Eden in Winter Read Online Free PDF Page B

of Adam’s family – briefly lingering on Clarice, who turned away in scorn and anger. Then her eyes met Adam’s. Touching his mother’s elbow, he murmured, ‘Wait for me in the car,’ and walked over to Carla.
    For a moment they faced each other, quiet. ‘Sorry for this,’ she said. ‘I came to see the district attorney, not your family. I thought the hearing would be over.’
    Adam grasped her dilemma. At the end of his life, she was the one who had cared for a dying man – knowing nothing about the change in his will to favour her – and, by her lights, had found the good in him. But she was not family; only Benjamin Blaine’s family, who despised him, was allowed inside the courtroom. And so Carla, who suspected that one of the Blaines had killed him, was forced to glean from George Hanley whatever he chose to tell her. Not much, Adam guessed, leaving doubt to gnaw at Carla’s mind and heart.
    Looking around them, he saw no one; the Sheriff’s deputies had kept the media outside. ‘The hearing ran late,’ he said with an ease he did not feel. ‘Jack was on the stand for a good while.’
    ‘I don’t suppose you’ll tell me what he said.’
    ‘What you’ve already heard, once he went to the police: that Ben’s death was an accident.’
    Her deep brown eyes were flecked with doubt. Burdened with his own deceit, Adam wondered why, of all thedeceptions he had crafted, it pained him most to deceive Carla Pacelli. Perhaps because, as he had belatedly discovered, she was the only person involved with Benjamin Blaine who – unlike Adam’s mother, uncle and brother – had always told him the truth.
    ‘Do you believe that?’ she asked.
    ‘Consider the circumstances, Carla. There’s no evidence that Jack killed him – or, as I understand it, to even place him at the scene. He risked putting his head in the noose in order to save Teddy.’
    ‘Which means he’s innocent?’ For an instant she eyed him closely, the intensity of her gaze fading to a fleeting half smile of scepticism. ‘I suppose I’ll have to wait for the judge’s report. For now, you’re the person I most want to believe.’
    Adam had trained his face to show nothing; only another professional, he supposed, might take its studied blankness for what it was.
    ‘Whatever the case,’ she added, ‘I appreciate all you’ve done.’
    He shrugged this away. ‘How’s the baby?’
    Carla touched her stomach. ‘Fine, as far as I know. I have another check-up in two weeks. Ask me then.’
    ‘By then I may be back in Afghanistan.’ Adam hesitated, then heard himself ask, ‘Can I see you tonight?’
    Briefly, she looked surprised, then smiled a little. ‘Of course.’ Lightly, she added, ‘How will you explain this to your mother? Or to anyone, for that matter?’
    ‘I won’t. It’s like Ben told me, back when I thought he was my father, “Never complain, never explain”. Truly, words to live by.’
    ‘Only sometimes,’ Carla responded. ‘My life left me witha great deal to explain, if only to the people I choose to care about. But in that spirit, I’ll cook dinner for us. I’d rather not have the two of us sitting in a public restaurant, drawing gasps and incredulous stares. There’s been too much unwholesome interest in my life, and in my involvement with Ben. I don’t want it to bleed into your life any more than it already has.’
    Adam simply nodded, a tacit acknowledgment of how difficult their relationship was. Whatever it was.
    ‘Seven o’clock, then?’ she asked.
    ‘I’ll look forward to it,’ he answered, and went to face whatever waited outside, feeling the conflict within him, guilt at war with kinship.

THREE
    Outside, the rain had stopped. For a moment, Adam stood blinking in the light of a changeable August day, feeling like a badger peering from a hole. In this moment of hesitation, he saw the media scrum pursuing his family toward the sidewalk, a swarming organism filled with boom mikes, cameras,