Every Breath You Take Read Online Free PDF Page B

and was swallowed into the crush of the city. She could still remember coming downtown for her first official sightseeing jaunt, about a month after transferring to Northwestern from Brown. Staring down North Michigan Avenue—the John Hancock building, Tribune Tower, and Wrigley Building looking back at her, the sidewalks teeming with tourists, cars, cabs, and buses screaming down the street—she knew she was home.
    Natalie often wondered whether she would have found her way to Chicago had her parents lived. She could have possibly been a Texan with a big car, bigger hair, and a syrupy twang. Ricky and Laura had grabbed the brass ring out of Braxton, Arkansas, banking their future on his status as the newest Dallas Cowboy, a prized quarterback who was showered with signing bonuses, new cars, and predictions of glittering championship rings and Hall of Fame accolades.
    Laura’s own sights were set on a career in nursing—motherhood most of all. Six-month-old Natalie was to be the first of many children. Ricky often joked he wanted to breed a football team, and Laura would shoot back she was getting her own cheerleading squad. Young, blissful, beautiful, with the world on a string. They had just closed on a house in the posh Dallas suburb of Highland Park before joining team management for a dinner that ran later than intended. Laura, eager to get home to her baby back in Braxton with her parents, had insisted they drive the five hours and six minutes home late Wednesday night rather than waiting until Thursday morning, which was Ricky’s preference.
    Everyone used to shake their heads over the “Why Didn’ts?” of it all. “Why Didn’t?” Ricky put his foot down and insist they wait until Thursday morning. “Why Didn’t?” Laura realize the prudent thing would have been to stay put in their hotel that night. “Why Didn’t?” the bleary-eyed trucker, who’d been on the road for three days straight, pull over to a rest stop for the night. “Why Didn’t?” he refuse to take that extra shift, his seventh in as many days, so he wouldn’t have nodded off at the wheel for a few seconds before slamming into Ricky’s Honda Civic, a sixteenth birthday gift from his father and the one he planned to trade in the following week for a shiny new Cadillac.
    Why Didn’t?
    The collective hopes and dreams of Braxton had crunched up into that tiny ball of metal along with Ricky and Laura Scott. They would not be cheering their hometown hero on TV every Sunday as they’d done every Saturday during his storied college career and every Friday night the year he made All-State. Their bragging rights would no longer be laced with the pride of having known Ricky when but, rather, tinged with melancholy over having known Ricky when. Their piteous looks would come to be cast Natalie’s way anytime they saw the orphaned little girl around town. The tsk-tsking and hangdog expressions. It had become as familiar to Natalie as air.
    At first, she stayed with her maternal grandparents, with frequent visits from her paternal grandparents. The four showered Natalie with kisses, hugs, and attention, hoping somehow to make up for the tragedy and erase the “Why Didn’ts?” The situation had been fine, though she could never shake the pervasive loneliness that dropped on top of her like a pile of bricks. Her grandparents gave her a nice, solid life. No frills. No fuss. No muss.
    But the inevitable happened when Natalie was seven. In rapid succession she lost her grandparents one by one: cancer, stroke, heart attack, dementia.
    Which left Zach and Cheryl.
    In the early years following Ricky’s death, news reporters would come knocking on Zach Scott’s door, the eternal shame of the family, persona non grata with his parents and forever shrouded in the shadow of his handsome, popular, star quarterback brother. They were hoping for sugary nostalgia from the older brother of the football idol. What they got were drunken ramblings and