The Beautiful Daughters Read Free Page B

is hardly a prison. You’re free to go.” She indicated the door with an outstretched hand, inviting him to go inside and pack, to pretend that his third-world hiatus was nothing more than an inkblot on the predictable map of his life.
    He was embarrassed when he swept past. His head was down and he wouldn’t look at her. But just over the threshold, Caleb stopped and turned back. Stared her straight in the eye, boldly and without an ounce of guile. “You don’t have to stay here, either, you know. You’re not a prisoner.”
    The sun was beating against Adri’s auburn hair and sending little rivulets of sweat down the side of her face. But his words were a slap of ice water. Cold and so startling that for a moment she couldn’t breathe.
    He must have sensed that he’d struck a nerve. “You could go home, Adrienne. You could come with me.”
    Caleb’s eyes betrayed him. She had assumed that he wasafter nothing more than a tropical fling, a no-strings-attached affair that he’d casually forget the moment he decided to shoulder his backpack and abandon her little corner of Africa in search of the next big thrill. She figured his tattoos lacked meaning and his Médicins Sans Frontières poster-boy persona were affectations. But standing across from him in the slanting light, Adri could almost believe that his offer was something more. Maybe he was something more.
    You could come with me.
    As if she could just leave it all behind and start over. As if she could be the girl she had been all those years ago, those years before she crossed an ocean and became a person that she didn’t recognize when she looked in the mirror. As if he could offer her the sort of new beginning that she had stopped dreaming about long ago. As if.
    If there was anything Adri knew, it was that some things could not be undone.
    â€œGo pack your stuff,” Adri said, turning away toward the ocean and the sunburned sand and the dark sliver of an impossibly thin fishing boat beyond the breakers. “I’m never going back.”
    And inside a zippered pocket of her cargo pants, her cell phone began to ring.

2

    A dri swung her pack into the back of the land rover and slammed the hatch.
    â€œYou’re not taking much,” Caleb said, putting his hand out for the keys.
    It had been a point of contention—who would drive to the airport—but in the end, Adri reluctantly conceded that if Caleb was going to stick around, he’d better learn to navigate the streets. If they could be called that. She handed him the key chain with what she hoped was a reproachful smile. But her face felt frozen, numb. She felt numb, and had from the moment she answered the phone and heard her father’s voice.
    She’s gone, Adri. I’m sorry, baby, but you need to come home.
    Adri didn’t fight with her father. She never had. It was pointless to shout at a man who would never raise his voice back. But she had argued for almost an hour, begging him to take care of it for her, to somehow fix things so that she wouldn’t have to leave Africa. In the end, there was nothing for it. And if Adri was really honest with herself, there was a certain poetic justice in going back. She deserved it.
    Adri felt her heart squeeze to a pinprick. She tried to swallow and made herself focus on Caleb. His comment. “I don’t need to take much,” she said. “I won’t be gone long.”
    Caleb cocked an eyebrow and disappeared around the side of the Land Rover. “You said you wouldn’t be gone at all,” he called over the top of the dusty vehicle. “In fact, if I recall correctly, you said, and I quote, ‘I’m never going back.’ ”
    Adri wrenched open the door and swung herself inside. “And you said you hated it here. You said you were leaving.”
    â€œYeah, well, things change. And you called it: it was a party, not an uprising.” He