The Second Lie Read Online Free PDF

her chest. "Just stuff. I read articles about all kinds of things."
    "Do you smoke, Maggie?"
    "Of course not. And I've never tried drugs, either. They're gross. And they'll kill you, too. That's what I keep telling my mom about her cigarettes. But she doesn't quit. Sometimes I think she'd rather be dead."
    Did her mother do drugs?
    "How about you? Have you ever felt like you'd rather be dead?"
    "I'm only fourteen."
    "That doesn't answer my question."
    "Why would I want to die? I've hardly started to really live."
    She had an edge.
    "What do you and your friends do when you're together?"
    "Hang out."
    I had a choice. Let her go and hope I could get her to come back. Or try to help her and risk losing her.
    "Do any of your friends know you like an older man?"
    "Of course not. You think I'd tell them..."
    Maggie stopped dead. And with a venomous glance, she got up and walked out of my office.

4
    I n the middle of lifting a bite-size piece of the most delicious-smelling pork to her lips, Sam paused. "What?" she asked, twirling the toothpick spear.
    Her older brother, Pierce, wiped his hands on the white full-body chef's apron that was folded over and tied at his waist. "What what? "
    "You're frowning."
    "Sorry." Busying himself with the cooked pork, Pierce didn't elaborate. Sam stared at the big erase-board calendar on the wall beside him. Thursday, August 19. He had two functions that day.
    "No, I want to know," Sam said, lowering the sample he'd just handed her. "What's on your mind?"
    "Nothing." His fingers touched the food softly, gently, almost reverently, as he layered longer skewers with different-colored vegetables. Sam knew the finished product would look more like a work of art than the main course of the dinner he was catering that evening.
    "Yeah, right. Nothing. And I'm quitting my job." Sam leaned on the cooking island Pierce had had installed when he'd remodeled the downstairs of the Victorian house they'd grown up in and opened his catering business. She always stopped by during her lunch hour, hoping her brother would have something tasty to sample.
    "What'd you think of the pork?" Pierce turned around. "You didn't like it?"
    "I didn't try it. Not until you tell me what the frown was about."
    "You, of course. It's always about you. But you know that."
    "Me." Grumpily, she closed her teeth around the toothpick and slid the meat off. It was good.
    Almost good enough to distract her from her bad mood.
    "What about me, specifically, and why today?" she asked, softening her tone a bit as she snagged another piece of pork.
    "You're becoming more and more like Dad every day. And you're worrying Mom. Have you even been upstairs to see her today?"
    Pierce had renovated the house into separate apartments--one for him, one for their mother--on the second and third floors.
    And her brother knew she hadn't been up upstairs. She'd come in the back door, which opened into the kitchen.
    "What's the matter with her legs?" Sam groused defensively. "They still work, don't they? There's no reason she can't come down here once in a while to see me. She knows I'm going to be here. Every day. Like clockwork." Pierce babied their mother--just as their father had. He thought he was taking care of her, but to Sam, he was simply pandering to their mother's fears. Especially the fear that Sam was incapable of protecting herself.
    But that was a twenty-year argument she definitely didn't have time for today.
    Pierce folded a long piece of foil over his skewers.
    "And how am I like Dad?" she asked when it became fairly clear that he'd relegated her "mother" quip to a "not worthy of response" status. "You're obsessing."
    No, she wasn't. Pierce could accuse her of many things--and be at least half-right. But not this time. Obsessing led to mistakes. And in her line of work, a mistake could mean death.
    Peter Jones, their father, had found that out the hard way. He'd let a personal tragedy cloud his professional judgment.
    "Anyway, is this just