The Lost Daughter by Lucy Ferriss

Author:Lucy Ferriss
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Contemporary Women, Fiction
ISBN: 042524556X
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2012-02-07T08:00:00+00:00

At the break, Sean approached Geoff and asked for the rest of the night off. “Don’t want to infect anyone else,” he said. Geoff told him he looked like hell and shooed him out the door. Driving home, he felt his ears ringing, the soreness descending his eustachian tubes to his throat. This cold was going to be a doozy, he thought. He’d crawl right into bed, ask Brooke to fix him a whiskey toddy. But when he pulled into the drive and saw her car gone, he knew. He pressed his heavy head against the steering wheel for a minute, then hauled himself out of the car and into the house. Gave little Emma ten bucks; she could walk herself home. Meghan was already in bed. He poured his own whiskey, neat, and nursed it in the kitchen.

By the time Brooke’s car crunched on the gravel, he’d played out the fight in his head a dozen times, and left himself bloody and bruised at each round. “Eight years,” he said when she’d come into the kitchen, startled as a doe, those red earrings glinting in her hair. “And you haven’t been honest with me for a single day.”

The whiskey bottle stood on the breakfast table. Christ, he was hammered. Hammered and horny and sick as a dog and wanting his wife, and what had Danny called her? A cold bitch.

“You’re drunk,” she said softly.

“And you are a whore.”

“What. The fuck. Are you talking about?” She went over to the sink, drew a glass of water, and chugged it.

“Ah. Now, there’s the stuff. Never heard you say ‘fuck’ before. Is that amazing or what? Too much the lady. Now you meet your boyfriend, and you come back saying ‘fuck.’ What do you think of that, guys? Huh?” He nudged Lex with his toe. “She doesn’t take you along, either. Little miss lover of all things dependent but she leaves you behind for the old flame. Why d’you suppose that is?”

“Because I needed to talk to him.”

“To Alex. You can say his name, Brooke. I know his name now.”

“Yes, to Alex. We needed to work out some stuff. From long ago.”

“Without telling your husband. Where I come from they call that sneaking around. Not working stuff out.”

“I knew you’d be jealous, Sean. I’m sorry.”

“Hear that?” He nudged Lex again, harder. The Labrador growled. “The adulteress is sorry.”

“I’m not sleeping with him.”

She said that quickly, too quickly. His head stampeded. His throat was sandpaper, coated in phlegm. “ ‘I am not having sex,’ ” he quoted, “ ‘with that man.’ Which means you did. Or you will. And I don’t fucking care which it is.”

“I did sleep with him, Sean. In high school.”

God, he loved her. He knew he loved her more than his life, even as he knocked back the last shot and went to take a piss, his muscles weak. In his stuffed head now he heard the chorus they’d been singing before he left rehearsal—the chorus coming in as

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