The Vineyard Read Online Free PDF Page A

the last year. Granted, it might have happened with any teacher. Tess was at that age. Much more of the same, though, and she wouldn’t only need a tutor—she would also need a therapist.
    What to do? Olivia had the name of a tutor who would work with Tess through the summer, but tutors cost money, and the electronic transfer of funds that had continued for several months after Jared’s death had ceased abruptly with his parents’ verdict that Tess wasn’t Jared’s child.
    That Tess wasn’t Jared’s.
The charge still stung.
    â€œBut she
is,”
Olivia told the lawyer who had sent the letter informing her of the family decision.
    â€œCan you prove it?”
    Of course, she could. Tess was there in the flesh!
    But Olivia had watched
The Practice
. She knew how lawyers thought. Lawyers wanted DNA tests.
    â€œMy client was cremated,” this one said. “His ashes were scattered over the Great Smokies. Unless DNA tests were done before, you’ll have a hard time proving it. His family won’t hand anything over for testing. You’ll have to take them to court.”
    Olivia vowed to do just that—for all of two minutes. Then she came to her senses. She couldn’t put Tess through a paternity battle. Besides, it took money to win money.
    So the Stark connection was severed. It was another sad twist to an already sad saga, because it wasn’t about money at all. It was about love. Olivia had loved Jared. He was a brilliant man, a scientist who was forever writing up treatises on seemingly obscure things, like the correlation between eating carrot greens and the ability to identify birdcalls at night. He claimed that what he did was crucial to mankind, and Olivia remained a believer even when he lost interest in her. She hadn’t planned on getting pregnant. When it happened, she saw it as God’s way of telling Jared to stay put. He didn’t. The man was long gone by the time Tess was born, but payingchild support for nine-plus years had been his own free choice. He had taken it on without complaint.
    Olivia had hoped that his family would give that fact some weight. She had hoped that they would want even some small part of the son they had lost. Apparently they did not.
    So here was Tess, badly in need of help. Olivia would take out a loan to pay for more tutoring if she felt the child would go for it, but that wasn’t what Tess wanted. She wanted tennis camp, had her heart set on tennis camp,
had
to go to tennis camp because two of the popular girls in her class were going, and she saw it as her one chance to excel. She had never played tennis before, but she was a good little athlete, and if she really tried, then anything was possible.
    Not that Olivia had the money for tennis camp. Not that she would have the money for
food,
if she didn’t find another job. She had sent résumés to dozens of museums in the hope that one would want an in-house restorer. To date, she had received six rejections. She supposed she could always go back to selling cameras, but she had hated doing that. She loved taking pictures and did it almost on instinct. Teaching others how to do it was something else. Olivia had neither the patience nor the vision. Her mind worked differently from most people’s. Tess hadn’t come upon dyslexia by chance.
    What to do?
    She had an idea. Tipping up her daughter’s head, looking into that beautiful little freckled face framed by long brown curls—a legacy of the father who hadn’t wanted to know her—Olivia fell in love for the gazillionth time. “Want Chinese for dinner?”
    Tess’s eyes lit up. “General Gao’s?”
    Olivia nodded. “But only after homework.”
    â€œI’m starving
now.”
    Olivia opened the refrigerator and poured a big glass of milk. “This’ll tide you over. The sooner you start on your homework, the sooner we can go.”
    Tess took the