The Secrets She Keeps Read Online Free PDF

this is the beginning of the disaster Nash feared when her mother left the ranch in her care. Lilly Marcel’s own insistence seems a symptom of something larger, of a heedlessness that has led her here. Nash had gotten it wrong before— this is what distinguishes Lilly Marcel from the rest, because, of course, there is much more that people say about Stuart Marcel. It’s not just the airplanes and the women and the film studio and those beautiful clothes and the way people are drawn to him in spite of his almost hideous looks. There is the thing: the first wife who leaped (or was pushed? Did he push her? They say he pushed her.) to her death from some high, deserted Topanga Canyon road.
    Gloria would say Nash is being stupid, the way her nerves are rubbing and twitching like the legs of a mosquito. But Gloria would never have caught the way Lilly Marcel flinches right now when the door of the main house slams.
    “You!” Veronica calls, pointing at Lilly with her elegant finger. She strides toward them, wearing her new shirt with the pearl snaps, a bandanna tied around her neck. Ellen runs to catch up. “You may have swallowed a bowling ball, but you are still coming for cocktail hour.”
    Lilly has an uncertain smile when she meets Nash’s eyes. It’s the same look Nash’s friend, Louise, gave her when that boy took her hand at the Fireman’s Association dance, and she gives the same response in return—a smile and a shrug.

    “You must need a drink, your first night here,” Ellen says to Lilly. Ellen is as cheery as a daffodil in that yellow dress, and her heels require her to walk cautiously down the dirt path, arms out slightly like new, tentative leaves. Her blond hair is in a perfect curve. She’s smiling now, but she cried for her first three days, until Alice insisted she take a trip to Carson City with the girls one night. She danced with a cowboy! Veronica said with a wink afterward. There was a great deal of laughing and elbowing one another. If Bill had seen me, he would’ve died, Ellen said. He would’ve had me put away !
    “I was just going to read in my room,” Lilly says.
    “Nonsense,” Veronica says.
    Ellen takes in Veronica and those pearl snaps for the first time. She adjusts Veronica’s bandanna just so. “Very chic.”
    “You like? I couldn’t decide if it was hideous or the best thing ever, which is exactly how I felt about Gus on our honeymoon.”
    “I look like a frump,” Ellen says.
    “Never.” Veronica links her arm with Lilly’s. “We don’t allow hiding in one’s room. We are also coming to get Hadley, who tries to avoid us.”
    “I guess I’m doomed,” Lilly Marcel says.
    “We don’t bother with You-Know-Who in the Ritz .” Veronica tosses her head toward the cabin.
    “She came with a spare,” Ellen says. “So…”
    “A spare?” Lilly asks.
    “The new man. The next one in line,” Veronica says
    “Busy trading one prison for another, then?” Lilly says.

    Hadley comes out of her cabin door, her dress slim and shimmery. “We make our own prison, my dears.”
    “Oh, please,” Veronica groans. “I can’t stomach profound observations before a drink.”
    Nash still holds those blankets as the women change direction and head back toward the house. The quilts made the trip out of the cupboard for nothing. The unease she feels—it stops its ugly whispering as she follows the women inside. There is a yellow dress and shimmery fabric and Jack will be coming with some friends.
    “I’m through with you cynics,” Ellen says. She waves her hand, and the White Shoulders she dabbed at her wrists spins and flaunts.
    “Us cynics are all you have,” Hadley says.
    “Love is an act of courage,” Ellen says. This is not something she would have said when she first arrived, but Nash knows that even a single, uncharacteristic dance can set change in motion.
    Boo the dachshund sits straight by the piano, being his best self, and Ellen picks him up, looks in his