The One Safe Place Read Online Free PDF Page A

unconsciously taken another step toward her. He reined himself in with effort.
    She was right, of course. They were fine. Spencer had quickly caught the dog, who wriggled in his arms, ecstatically licking mud from his chin. Faith put her arm across the boy’s wet, bony shoulder and bentdown, ignoring the water, to give him something that was a cross between a hug and a stern talking to.
    It was quite a scene, the two drenched and muddy creatures standing knee deep in water, their clothes ruined, their hair streaming in their faces. And all around them, the ducks paddled peacefully, staring straight ahead with stately boredom, as if, sadly, nothing interesting ever happened on their little pond.
    Just then, Justine appeared at Reed’s elbow, chewing on some spearmint-scented gum, her sleeping baby propped on her shoulder.
    â€œWow,” she said without much inflection, scanning the weird tableau before them. “That half-drowned thing in the pond is your ‘fox’?”
    â€œNo.” Reed shook his head slowly, and then, seeing that Faith’s minilecture was over, he began to move a little closer. Maybe he could just lend a hand, just make sure they could climb out without any further dunking.
    He glanced back at Justine briefly with a small smile. “Actually,” he said, “that’s my new housekeeper.”
    Justine stared a minute, and then she chuckled, stroking her baby’s cheek softly.
    â€œWow,” she said again as she turned to go back into the clinic. “And I thought you were nuts for hiring me! ”

CHAPTER THREE
    F AITH HAD NEVER BEEN so humiliated in her life. What a great first impression! She couldn’t imagine what Reed Fairmont must think.
    She had to fight the urge to come staggering out of the pond, dripping mud all over everyone, and start compulsively overexplaining, overapologizing, overreacting.
    She hadn’t realized that Tigger was essentially being theatrical and never had any intention of massacring Dr. Fairmont’s ducks. Tigger wasn’t a bird dog. He was just a puppy with too much energy, but for a minute she’d forgotten that.
    And she hadn’t, of course, realized how shallow the pond was. She had been too focused on the fact that Spencer wasn’t a strong swimmer. He was just six years old, and if he’d slipped beneath the black-gold water, she might not have been able to find him in time.
    But, though these were good reasons, they weren’t the real reasons, and she knew it. The real reason Spencer had overreacted to the fear of losing Tigger, and the real reason she had been so afraid of losingSpencer, was simply that they had lost too much already.
    They weren’t like other people anymore. Their antennae were always subtly tuned to the disaster frequency. They had seen how swiftly tragedy could strike—even on a sunny summer morning, even in your own home, even while people were making peanut butter sandwiches—and that knowledge had changed them forever.
    But that wasn’t the kind of thing you walked right up to a total stranger and began explaining. “Hello, nice to meet you, sorry about the ducks, but you see my nephew and I have developed this disaster mentality.”
    Impossible. So instead she put her arm around Spencer’s shoulder and guided him toward the bank of the pond. She stroked his hair back from his forehead, and then did the same to her own. Her stitches hurt—she shouldn’t have let them get wet—but she ignored the pain.
    She summoned up all her dignity and looked at Reed Fairmont with her best imitation of a normal smile.
    â€œI’m so sorry,” she said. “We seem to have made a terrible mess.”
    The man in front of her smiled, too. It was such a warm, sympathetic smile that for a minute Faith thought maybe Reed Fairmont did understand everything. Maybe he knew about how fear seemed to follow them everywhere, even to Firefly Glen, how