Haunting Olivia Read Online Free PDF Page B

Glitz (actually, she wasn’t sure if she’d resigned or gotten fired), the two other women in the photograph felt like all she had. And she barely had them. They were her sisters, yes, her half sisters. She hadn’t grown up with them. She barely knew them. Until last month, the three Sedgwick sisters had rarely spoken. They hadn’t been raised to be close, and so in adulthood they’d been wary of each other, a trait their mothers had in-stilled in them since toddlerhood. Well, Olivia’s and Ivy’s mothers, anyway. Amanda’s mother had HAUNTING OLIV IA
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    been very kind and not the least bit competitive, but she’d passed away years ago.
    Olivia glanced at the photo. The three sisters had the same eyes, almond shaped and blue, like their father’s, but the similarity ended there. Olivia’s hair was blond and straight. Amanda’s hair was brown and wavy, and Ivy’s was short with an auburn cast.
    As the eldest sister, Olivia felt as though she should do something to bring the sisters closer, but what? And how? Amanda now lived in Maine with her new husband and her adorable year-old son, Tommy, from a previous relationship. Ivy lived in New Jersey, almost two hours’ driving distance from Manhattan, and her job as a police officer and her wedding plans (she was engaged to be married in March) kept her very busy.
    Her cell phone rang. Olivia glanced at the Caller ID. Her mother. For the fourth time this morning.
    “Hi, Mom. No, I haven’t opened the envelope.”
    She’d almost forgotten all about it.
    “What the hell are you waiting for?” her mother yelled in her ear. “Open it!”
    “I’m afraid to,” she said, surprising herself with her honesty. She rarely felt she could be honest with her mother.
    “Honey, there’s nothing in there but property or a pile of money. I’m sure your father left you something of equal value to the brownstone he bequeathed to Amanda. Millions!”
    “Amanda and Ethan donated the brownstone to a children’s charity,” Olivia reminded her mother.
    “Maybe I’ll do that with whatever William left me.

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    Janelle Taylor
    Do I really want to inherit anything from a man who couldn’t bother being my father?”
    “He was your father when it counted, Olivia,” her mother snapped. “When you were in trouble, he stepped up.”
    Her mother never said the actual words: when you got pregnant. Nor did she ever mention the home Olivia had been sent to, the lies told to distant relatives and friends and school administration. And the birth—it was as though it had never happened.
    “Stepped up or took care of business?” Olivia asked. “He did what was good for himself. He was embarrassed and he ‘handled’ what he considered a problem.”
    “Olivia, there’s no need to rehash the past. Your father owes you for being an absentee father. Take the money and buy yourself a beautiful apartment.
    You might even have something left over for your dear mother.”
    Olivia smiled. She could always count on her mother for honesty, that was for sure.
    “Mom, when I open it, I’ll call you first thing, okay?”
    Having extracted a promise from Olivia to open it today (which she was legally bound to, according to her father’s lawyer), her mother harrumphed and hung up. Olivia put her phone and the photograph away and took out the white envelope, turning it over in her hands.
    “My ball!”
    Olivia glanced up to find an adorable little girl, around four, racing toward her. With her white HAUNTING OLIV IA
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    blond hair, blue eyes, and heart-shaped face, she could be Olivia’s own child.
    Except that her child, had he or she lived, would now be thirteen. And he or she would have inherited some of Zach’s features and coloring. His thick sandy brown hair or his intense hazel eyes. His dimple or his cleft.
    She hadn’t even had the chance to hold her own baby, see him or her. She’d never know what their baby had looked like. Tightness squeezed her chest and she shut her