Cover of Snow by Jenny Milchman

Author:Jenny Milchman [Milchman, Jenny]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: C429, Extratorrents, Kat
ISBN: 9780345534231
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2013-01-15T08:00:00+00:00

Teggie was brewing coffee by the time the old, creaking elevator opened on her floor. I had to remind her that I no longer drank it. She put water on for tea instead.

“Are you hungry?” she asked, and I shook my head. For once I wasn’t. The rest stop sandwich sat in my stomach like a ball of paste.

My sister wore a T-shirt askew on her shoulders, and nothing else; Gabriel had pulled on jeans, but his muscular chest was bare. I had interrupted something, or else they were just sleeping naked, but either way, their sudden slide toward partnership baffled me. How could my sister be there and I here? It was a total reversal of the hemispheres, the earth shifted on its axis.

As if reading my thoughts, Gabriel straightened from where he was slouching by the fridge. “I need something a little warmer. Teg?”

“My robe?” she said, and he left the room.

I couldn’t stop my head from spinning. They would have children, Gabriel and Teggie, the ones I’d so longed for. My sister’s lithe body would swell and distort, pushed in ways she hadn’t made it go.

This was why Dugger’s recording had hit me so hard. Not because of the shock, after being so sure that I’d been listening to an appalling crime, but because it reminded me of everything I had lost, everything I would never have. Brendan hadn’t wanted kids—I’d known that even before we married—but I never doubted that eventually I’d either convince him or there’d be a mishap, some spontaneous burst of passion that got the better of both of us.

For the first time I realized that it must’ve been Red’s death that had made parenthood such a dread prospect for my husband. He believed—Eileen had led him to believe—that he would not only fail at the job, but destroy it completely. I pressed my eyes shut, but couldn’t stop the tears from falling, a dike giving way beneath too much pressure.

Teggie squeezed my hand. She pushed a cup of tea across her small square of counter.

I drank.

Gabriel reentered the room, dressed, although still in bare feet, a faded blue drape of terry cloth over his arm for my sister. “Want me to take the couch?” he asked, looking at Teggie. “You guys can sleep in your room?”

I never would have asked or even accepted aloud. But when my sister said, “If you don’t mind, G,” a tidal swell of gratitude rose inside me. To sleep in the warmth of another—someone who loved me in her own way as much as Brendan had—was almost too much for me right now, and at the same time, exactly the right thing. I met Gabriel’s gaze, nearly on the level of my own, and tried to come up with words.

Gabriel found them for me.

“That terry-cloth number’s pretty hot, Nora,” he said, and I laughed. “Try to resist.”

“He’s funny,” I told Teggie, as we lay curled in her bed, and I saw her nod in the dark. Then

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