Mommy Tracked by Whitney Gaskell Read Free Book Online Page A

her attention to nursing the baby. By the time Louis got home from work, Grace hadn’t had time to do much more than pull a brush through her hair and swipe a lipstick on before she had to run out the door. The previous president of MCT, Tara McFadden—a thin, elegant woman whose straight ash-blonde hair was always frizz-free—had always looked so polished at the monthly meetings.
    Pretty much the opposite of me , Grace thought unhappily. When had she become so frumpy? It seemed like just yesterday that she was paging through fashion magazines, trying to imitate the styles she found there. Nowadays, she lived in sweats and sneakers.
    She looked gloomily down at the now-rumpled linen pantsuit, which she’d already decided to burn, and saw a streak of powdered sugar smeared across the top. Gah. Had that been there earlier? Had she stood up in front of everyone covered in sugar?
    Grace turned and popped the lid off the storage container and took out a brownie. Three bites later the brownie was gone, and she took out another one. And when that one was gone, she ate another. Twenty minutes later she looked down and saw that the storage container was empty. She blinked. Had she just eaten…How many brownies had been in there, anyway?
    Revulsion surged up inside her, hot and fierce. The brownies felt heavy in her stomach, and suddenly Grace felt like she was going to be sick.
    Thank God , she thought.
    She ran to the bathroom. After taking care to turn on the water, so Louis wouldn’t hear, she knelt down in front of the toilet and waited. But nothing happened. Grace panicked. She couldn’t allow her body to digest five thousand calories of sugar, butter, and chocolate. Finally, she did something she hadn’t done since she was in high school—she stuck three fingers down her throat until she began to gag, until her stomach cooperated and began to heave. She did it again, and again, and again, until there was nothing left to purge.

three
    Juliet
    J uliet was already awake when her alarm went off at five a.m., and she hit the buzzer before it woke Patrick. She always woke up a minute before the alarm went off and didn’t know why she even bothered to turn it on every night. Habit, probably. Habit, and the fear that the one time she didn’t set it would be the one morning she’d oversleep. And that would be a disaster. Juliet barely had enough time in the day as it was.
    She slid out of bed, shucked off the oversize Tulane Law T-shirt she’d slept in, and pulled on her running clothes. Ten minutes later she was pounding down Ocean Street, the main avenue that ran from downtown Orange Cove to the public beaches on Pelican Island. Duran Duran played on her iPod, and Juliet matched her pace to the music.
    It was still dark out, although the sky had the ethereal glow it got just before sunrise, changing so slowly from inky black to sorbet shades of pink and orange that it always took her by surprise when the morning suddenly dawned. She ran past the Dunkin’ Donuts, which was already lit up inside, and the oil-change place, which wasn’t. She sprinted by an assisted-living center for seniors, with its clusters of mod, seventies-built condos, and then past the fences of the few houses that backed against Ocean Street. And then she was running up the bridge that arched over the intracoastal river, connecting Orange Cove to the island. The wind was stronger at the top arch of the bridge and tasted sharply of salt. Juliet tucked her head down as she ran into it.
    This was her favorite time of day, the one hour when there were no demands on her other than the physical ones she placed on herself. She didn’t have to think, or be anything for anyone. No one was asking her for the status of a case, or pushing her to stay late at the office, or putting her on a guilt trip for staying late at the office, or begging her to turn on the television so they could watch Kim Possible over their morning bowl of cornflakes.
    And it was the