Damaged by Pamela Callow Read Free Book Online Page A

this man she loved so desperately. Ethan saw life in black-and-white. The only thing she saw in black-and-white was death. Everything else was shades in between.
    In the gray of the early morning, the massive anchor of the sailors’ memorial loomed a shade darker than the colorless water. Alaska skirted around it, then bounded across the wide stretch of grass toward the old stone fort. The fort had been one of the first lines of defense for Halifax during the two World Wars. It was crumbling now, overgrownwith hillocks. Yet it retained a sober dignity, a memorial to long-ago trauma.
    The fort was disintegrating. Just like the barriers she’d spent her adult life molding around her heart. They were suddenly becoming thin, porous, easily breached. It wasn’t just Ethan. Although he’d given it a good hammering on Friday. The breach had started before that. When she realized she could never outrun her past. When she looked at the calendar and saw that the date was finally arriving.
    The fifteenth anniversary of her sister’s death. It gave her life a special symmetry. She had had fifteen years of being loved by her sister, and then had spent fifteen years living with the knowledge that she had killed the one who had loved her most.
    A wind brushed her cheeks, damp and chill, pulling her out of her reverie. She glanced toward the horizon. Sure enough, a fog bank crept under the rising sun. Its edges smudged the dark band of fir trees on MacNab’s Island. Within an hour it would billow over the water, blanketing the navigational buoys, concealing the treacherous Hen and Chickens Shoal off the end of the park that still caught yachts in its teeth. Then the low groan of the foghorns would fill the air. She usually liked the sound of them: deep, unearthly. So different from the shrill noises of modern technology.
    But she was glad they weren’t sounding today. She didn’t need the mournful warning that the fog of her childhood was about to descend on her. That the ghost of her sister was running right on her heels.
    She couldn’t shake her. Nor could she shake the feeling that she was letting down another fifteen-year-old girl. One whom she hadn’t met, but who appeared to be going down a road that Kate had glimpsed before. On the night of Imogen’s death. When she found her fifteen-year-oldsister in the back porch of a house party, with a mirror, a razor blade and a mound of white powder. She’d tried taking Imogen away.
    And killed her instead.
    She reached the fork at the end of the trail. Both paths were grueling uphill runs. She chose the one on the left. Serpentine Hill stretched out in front of her. It was steep. It was punishing. It was just what she needed. Alaska slowed down, angling into the woods to check out the squirrels. She pounded up the winding hill mercilessly. Just when she thought she could breathe no longer, the path leveled off, letting her heart catch up to the relentless pace her legs had set.
    That was how she lived her life. Fast paced. Striving for success.
    Because if you were successful, you’d be respected. No one could hurt you. No one could take that success away from you.
    That had been her mantra for the past fifteen years. If she didn’t have that, she didn’t have anything.
    LMB was her ticket to the kind of career she wanted. Thanks to the TransTissue case, she could sense success just around the corner. The easiest—and most prudent—thing would be to concentrate on that case. She’d done the groundwork over the weekend. She had a strong analysis to present to John Lyons this morning. She should forget about Marian MacAdam. After all, her client’s last words to Kate were that she would find proof of Lisa’s drug use herself.
    But how could a seventy-year-old grandmother who lived a life of privilege know how to find proof of a teenager’s illicit drug use?
    She still didn’t have the answer to that question when she ran through the park gates, Alaska trotting by her