Third Degree Read Online Free PDF Page B

and leave nothing behind. To be ignored by Danny was not to exist, and she could never convince herself that he was suffering the same way. But looking at him now, she knew that he was. “How could you come here?” she asked softly.
    He turned up his palms. “I wasn’t strong enough to stay away.”
    Honesty had always been his policy, and it was a devastating one.
    “Can I hold you?” he asked.
    “No.”
    “Because there are people around? Or because you don’t want me to?”
    She regarded him silently.
    “I’m sorry for how it’s been,” he said haltingly. “It’s just…impossible.” His eyes narrowed. “You look really thin. Good, though.”
    She shook her head. “Don’t do this. I’m not good. I’m thin because I can’t hold down any food. I have to pretend to eat. I’m barely making it, if you want to know. So let’s just stick to Michael and get this over with. There’ll be another parent outside my door in fifteen minutes.”
    Danny was clearly struggling with self-restraint. “We really do need to talk about Michael. He knows something’s wrong. He senses that I’m upset.”
    Laurel tried to look skeptical.
    “Do you think he could?” Danny asked.
    “It’s possible.”
    “All I’m saying is, when I’m not okay, he’s not okay. And I think you come into it, as well.”
    “You mean—”
    “I mean when you’re hurting, he knows it. And he cares. A lot more than he does about his mother.”
    Laurel wanted to deny this, but she’d already observed it herself. “I don’t want you to talk like that anymore. There’s no point.”
    Danny looked at the wall to his right, where clumsy finger paintings of animals hung from a long board he had attached to the wall last year. While he drilled the holes, he’d confided to her what he thought the first time he saw the pictures: that the kids who’d drawn them were never going to design computers, perform surgery, or fly airplanes. It was a shattering realization for him, but he had dealt with it and moved on. And though Laurel’s students were unlikely ever to fly a helicopter, every one of them had ridden in one. With their parents’ joyful permission, Danny had taken each and every child on spectacular flights over the Mississippi River. He’d even held a contest for them, and the winner got to fly with him on balloon-race weekend, when dozens of hot-air balloons filled the skies over Natchez, thirty-five miles to the north. This memory softened Laurel a little, and she let her guard down slightly.
    “You’ve lost weight, too,” she said. “Too much.”
    He nodded. “Sixteen pounds.”
    “In five weeks?”
    “I can’t hold nothing down.”
    Improper grammar usually annoyed Laurel—she had worked hard to shed the Southern accent of her birthplace—but Danny’s slow-talking baritone somehow didn’t convey stupidity. Danny had that lazy but cool-as-a-cucumber voice of competence, like Sam Shepard playing Chuck Yeager in
The Right Stuff.
It was the pilot’s voice, the one that told you everything was under control, and made you believe it, too. And when that voice warmed up—in private—it could do things to her that no other voice ever had. She started to ask if Danny had seen a doctor about losing so much weight, but that was crazy. Danny’s doctor was her husband. Besides, it didn’t take a doctor to diagnose heartbreak.
    “I wish you’d let me hug you,” Danny said. “Don’t you need it?”
    She closed her eyes.
You have no idea
…“Please stick to Michael, okay? What specific changes have you noticed in his behavior?”
    While Danny answered, slowly and in great detail, Laurel doodled on the Post-it pad on her table. Danny couldn’t see the pad from where he sat; it was blocked by a stack of books. After covering the first yellow square with spirals, she tore it off and started on the next one. This time she didn’t draw anything. This time she wrote one word in boldface print:
PREGNANT.
Then, without