Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult Read Free Book Online Page A

a bum sitting outside the courthouse, and Alex rolled her eyes-she’d actually seen this particular fellow heading over to the closest bar yesterday when she left work.
    In the coffee shop, Alex watched Lacy effortlessly unpeel layers of clothing from her baby and lift him out of his seat onto her lap. As she talked, she draped a blanket over her shoulder and started to nurse Peter. “Is it hard?” Alex blurted out.
    “Nursing?”
    “Not just that,” Alex said. “Everything.”
    “It’s definitely an acquired skill.” Lacy lifted the baby onto her shoulder. His booted feet kicked against her chest, as if he was already trying to put distance between them. “Compared to your day job, motherhood is probably a piece of cake.”
    It made Alex think, immediately, of Logan Rourke, who had laughed at her when she said she was taking a job with the public defender’s office. You won’t last a week, he’d told her. You’re too soft for that.
    She sometimes wondered if she was a good public defender because of skill or because she had been so determined to show Logan that he was wrong. In any case, Alex had cultivated a persona on the job, one that was there to give offenders an equal voice in the legal system, without letting clients get under her skin.
    She’d already made that mistake with Logan.
    “Did you get a chance to contact any of the adoption agencies?” Lacy asked.
    Alex had not even taken the pamphlets she’d been given. For all she knew, they were still sitting on the counter of the examination room.
    “I put in a few calls,” Alex lied. She had it on her To Do list at work. It was just that something else always got in the way.
    “Can I ask you a personal question?” Lacy said, and Alex nodded slowly-she did not like personal questions. “What made you decide to give the baby up?”
    Had she ever really made that decision? Or had it been made for her?
    “This isn’t a good time,” Alex said.
    Lacy laughed. “I don’t know if it’s ever a good time to have a baby. Your life certainly gets turned upside down.”
    Alex stared at her. “I like my life right side up.”
    Lacy fussed with her baby’s shirt for a moment. “In a way, what you and I do isn’t really all that different.”
    “The recidivism rate is probably about the same,” Alex said.
    “No…I meant that we both see people when they’re at their most raw. That’s what I love about midwifery. You see how strong someone is, in the face of a really painful situation.” She glanced up at Alex. “Isn’t it amazing how, when you strip away everything, people are so much alike?”
    Alex thought of the defendants that had paraded through her professional life. They all blurred together in her mind. But was that because, as Lacy said, we were all similar? Or was it because Alex had become an expert at not looking too closely?
    She watched Lacy settle the baby on her knee. His hands smacked the table, and he made little gurgling noises. Suddenly Lacy stood up, thrusting the baby toward Alex so that she had to hold him or risk having him tumble onto the floor. “Here, hang on to Peter. I just have to run into the bathroom.”
    Alex panicked. Wait, she thought. I don’t know what I’m doing. The baby’s legs kicked, like a cartoon character who’d run off a cliff.
    Awkwardly, Alex sat him down on her lap. He was heavier than she would have imagined, and his skin felt like damp velvet. “Peter,” she said formally. “I’m Alex.”
    The baby reached for her coffee cup, and she lurched forward to push it out of reach. Peter’s face pinched tight as a lime, and he started to cry.
    The screams were shattering, decibel-rich, cataclysmic. “Stop,” Alex begged, as people around her started to stare. She stood up, patting Peter’s back the way Lacy had, wishing he would run out of steam or contract laryngitis or just simply have mercy on her utter inexperience. Alex-who always had the perfect witty comeback, who could be thrown