A Secret Identity Read Online Free PDF Page A

had no answer for that comment, but I gave it my best try. “I regularly attend writers’ conferences as well as Romance Writers of America and Christian Booksellers conventions,” I said. “I deal with others all the time.”
    “Right,” he said, unimpressed. “And when you go to these places, you hang around all day with other recluses just like you.”
    I thought of the wild and wonderful personalities of many of the writers and editors I knew. Recluses hardly fit the bill. I thought of the panels I sat on and the classes I taught and the fascinating conversations I had at these convocations. In reality I did quite well with people. After all, I’d lived all my life with Pop and Mom and Ward. I knew all about people skills, and I loved my times on the dais or in the spotlight. But I was always happy to come home and be alone again. In fact, I needed to come home and be alone.
    But Ward never saw me do anything but write, never saw me as anything but alone. He naturally assumed I had serious limitations that were preventing me from enjoying his version of a happy life.
    Ward and his wife, Marnie, a delightful, sparkly blonde, lived fifteen minutes away from me in Columbia, in a large and wonderful new house with windows and gables and a stone front and a huge yard for John Seward Bentley V to run around in—as soon as he was old enough to run.
    “Cara,” Marnie said when they dropped in one day to check on me, “don’t stay alone in this huge old house!”
    “But I like it here,” I said for the hundredth time as I watched my brother begin his now routine tour of the place.
    “Just checking,” he mumbled as he slid through the doorway to the kitchen.
    “It’s not going to fall down,” I said.
    He made a soft grunt, obviously expecting just that now that there wasn’t a man living here. As Marnie and I continued to talk, I listened to him go down to the basement to check the furnace. I heard him checking the locks on the back door. I heard him climb to the second and third stories, moving from room to room, methodically going over some mental checklist he’d created.
    I felt a bit like Rainbow must when I hugged her too tightly.
    Marnie laid her hand on my arm. “This place is too big for you, Cara. There’s too much upkeep. We worry about you all alone here.”
    I smiled and said nothing.
    “You need to buy a nice condo near us. Johnny will want Aunt Cara nearby.”
    I thought that Johnny couldn’t care less, but I knew that Marnie, who had all the heart, vitality, and charm of a people person, was as concerned about me as my big brother. I just couldn’t imagine why they’d even think I would want to leave the house that had been my home almost all my life. I loved its high-ceilinged rooms, its tall, nearly impossible-to-decorate windows that let the late-spring light stream in, its backyard with Mom’s roses and two huge oaks that shaded the patio.
    “I think maybe I’ll paint the outside,” I said to Marnie as I rocked sweet-smelling Johnny softly in my arms. It was my way of saying that I wasn’t moving. “You think cream shutters would look good with the brick? Or should I stick with white? Or maybe go to red shutters?”
    She didn’t say anything as she sank into Mom’s favorite chair, but her kind face was full of worry. About me.
    “That painting is not a rash decision,” I said hastily, acting as if the painting were the main issue that concerned us. “Mom and I were talking about it just before she became ill for the last time, and I’ve continued to think about it ever since. Four years of thinking means it’s not an impulsive decision, doesn’t it?” I looked at her with feigned innocence.
    “Cara, I don’t care if you paint this place purple,” she sputtered. She rose and paced, her arms shooting in all directions in her agitation. “It’s the place itself that concerns me, and you here in it alone. You’re letting life pass you by!”
    “Oh, Marnie.” I gave