Bread Alone Read Online Free PDF

considered myself a jealous woman, but there were a couple of times when I wanted to pour my drink down someone’s cleavage. If David hadn’t been so absolutely circumspect, I might have done it.
Most ominous of all, however, was his new tendency to be annoyed and embarrassed by my frankness and my disinclination toward social jockeying—the very things he’d once said he loved about me. I tried to do what I thought would please him, but I began to feel like I was walking on eggshells. Still, when the meetings were over and we were safe at home, old comforts returned and we’d settle back into our life.
Nothing was really wrong. Things were going to get better. Just as soon as this meeting or that project or the next pitch was over. After he became director of marketing. We’d have more time. We’d go away for more long weekends and long talks. We’d find it again.
In the movies, when it’s time for The Bad Thing to happen, the music changes. When the homesteaders have got all the crops in the barn andthey’re having the harvest hoedown and everybody’s dancing and having fun, then the menacing cello tremolo lets you know that the cattle baron’s henchmen are about to show up and gun down a few innocent bystanders. I’ve always thought it extremely unfair that real life doesn’t come with that sort of sound track. Not that it would change anything, but advance notice would be nice.
So I came home on a Friday afternoon from a meeting of the Hancock Park Green Spaces Association to find a gold Lexus parked in our driveway behind David’s black Mercedes. I had to park my Mazda at the curb. Before I could even get to the porch, the front door opened and out stepped Kelley Hamlin, one of the account managers. Not just any old account manager, but the company MVP for the last two years. I’d talked to her briefly a couple of times at office social functions, but I’d heard from some of the other women on the management side that she was brilliant. Driven. She was also beautiful.
“Hello, Wyn.” She smiled at me, flicked her blonde hair back over her shoulder. David stood behind her, a file folder in his hand. “Thanks for dropping this off, Kelley.”
The faintest little ping sounded somewhere in my brain, so quiet that I almost missed it. I looked at him, and he looked right back at me, smiled into my eyes. But there was no exchange. It was like looking at someone who’s wearing those mirrored sunglasses. All you see is your own reflection.
After a quiet and seemingly endless dinner, I was reading the new Los Angeles Magazine in the room I call the den but that David always refers to as the “library.” He came in, sat down next to me on the black leather couch.
That in itself was a guaranteed attention grabber, because lately we’d been simply two people who found themselves asleep in the same bed every now and then. He sat on the edge of the seat, smiled almost shyly, as if he was going to start a conversation about something other than picking up the dry cleaning.
I remembered how it had been before. How it might be again. I smiled back. Détente.
Then he said, “Wyn, I can’t do this anymore.”
“Do what?” The wrong thing to say. It elicited his hurt/disappointed look.
“I can’t keep pretending everything is fine.”
“I know everything’s not fine. You’re working much too hard and the stress must be—”
“Yes, I have been busy, and there is a lot of stress. But it’s not just that.”
An image flared. David rolling over in our bed next to someone. Indistinct, no more than a shape under the covers. The scene evaporated instantly, but it left a white shadow, the way a match flame leaves a ghost of itself on your eye.
We looked at each other for a minute before I went for broke.
“Are you seeing someone?”
He frowned. “Seeing someone? You mean like a shrink?”
“No. I mean like a woman. Is there something you want to tell me?”
He took the magazine out of my hands and tossed it onto