The Secret Life of Prince Charming Read Online Free PDF

dark in my stomach, some whirling mix of questions and the dread of their answers. It was Brie’s statue. Something that had belonged to her father. So, why was it here? Maybe she had given it to Dad. A present. A going-away thing. A good-bye, something-to-remember-me-by thing. People did that, right?
    But I had a stronger, whispered thought. One of those whispers that are less curtains fluttering in a breeze than lawn chairs being tossed across patios in a windstorm. I knew that Brie did not know my father had this. That Brie might never know my father had this.
    I knew because I remembered another object in the room. A bust of a woman’s head that I had always found slightly eerie, made out of some kind of clay, with initials scratchedinto the base. A.R. I knew those initials. A.R., Abigail Renfrew.
    Two things that belonged to women in his life. Was this a crazy thought? Was I nuts? That I thought there were maybe more things in this room that belonged to other people? Other women?
    I did something else then, and I don’t even fully know why I did it. It was a hunch, if a hunch is ever just that. I lifted up other objects and looked underneath. A globe, no, nothing. A paperweight, just a paperweight. A book end shaped like an elephant. Nothing. I looked with growing unease. And then, there it was. Just like that. A name scratched in the bottom of a tall, brightly colored vase. Jane, age six, it said. And there, too, under the red tribal mask, the name Olivia Thornton . Written with blue ink on a piece of masking tape in handwriting I didn’t recognize. Under a mantel clock, its hands stopped at 3:30, one word, Elizabeth . I pulled the footstool to the mantel and lifted down the painting there. I got this when I met the artist in New York…. It was large and heavy, and I struggled with it. But there, tucked into the corner of the frame was a business card. Joelle Giofranco, it read. Costume design and alterations.
    Inside, I felt as if something were falling and about to crash: He had taken something from every woman he’d been involved with. Isn’t that what he had done? It was too eerie and disturbing not to have an explanation, right? What was the truth here? I suddenly wanted that, no needed that, more than anything else. I felt my breath in my chest and my heart beat as if a thing had crashed and landed just there beside me.And, too, right then as my sister and father lay sleeping and I stood on a footstool with a painting in my hands, there was a softer, quieter realization: that the truth I wanted so badly was likely as hard and faceted as one of the diamonds Dad told us about—perfectly imperfect, formed somewhere deep within and existing there, until it was brought to the surface by volcanic eruptions and simple need.

Chapter Three
    “Jesus, you scared me.” Grandma minimized the computer screen in a flash, whirled her fluffy-white-haired head around. She looked guilty. She put one veiny hand against her pink sweatshirt. “You almost gave me a heart attack. Don’t you know better than to do that to an old lady?”
    Gram sat at a desk in our office/spare room, one of those spaces that collected everything that had nowhere else to go—Mom’s sewing machine, Aunt Annie’s weights, this huge “Leprechaun trap” glued to green Elmer’s-and-glitter cardboard that Sprout had made in the first grade for St. Patrick’s Day. I put my hands on Gram’s shoulders, kissed the top of her head. “I just needed to work on a paper. Film studies…‘ Phantom of the Opera as an example of Classic Horror Cinema.’”
    “eBay,” Gram said, tilting her head to the computer, which now held only the blue desktop with white clouds. “Don’t tell your mom. Salt and pepper shakers shaped like chefs. Adorable.” She looked at her wrist, but she wasn’t wearing a watch. “Ten more minutes until the bidding’s over. Can you come back?”
    “Sure,” I said. She waited with her hands in her lap. Stared at me