Dirty Secrets Read Online Free PDF Page A

of the way up and sat cross-legged and hunched, looking around with interest. “Your attic looks bigger than mine.”
    “Because mine’s not as full of junk as yours,” Emma said and took a mug of steaming cocoa from the tray. “This is good.”
    “Thank you.” Kate regarded her over the rim of her mug. “Are you all right?”
    “I’ve survived the trauma of being kidnapped,” Emma replied dryly.
    “I wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t been desperate. You wouldn’t come home when I asked. And you were never in danger for a minute.” She grinned. “But wasn’t Linda wonderful? You never suspected a thing.”
    “No, I didn’t. And if you ever do anything like that again, I’m calling the cops.”
    “I hope I won’t have to,” Kate said pointedly, then sobered. “So how are you, Em?”
    Emma looked away. “I’m all right. The past few days have been hard, going through his things.” She looked back at Kate’s concerned face and forced her lips into a rueful smile. “I wouldn’t have believed clothes could hold a man’s scent for more than a year.” But they could. Emma hadn’t known just how badly a heart could break until she’d pulled one of Will’s sweaters from a drawer and . . . smelled him.
    She’d held back the tears until that moment, but smelling his woodsy cologne was somehow worse than everything else. The dam had broken then and Will’s sweater became a crying rag. Kate had raced to her side and held her through the torrent and when the weeping had passed, Kate pressed a hot cloth to her face and popped aspirin down her throat to take the edge off the resulting headache. But the headache was long gone now, in its place a . . . peace, a relief she’d long seen in the clients she’d counseled over the years as they too had come to grips with their loss, with having to refind their place in the world without that special person.
    Kate gripped her hand and squeezed hard. “But you needed to do it, Emma. I couldn’t stand watching you hide any longer. This is your home. You need to live here, not in hotels or in New York. You needed to grieve.”
    “I’ve been thinking about that,” Emma said thoughtfully, fixing her gaze out the attic window where snowflakes were silently falling. “I know you think I hadn’t grieved Will because I wouldn’t come home.” She shrugged. “I didn’t think I had either. But I did, in my own way. Every time I went to bed alone in a strange hotel, I missed him. Every time his favorite show came on TV or I heard one of his favorite songs on the radio, I missed him. But every day it got a little easier. Eventually, I stopped reaching for him in the night. I stopped listening for him to call my name in a crowd. Friday night was the first time I’d slept in our bed since he died. And . . .” She drew a breath. “I missed him. But it wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be.”
    Kate’s eyes were shiny. “I’m sorry, Em.”
    “So am I.” She sighed and crawled back to the box of books she’d been cataloging. “I found the newspaper clippings, by the way. Clever, hiding them in with the bag of peanut M&M’s you brought with you.”
    Kate bit her lip. “I was half-hoping you would find them and half-hoping you wouldn’t. I didn’t know if you’d kept up with the case.”
    Emma stared down in the box of books, controlling a sudden rush of grief and helpless rage. “I checked the
Post
online every day from wherever I was. And the detective called when the trial started.” The trial of the nineteen-year-old that had walked into a convenience store with a loaded gun and changed her life forever. “I was ready to come back if they needed me to testify, but the store video gave the police all the evidence they needed. The police were really wonderful. They faxed a letter to me when I was in LA last year. It was from the mother of the little boy Will pushed out of the way.” Will had saved the child, putting himself in the path