The Beautiful Daughters Read Free

if . . . ?” He let the question dangle and a dozen terrifying possibilities spilled from the hint of his suggestion.
    â€œThere are contingency plans.” Adri started walking again. “Our night security guard is coming early.”
    Caleb narrowed his eyes. “He’s not a security guard. He’s a kid.”
    â€œSamaritan’s Purse has a helicopter.”
    â€œAnd the UN has Blackhawks,” Caleb said abruptly. He seemed to be comforted by the thought. “They know where we are.”
    Adri laughed. “They have bigger fish to fry.”
    Caleb didn’t respond.
    At the bottom of a long hill they entered the compound proper. The dirt road branched off in three different directions, and squat, block houses cropped up among the cotton treesand oil palms. Scarlet rhododendrons flanked small porches clustered with sagging lawn chairs, and here and there residents tried to urbanize the jungle with random attempts at domesticity in the form of potted plants. It struck Adri as downright ridiculous. Wasn’t the native flora enough? After five years of living at the very edge of the known world, she still couldn’t get over the fact that she could step out of her front door and pluck sweet, ripe plantains off the tree in her yard.
    The compound was a haven in the heart of the capital city, a sprawling village where various NGOs and missionary families had congregated after the civil war ended and it was officially declared safe to return. Adri had never known war. She stepped foot on African soil after the last of the rebels were driven from the bush. To her, the collection of homes, guesthouses, and small office buildings that populated the compound were simply neighborhood and community, and the mélange of humanitarian workers and expats were family. More or less. Adri had found that although many of the volunteers and aid workers in her little corner of Africa were sincere and altruistic in their motives, just as many were running away from something. Or someone. She could relate. They didn’t pry and neither did she.
    Adri’s house was a two-bedroom bungalow with a tiny, eat-in kitchen and a bathroom that was perpetually grimy, no matter how much she cleaned it. All inadequacies aside, Adri adored every inch of the six hundred square feet of her home.
    She had bunked with other coworkers, board members passing through, friends of friends. It was how things were done when space was at a premium and nothing quite worked out the way you hoped it would. A bigger house was in the works, but funding had dried up, and, for better or worse, Adri’s place was forced into service as home base. Once, when she was hosting the founder, his wife, and teenage son for a single night, Adri had slept in her bathtub, a late-nineteenth-century claw-footed monstrosity that had amazingly found its way to the west coastof Africa. But living with Caleb had come with a brand-new set of discomforts. The air was alive. Charged.
    He had earned his nursing degree after backpacking through Asia and deciding that life was too short to not make a difference. That’s how he introduced himself to her in their first email exchange: “I want to make a difference.” So did Adri, but his admission looked especially ingenuous in type. She liked him more than she wanted to, and bristled at the way he made her feel jaded.
    â€œAre you going for a swim?” Adri asked, fitting her key into the front door. Her back was to the ocean, and although the water was across the road and down a wide, orange beach, she could imagine that the spray licked the back of her neck, her bare arms.
    â€œTonight?” Caleb sounded surprised. “The fence doesn’t go down the beach, Adri.” They could hear the beat of drums in the distance now, the swell and whoop of voices shouting for something they couldn’t make out and wouldn’t understand even if they could.
    â€œYou think