Once Upon a Lie Read Online Free PDF

girls, as she herself had been left unprotected, she would never forgive herself. “You never have to do anything you don’t want to do.”
    Rebecca responded with a groan.
    “I know I’m a broken record, but it’s just—”
    Rebecca threw her mother’s words back at her: “You’d never forgive yourself if something happened to me.”
    Maeve bent down and saw she was surrounded by broken glass, each shard a threat. Rebecca, finally realizing that her mother was stuck, got up. “Careful,” Maeve said.
    “That’ll leave a mark, right?” Rebecca said, echoing one of her grandfather’s favorite sayings.
    “Right,” Maeve said, her mind on other things. “That’ll definitely leave a mark.”

 
    CHAPTER 4
    On Monday, after the bakery closed at four, Maeve made an unscheduled visit to the assisted-living facility. When she got to Buena del Sol, she found out that Jack was in the weight room, an idea that frightened Maeve more than the fact that he had snuck out a several nights earlier.
    The “concierge,” a young woman who sat at the front desk, a stuffed monkey attached to her shoulder, gave her a warm smile. When Maeve asked her what kinds of weights one found in the weight room of an assisted-living facility, the monkey did the talking. “Nothing too heavy, Miss Conlon,” the monkey said by way of the woman’s hand. Maeve stared at the woman’s mouth, noting that she was a pretty good ventriloquist while also being completely insane. “And our residents are completely supervised while in there. Isn’t that right, Doreen?” the monkey asked the woman around whose waist its long legs were attached.
    The woman nodded vigorously.
    “Doreen?” she asked. “Could you ask my father if he could meet me in the community room?”
    Doreen affected the husky voice of her stuffed simian counterpart, her lips not moving. “Doreen can’t, but Caesar can,” she said.
    Maeve was used to seeing the staff talk to the residents like children, but this was the first time she had ever been treated that way herself. Rather than dwell on the fact that Doreen really took her job seriously—or rather, Caesar did—Maeve went with her fallback position: Doreen was crazy. She waited patiently while Doreen, using her Planet of the Apes voice, paged Jack in the weight room. When she gave Maeve the high sign, in this case a regular old thumbs-up with one of her own opposable digits, Maeve started down the hall, taking one deep breath before she hit the community room, a place that invariably smelled like a combination of oatmeal, disinfectant, and something else that she would never attempt to discern, no matter how curious she was.
    She took a seat by the window, looking out over the back lawn and the various residents who were taking advantage of an unseasonably warm October day. Some were in wheelchairs, while others wandered freely. Two, to Maeve’s surprise, were engaged in a rather passionate kiss, confirming her suspicion that life at Buena del Sol was a hell of a lot more interesting than Maeve realized. To the best of her knowledge, Jack wasn’t involved in a romance, but nothing would surprise her. While he talked a good game about breaking hearts left and right during the five o’clock supper hour, his own heart was still devoted to his lovely Claire, long gone but still a presence in his fragile mind and memory.
    He arrived a few minutes after she sat down, by now fully engrossed in a home improvement show that boasted that she, too, would be able to make her own valances by the show’s end just like the show’s trained designer. Now that Jack had arrived, she’d never know. Jack was wearing a tank top that showed off his ropy yet still muscled arms and the slight paunch that had developed only since he had discovered the joys of assisted-living dining hall chocolate pudding. His smile widened as he got closer, the look on his face one that greeted her every time they came together and one that she would