empty bowl on the carpet and Lucy materialized to lick it clean. Hugging back a chill, Tabitha frowned into the deepening darkness. It was one thing to reject her parents’ idyllic lifestyle when she knew they were out there somewhere, loving her from a distance. But the possibility of a world without their laughter, their tenderness toward one another and toward her,added a bleak edge to her loneliness. An edge dangerously near panic.
    Tabitha slowly turned to face the couch. The envelope lay where she had abandoned it.
    As Tabitha picked it up, a thrill of dread coursed through her. She understood Uncle Cop’s reluctance to hand it over. His words still haunted her.
    Your mother asked me to give this to you in the event of her …
    “Stop being so superstitious,” Tabitha muttered. “It’s an envelope, for God’s sake, not Pandora’s box.” Determined to face her fears, she tore open the clasp and dumped the contents.
    A silvery disk skittered across the glass coffee table. Tabitha instantly recognized it as a video disk. She took it to her modular workstation and popped it into the appropriate drive, praying it wouldn’t be one of those maudlin presentations favored by funeral directors in which sobbing violins nearly drowned out the dearly departed’s last words.
    The forty-five-inch wall screen winked to life.
    Tabitha found herself gazing up at an image of her mother seated on a stool with the impish grace of an elf perched on a mushroom. She wore a vintage Chanel suit, red to match her lipstick.
    Before she’d been forced to so ruthlessly curb her imagination, Tabitha had fancied her mama a fairy princess. Delicate and petite, Arian Lennox possessed an otherworldly quality that even age couldn’t tarnish. The wiry threads of silver she stubbornly refused to color only enhanced the lustrous beauty of her dark hair. Shallow laugh lines bracketed her lush mouth and sparkling eyes.
    It wasn’t her mother’s fault that Tabitha had always felt like an ungainly elephant next to her. Or that shesecretly wished she’d inherited her mama’s looks and her daddy’s talents, instead of the other way around.
    Suppressing a wistful sigh, Tabitha stabbed the button that would activate the video.
    “Hello, my darling Tabby-Cat.”
    Her mother’s husky voice actually seemed to warm the room. Tabitha felt a rush of nostalgia at the sound of that Gallic lilt. Her mother hadn’t called her by that particular endearment in years—not since Tabitha pronounced it too undignified for a mature young lady of seven years. Tabitha’s eyes stung. Too many hours spent gazing at a video screen, she told herself, blinking hard. Lucy hopped into her lap, demanding to be stroked.
    Her mother looked guiltily over her shoulder before placating the camera with a mischievous smile.
“Your father would never forgive me if he knew I was doing this.”
    “That’s where you’re wrong, Mama,” Tabitha murmured. “Daddy would forgive you anything.”
    But as her mother’s dazzling smile faltered to a pensive frown, even Tabitha felt a chill of doubt.
    The invisible camera seemed to disappear as her mother fixed her with a penetrating gaze.
“Parents have very little control over which traits they pass on to their children, my dear. Sometimes it’s gray eyes, or big feet, or an insatiable fondness for ice cream.”
    Tabitha gave the empty bowl a rueful glance.
    “Or, as your father would say”
—Arian sat up straighter and adjusted a pair of imaginary reading glasses in a dead-on imitation of Tristan Lennox—
“the ability to manipulate the space-time continuum and convert thought energy into matter.”
A conspiratorial wink.
“I prefer to simply call it ‘magic.’ ”
    Tabitha’s smile faded along with her mother’s.
    “I’d be lying if I told you it didn’t distress