Mr. And Miss Anonymous Read Online Free PDF

dinner at Berkeley. Maybe another new outfit for the day after. A travel outfit. Lily tried to remember the last time she’d gone clothes shopping. When she couldn’t, she gave up. She wondered if she had enough time to get a facial and a haircut. Just the thought of getting a haircut sent shivers up and down her spine. Some inner instinct warned her that she needed to look as successful as she was if she was going to see Peter Kelly. Assuming she would meet Peter Kelly if he even showed up for the fund-raiser. Well, she’d just have to make the time. The worst-case scenario was that she would have to pay extra to have the beauty shop stay open to accommodate her.
    As Lily drove toward Charleston, she let her mind wander back to her past and the years leading up to the present. She had so many regrets these days. She’d hoped to be married with children by now, but that wasn’t happening. She didn’t think it would ever happen. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing. She was married to her company and would just be cheating a husband. She had no motherly instincts, but there was a reason for that. A reason she didn’t want to dwell on. How sad.
    Lily tried to remember the last time she’d had a real date. Well over a year ago. Penny said it was because she was too intimidating. Penny also said her standards were way too high, and at her age, she needed to stop being so picky. Lily didn’t even bother to offer any rebuttal because Penny was right. If things continued the way they were, she was going to end up an old maid, rocking on her verandah and staring out at the ocean.
    Lily continued with her soul-searching. She’d always been a methodical kind of person. And analytical. She rarely made a mistake, but when she did, it was usually of the mega kind. To date she regretted only two things she’d done in her life. The first one was going into the teaching field. She simply wasn’t teacher material. While she admired all teachers, she herself had no desire to mold young minds. The second mistake was to donate her eggs to that awful clinic. How young and stupid she was back then. How needy, how greedy, how goal-oriented she was during that last year at Berkeley.
    With all that on her shoulders, it still boggled her mind that she’d made a go of the little business she’d started in her grandmother’s garage. These days she ran a company that netted a billion dollars annually.
    All of that, and still she was an emotional wreck, teetering on the edge. For months she’d known she had to do something to turn her life around. Then when the invitation arrived to attend the special fund-raiser, her mind had kicked into high gear. Why she thought Peter Kelly could help her was beyond her comprehension. Some deep part of her gut said that since he was part of her past in a minimal way, the answers had to lie with him. “Maybe I’m in the throes of a nervous breakdown and too stupid to know it,” she muttered to herself.
    Lily had reached Charleston. She parked by the outdoor market and made her way to a specialty shop on King Street—a shop named Olga’s—where she bought a ton of clothes that Olga herself paraded in front of her. She explained that she was going to the hairdresser at Charleston Place and paid extra to have her purchases delivered to her home on the Battery.
    At seven o’clock, when she left the beauty shop, her long crop of hair was sheared, sunstreaked, and highlighted. Her mane of curly hair, what was left of it, was now styled into a becoming skullcap hairdo that curled winsomely around her face. She liked the change because she looked totally unlike herself. The beautician said she looked ten years younger. The woman’s testimonial pleased Lily so much that she purchased two shopping bags of products she knew she would probably use once. Her face glowed and tingled, but she was zit-and blackhead-free. She hadn’t even known she had zits and black-heads, which probably just meant she needed