Damage Control by J. A. Jance

Author:J. A. Jance
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2008-07-05T04:00:00+00:00

In an entry from a few days earlier, Joanna found a damning passage that seemed to show her mother’s accusations had been well founded after all:

This is eating away at me. I’m not sleeping at night. Living like this isn’t fair to Ellie. It isn’t fair to Mona. And it isn’t fair to me. But what will become of Joanna if we split up?

Joanna’s eyes blurred with tears as she read those words. In a matter of seconds everything Joanna had ever believed about her parents’ relationship went out the window. Butch was right. Had her father lived, it was possible her parents really would have been divorced, making Joanna a child of divorce. Had that happened, how different would all their lives have been?

Knowing what seemed to be the worst, Joanna scanned through previous entries. In one from several weeks earlier, woven in among a series of general comments about what was going on in the office, Joanna found this:

Ellie’s still pitching a hissy fit. Nothing I do is right. Nothing I say is right. The only time I have a moment’s peace is when I’m out of the house. If I wasn’t able to go to work, I don’t know what I’d do. But work isn’t exactly peaceful these days, either. M is pushing me to make a decision. I know what she wants. Part of me wants it, too, but not enough to hurt the other people I know will get hurt.

That was what Joanna’s mother had said—that Hank had used work as a way of avoiding her. And that was why now, all these years later, she was so susceptible to thinking George Winfield might be doing the same thing with work and with Madge.

But when had her father’s illicit office romance started? Joanna wondered. Had it been going on the whole time Mona had worked for Hank, or had it happened only during the last few months before her father’s death? The snippets Joanna found offered no specific clues about the timing. What they did make clear, however, was that although Hank Lathrop had cared deeply for Mona, he had also agonized over what his relationship with her would do to his wife and daughter.

M’s dad is back in the hospital, and her mother is a basket case. The whole mess is squarely on her shoulders. I wish there were more I could do to help her. It hurts like hell to watch someone you love being run down by a train when there’s not a thing you can do to stop it.

Joanna stared at the words: “someone you love.” There it was in black and white, an admission written in Hank Lathrop’s own distinctive handwriting. Joanna’s father had fallen in love with someone who wasn’t his wife and wasn’t her mother. Somehow Eleanor had figured it out; found it out. For her that betrayal had been a life-altering experience, and the fact that Eleanor had decided to keep her husband’s secret from Joanna had altered their daughter’s life as well.

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