To Have and to Hold Read Online Free PDF Page A

narrowed and nose wrinkled with suspicion. “Can’t you just tell me whatever it is?”
    Over the last year, Trina had run this household as if the girls
were
sisters. If she had something to address, she’d address it with both of them. Sure, there had been moments that she’d taken one or the other aside for a pep talk, a heart-to-heart, or a little boundary-setting, but pretty much, she’d been able to say whatever she had to say to both girls. So it was no wonder her daughter was suspicious now about being culled from the pack for a special talking-to.
    Still, there was nothing to be done about it. “Sorry, Phoebs, but I need to talk to you alone.”
    Phoebe slid from the top bunk and followed her mother into the hallway, her shoulders hunched.
    “I need you to pack your stuff up. We’re going to leave soon. Tomorrow or the next day.”
    “What?!” Phoebe’s eyes found Trina’s, big with shock, and the preteen outrage echoed off the walls of the hallway.
    “I’m sorry it’s so quick.”
    “You said—you said we’d be able to stay awhile even after Hunter came back!”
    Trina and her daughter shared the same fine, straight blond hair, the same heart-shaped face. But Phoebe’s expression, stubbornness morphing into iron will, had come straight from her father.
    She braced herself, because if Phoebe sensed room for negotiation—
    “I know. But things are—complicated. Clara and her dad need to get back to their normal lives.”
    As soon as the words came out of her mouth, she knew they were a bad choice. The sullenness deepened on Phoebe’s face. “We
are their normal lives.
You and I are Clara’s normal life. More than Hunter is. We can’t just leave her.”
    We can’t just leave her
.
    The pain doubled and redoubled. Trina had been so stricken with grief over Hunter that she’d been blind these last few minutes to the rest of what she’d lost. Not just Hunter, but Clara, too. Who’d become a sister to Phoebe.
    A daughter to her.
    She put a hand to her chest, as if she could soothe or contain the pain, but it was too great.
    She got angry again, not at him, but at herself, for how foolish she’d been. To think Hunter and Clara had been hers to keep. When she should have learned…
    Phoebe made a small sound, tugging Trina’s attention back. Her lower lip was trembling, and Trina, who remembered how that lip had always done exactly that before baby Phoebe burst into tears, knew that her daughter’s anger was just a shell. Phoebe was as heartbroken as Trina at the thought of leaving.
    And sure enough, one tear ran down Phoebe’s face, and Trina thought for the ten thousandth time in the last year that a girl of twelve was stuck precisely halfway between woman and child. “I don’t want to go.” Phoebe’s voice was as trembly as her chin. “I don’t want to go back there.”
    She was talking about the apartment.
    “It’s so small. And dingy. It always feels dirty.”
    Trina understood what Phoebe meant. They’d always kept it clean and neat and scrubbed, but you couldn’t make thirty-year-old Formica look as glossy and beautiful as the faux granite stuff in Hunter’s kitchen. You couldn’t do much about floors that desperately needed to be resanded and refinished. And if the landlord stubbornly refused to let you repaint and kept delaying the work himself, the walls would eventually show fingerprints and the grime of years. It had always felt dirty, and when Trina had moved into Hunter’s house she’d felt the weight of that burden—which she hadn’t quite known she carried—lift off her shoulders. She’d even warned herself not to get too used to it, in case—well, women born since the last quarter of the twentieth century knew not to stake too much happiness on things they couldn’t afford to pay for themselves.
    But what she hadn’t counted on was how it would feel to have Phoebe tell her that what she’d given her all those years hadn’t been enough.
    “There’s