Wade Read Free Page B

her long, soft brown curls.
    â€œHe wanted you to meet him?”
    Chloe gave her a straight glance. “You did understand him then.”
    â€œA little,” Treena agreed. “You may as well tell me the rest, yes?”
    â€œIt was stupid.”
    â€œBut interesting enough to keep you silent all the way home. Please, Chloe. It’s so exciting that he actually spoke to you.”
    Treena would not stop until she had every detail, Chloe knew. And what reason was there to keep it from her when nothing would come of it? Paying careful attention to the braid she was making in Uma’s hair, she said, “He only told me that he’d been sent by my father.”
    â€œFor what reason?”
    â€œTo…to take me back to the States.”
    â€œOh, Chloe.” Distress and sympathy were plain in Treena’s face.
    â€œI don’t believe it,” Chloe answered, her voice grim. “Why would my father send someone now when he never answered my letters?”
    â€œThere are many reasons for things.”
    It was one of the obscure answers so common in this part of the world. They had once driven Chloe crazy, but that was before she’d come to see that they could be an invitation to explore a topic as well as an evasion. “Such as?”
    â€œPerhaps your letters have taken this long to reach your father?”
    â€œMy country may be far away, but it’s hardly on another planet.”
    Treena gave her a wan smile over her shoulder as she kissed her daughter, then slipped a clean nightgown over her head. “You thought differently at one time.”
    â€œExperience is a useful thing,” she replied, since Hazaris weren’t the only ones who could be obscure. “I wish I knew if this American really has news of my father. To hear of him, where he is, what he does, would be wonderful.”
    â€œBut I thought you had hardly seen him since you were a child, even before you left your country. You never speak of him. It has been as if you’d put him from your mind.”
    â€œNo.”
    Chloe let that simple denial stand. She’d been her father’s tomboy princess. They had built birdhouses and tree houses together, ridden bikes together, gone fishing together and even spent the summer together when she was ten, at a fishing camp beside some lake in Louisiana. Sometimes, when the icy wind blew from the mountains, or when the sky was silver-white with heat and the rain would not fall, she dreamed of those endless summer days beside sparkling water. She longed in her dreams for the Louisiana air that was as warm and soft as silk, for the near-jungle of trees so green that they tinted the world with emerald light, for the lazy amble of passing days that were each a haven of peace and safety. Waking, she feltdisoriented, as if she were in the wrong place. And she ached with memories of her dad, and how he had told her she was pretty, repeating it so often that she’d decided to believe it whether it was true or not. How could she ever forget him?
    â€œI’m sorry,” Treena said quietly.
    Chloe looked away to hide the sheen of moisture in her eyes. “I’ve wondered if my letters ever reached my father at all. If that was why I never heard from him, because he did not know where to write to me.”
    Her stepsister made no answer as she knelt, wiping dust from her young daughter’s legs and feet, murmuring soft nonsense to keep her still and entertained through the ritual. Something in the stiffness of her back caught at Chloe’s attention.
    â€œTreena?”
    â€œAll things are possible.”
    Chloe frowned as she watched Ahmad’s sister gently press the child down on a pallet in a corner of the bedroom she shared with Ismael. “Are you saying,” she asked with slow control, “that they might have been intercepted?”
    Treena glanced at her from the corners of her eyes. “Oh, Chloe, must you always be