Another Piece of My Heart by Jane Green Read Free Book Online

hangs his head. “I’m not saying Emily can’t be manipulative. And she was wrong. And she said terrible things to you. I’ve spoken to her mother, and she’s taking the girls this weekend.”
    “Really?” Andi feels a weight lift. “But it’s our weekend to have them, and we have Isabel’s wedding.”
    “I know. I already texted Isabel to say the kids wouldn’t be coming. I told Emily I didn’t want her around until she can conduct herself better. I told her it’s fine to feel the way she feels, but it isn’t fine to express it in the way she does. Not to mention the consequence of her breaking curfew. That’s why she’s going, very much against her will, to be at her mother’s this weekend.”
    “How did she take it?”
    His eyes flicker away. “You don’t want to know.”
    “But you didn’t cave?”
    “I’m not as weak as you think I am.”
    “Thank you,” Andi says, reaching up on tiptoes as she snakes her arms around his neck. “I love you so much.”
    Ethan gives her a half smile. “Does that mean I can tempt you upstairs for a spot of afternoon delight?”
    Andi checks her watch. “We’ve got twenty-five minutes until Sophia gets back from camp. Think you can delight me enough in twenty-five minutes?”
    A throaty laugh emerges as Ethan hauls her over his shoulder and runs upstairs, throwing her on the bed as her laughs turn quickly to slow, satisfied sighs.

Six
    When Sophia comes home from tennis camp, Andi avoids Emily by putting Sophia in the car and taking her to the showroom. Sophia has a natural eye for design and loves nothing more than putting together sample boards in Andi’s office.
    Technically, Andi still calls herself a home-stager although most of the clients who go on to sell their homes thanks to Andi’s staging then ask her to help them decorate their new houses.
    The business has grown to the point where she now has a large warehouse—four times the size of the one she had when she ran her business on the East Coast—filled with furniture and accessories and furnishings that are rented out to turn houses into homes, with one corner devoted to bolts of fabrics and books of wallpaper for the interior decorating clients.
    Andi answers e-mails, returns calls, and rings her suppliers while Sophia curls up on the sofa and leafs through old interior design magazines, tearing out pictures of rooms she loves, gravitating, naturally, toward children’s bedrooms.
    “I love this!” Sophia will gasp, holding something out for Andi to look at. When Andi goes over to the marble counter on which stands a kettle and a glass apothecary jar filled with tea bags, to make some tea, Sophia comes to stand next to her, wrapping an arm around Andi’s waist.
    “Promise me you’ll let me work with you when I’m old enough,” she says, leaning her head on Andi’s arm.
    “I promise. I already told you next summer, when you’re fourteen you can work as my assistant.” Andi smiles down at her and kisses the top of her head.
    “I just love it here.” Sophia sighs happily. “I’m so lucky I know what I want to do when I’m older.”
    “Interior decorator?”
    “Mmm-hmmm.”
    “How about Emily?” Andi ventures, for the only way they know anything about Emily these days is by subtly asking Sophia. “What do you think she wants to do?”
    Sophia shrugs. “All she’s interested in these days is her boyfriend.”
    Andi is surprised. “She has a boyfriend?”
    “Mmm-hmmm. Although I don’t, like, know who it is today.”
    “There’s no ‘like’ in that sentence. Who was it yesterday?”
    “No! It’s like, last…”
    “No ‘like’ in that sentence.”
    “Sorry. Last week it was G-man, but this week it’s li … sorry, it’s someone else. She changes all the time.”
    “She does? She really has a lot of boyfriends?”
    “Yeah.” And Sophia turns away. Bored now.
    *   *   *
    We are so unaware, Andi thinks. We think of them as children, long after they are