The Betrayed Read Online Free PDF Page A

pulling and twisting on the loose threads. A white button-down oxford shirt hung haphazardly on her frame, the shirttails falling untucked over the denim. She was used to adversity, and considered herself a person who relished a challenge, but right now she felt numb.
    She had been back in D.C. for three weeks, living in a base ment apartment as she got settled in at her job as a research assistant for a law professor at Georgetown. It was a summer job; she had one year left in law school at Stanford, and she had originally planned to work for the summer at a large San Francisco law firm, but things had changed.
    She’d begun talking to her sister, Elizabeth, more and more over the previous winter, which was unusual. They were nine years apart in age, and had never been particularly close. Yet that winter the bonds of sisterhood seemed enough to overcome nearly a decade’s age difference and three thousand miles’ separation. They had found, over the phone, that they had much in common, and Sydney came quickly to realize that she missed the connection she had once felt to her family. After much deliberation, she had decided to come back home to face her demons. She thought that together she and Liz might reunite the family. Now all of that was gone.
    She’d been at the law school’s library when one of her mother’s assistants reached her to tell her about her sister’s murder, and she’d gone immediately to the hospital to be with Amanda. Her first breakdown had come in the waiting room, unexpectedly, the tears streaming down her face as she sobbed silently, leaving ragged tracks on her cheeks. The second had come shortly thereafter as she was allowed into the hospital room to visit Amanda—the enormity of her niece’s situation gripping her as she caught herself at the door, trying to stem the flow of her tears before she entered the room.
    Since then, she’d felt nothing. It was as though she’d turned her emotions off to prevent them from overwhelming her completely. It was an unusual reaction for Sydney, who prided herself on her strength and compassion.
    She barely heard her mother enter the room from the marble foyer, where the grand staircase to the second floor swept around in a regal ellipse, its carved oak banister smelling of rich wood polish. Lydia Chapin walked over to the bar at the far end of the room and began fixing herself a stiff drink.
    “Do you want one?” she asked her daughter after a moment.
    Sydney looked up. Everything seemed muted to her, as if she were under water. “No.” She shook her head.
    “Do you not drink?” Lydia asked. “Or is it just that you won’t drink with me?”
    Sydney rubbed her forehead. “I just don’t think my system could handle it right now. I don’t know how to feel.”
    Lydia stared off into space. “Yes, I think there’s a lot of that going around.”
    “How’s Amanda?” Sydney asked.
    Lydia’s shoulders dipped as she set her drink down on the marble bar. “Who knows? She’s sleeping now, thank God. The doctors think she will be all right, eventually. They gave her some sedatives, and they think after a long rest she’ll be ready to talk.” She picked up her drink again and took a long sip.
    “Should we have kept her at the hospital?”
    “Certainly not.” Of this, at least, Sydney’s mother seemed sure. “I’m not going to allow her to wake up in a sterile environment surrounded by strangers and doctors and nurses. Dr. Phelps will stop by early in the morning, and he said I should call him if she wakes before then—although he said that was unlikely to happen. Right now Amanda needs to be with her family.”
    “Her family,” Sydney repeated in a hollow voice. So odd, she thought, that she and her mother should be all the family left for the fourteen-year-old upstairs.
    “Yes,” Lydia said firmly, as if reading her daughter’s thoughts. “Her family.” She locked her daughter in a hard stare. “Like it or not, we are the only