Mommy Tracked by Whitney Gaskell Read Free Book Online Page B

only time when she wasn’t worrying. Worry had become Juliet’s default state. She worried about everything —about the twins, about work, about money. How they were going to swing all of the extras that were constantly cropping up—new tires for Patrick’s minivan, the roof repair they’d been putting off for months, the girls’ dance lessons—on top of the fixed monthly costs. The mortgage. School tuition. Her law-school loans.
    She’d turn the rest of the day over to her worries. But not now. Now she just focused on her lungs expanding with the humid salt air, the way her leg muscles strained up the incline of the bridge, and the rhythmic pound of her heartbeat. Juliet ran two and a half miles, which took her just over the bridge, and then turned around and ran back home.
    A little less than an hour after she left, she walked in the back door of her house, sweating but not winded. She tossed the morning paper on the kitchen counter, poured herself a cup of coffee, and took it into the office, where she settled down behind her desk and switched the computer screen on.
    This was her routine, every day, even when it rained. She knew her friends—Grace, in particular—thought she was crazy to get up so early just to work out, but it kept Juliet sane, made her feel like she actually had a grip on her life.
    And her friends would never know just how important that grip was to her.
    Juliet opened up her e-mail and sipped the bitter coffee as the messages downloaded from her office account. There wasn’t much in her in-box; she’d checked it last night before going to bed. Mostly spam, and a note from a client asking for clarification on the documents Juliet needed from him to comply with a document request the plaintiffs in his case had made. At this, Juliet sighed. She’d already told the client, Peter Hamilton, what she needed—in explicit detail—three times. Hamilton was a nervous man, so distracted by the sexual-harassment lawsuit that had been filed against him that he needed constant hand-holding. He was her least favorite sort of client.
    Juliet knew she wasn’t any good at being emotionally supportive. She lacked whatever gene it was that made people want to reach out to one another, to share feelings, to listen empathetically. It was why she’d gone into the law; no one expected an attorney to be warm and cuddly. Although sometimes she thought that maybe she’d have been better off if she’d become a doctor instead—a surgeon, maybe, where the patients would be unconscious when she saw them.
    And then, with an electronic chime to announce its arrival, another e-mail popped up in her in-box. One that made Juliet sit up a little straighter, that made her pulse buzz and her heart give an excited lurch. It was from her boss, Alex Frost. Juliet clicked on it.

TO: COLE, JULIET [email protected]
FROM: FROST, ALEX [email protected]
RE: lunch

Juliet—Are you free for lunch today? We need to go over the status of the D.B. case. I’ll have Gail make a reservation for us at the Treehouse.
Alex

    Lunch with Alex! And not just a sandwich in the conference room but an actual lunch out at one of the nicest restaurants in town.
    Will it be just the two of us? she wondered, enjoying the way the thrill fluttered through her. It must be. No one else has worked on the dead-baby case. Well, no one other than Richard, but he’s only done a few motions here and there.
    Juliet’s next thought was an uncharacteristically feminine one: Oh, my God—what am I going to wear?
    She got up abruptly and, carrying her coffee with her, headed up to the master bedroom. The bed was rumpled and unmade but empty. There was the sound of a toilet flushing in the attached bathroom, and then Patrick appeared in the bedroom doorway, wearing a white V-neck T-shirt and striped pajama pants and looking sleepy. His black curly hair was standing up in peaks, and there was a red sheet mark on his left cheek.
    “Is that coffee for