My Dearest Friend Read Online Free PDF Page B

in the middle of the bed, as zonked-out as Carey Ann, sleeping on her stomach with her bottom sticking up in the air and her thumb at her mouth. The backof her neck was damp with moisture, her blond, almost silver hair curled from the moist heat of her little body. She had her thumb poised right at the edge of her mouth, as if even in sleep she kept it near for emergencies, and her bottle, a plastic thing that used to look like a bear but had lost some of the markings, lay next to her, drained.
    His little girl. His baby. When Alexandra saw Jack, her face lit up with ecstasy, every single time. No one else adored Jack as Lexi did. It really was something to have the power to make another human being so happy. It was also a responsibility.
    Carey Ann used to say, before they married and in that first year, that she could never
ever
be happy without him, but now he wondered if she could be happy
with
him. He would do anything in the world to make his two females happy. If only he knew what to do!
    He slipped from the bed, grabbed up his jogging things where he’d tossed them on a chair, and went into the bathroom. Then he crept out of the room, down the stairs, and out of the house. The sun hit him like a spotlight. God, it was a warm and brilliant day. He stood in his driveway, doing warm-up stretches. He’d been jogging five times a week for six years now. He’d started jogging at Yale when he was working on his Ph.D., feeling the need to stretch out the body that spent so many hours bent over a book, crooked and cramped at a desk or typewriter. He used to go every weekday morning to the gym, where gradually he worked up to jogging four miles around the track. He kept it up for a while when teaching in Kansas City, because he found the morning run exhilarating and refreshing. He taught better, his mind worked more quickly, his responses were sharper. After his marriage, and especially after Alexandra’s birth, he just couldn’t find the time—or the energy—to keep up those four miles. So he had settled for two, which took him only about fifteen minutes, even when he was taking it easy.
    He’d gotten in the car and measured a route up here the first day they moved into the house. It was almost exactly one mile from his doorstep to the end of a funny little lane giving onto an old cottage, and back again; then a mile in the other direction, down to the remains of an old barn, and back. It was a pretty run along a country dirt road, perfect for jogging, not as hard as street pavements, but well-packed, with no other houses in sight, mostly forest bordering the road, and dusty wildflowers and grasses, and an occasional view through the trees, as the road turned, of the valley so far down below.
    The realtor had shown him and Carey Ann the cottage. “Only forty thousand dollars,” she had said. “You just can’t find anything at that price anymore. But it’s beensold. Just like that, this spring. After being on the market for over a year.”
    “Ugh,” Carey Ann had said. “It looks like something imported from the Ozarks.”
    In a way, Jack liked the property the cottage sat on better than his own—they had no land, just a small yard—and although the view out the front was spectacular, Jack was already worrying about the heating bills and the winter wind. Their A-frame felt exposed. The little cottage, on the other hand, was sort of nestled down in among an orb of trees. It seemed so cozy, protected, a fairy-tale place cut off from the world.
    Now he headed down the dirt road, taking it easy, concentrating on his breathing. The road narrowed to a lane, the grass and saplings flickered closer to him, and the taller trees arched over, cutting off the sun. He ran through the shadowy tunnel, and, coming out into the light again, saw, with a shock, a woman seated on the steps of the cottage.
    In the instant before she opened her eyes in surprise, he saw that she had been leaning against the cottage door, wearing a