Second Glance by Jodi Picoult Read Free Book Online Page B

baby would not be hemophiliac herself . . . in all likelihood she’d be a perfectly healthy girl with her mother’s shining hair and her father’s chestnut eyes. But she had the potential to pass the illness to her own male children one day, and given that, her parents would rather she never be born.
    Meredith signed off on the release and set it to one side of her desk. “The Albertsons are here,” said the secretary.
    “Give me a minute.”
    As soon as the door closed, Meredith picked up the phone and dialed home. She imagined her daughter sitting at the kitchen table, two braids curling down her back like replicas of the human genome, as she practiced her U s and V s for handwriting homework. Ula unrolled uneven umbrellas . Lucy lifted the receiver. “Hello?”
    “Hey, Noodle.”
    “Mom! Where are you?”
    “On Jupiter. Where are you?”
    “In the Calamari Desert.”
    Meredith smiled. “That might be Kalahari.”
    “When are you coming home?”
    “Soon.”
    There was a beat of silence. “Before it gets dark?”
    Meredith closed her eyes. “I’ll be back for dinner,” she promised. “Tell Granny Ruby. And no more Oreos until I get home.”
    Lucy sucked in a breath. “How did you know I was—”
    “Because I’m the mom. Love you.” Meredith hung up, then twisted her hair onto the top of her head. She scrabbled through her drawer for a rubber band, but could only come up with a few paper clips, which worked about as well as bobby pins. Her glance fell on the release the De la Corrias had signed. On impulse, Meredith slipped the form into the lower drawer of her desk. She would lose it, temporarily. Just in case.
    She pushed the button of her intercom and a moment later the door swung open, revealing the Albertsons. They looked beaten and drained, like most of the other couples who came through her office for the first time. Meredith held out her hand. “I’m Dr. Oliver. I’ve reviewed your case. And,” she said briskly, “I can help.”
    Az knew that if push came to shove, he wouldn’t be able to chase a squirrel out of Angel Quarry, much less give full pursuit to an armed intruder. The owners kept him on as a security guard out of kindness, or pity, or maybe because he only bothered to pick up half his paychecks, not having much use for them in the long run. Luckily, there was only one access road into the quarry, not that Az paid much attention to it. He sat in the small illuminated booth at the quarry office, where three closed-circuit televisions monitored activity at different locations, and kept his eye instead on the fourth monitor, tuned to the Red Sox.
    “Ha,” Az snorted at the batter. “They pay you eleven million bucks a year for that ?”
    The quarry was one of Vermont’s granite mines, veins of rock etched into the cliffs like the deep lines of Az’s face. A long time ago, they’d drilled the charges by hand, blasted, and milled the stone for export. These days, it was mostly computerized. Working alone at night, he never saw another soul . . . for all he knew, it was like that at peak hours too. Az sometimes wondered if he was the only human employed there.
    In the thirty years he’d been working at the quarry, he had filed only two security reports. One involved an electrical storm that set off an explosion intended to detonate the following day. The second was about a suicidal man, who scaled the protective wall and tried to jump off one of the cliffs into the jagged rubble at the base. The fool broke both legs, recovered, and started a dot-com business.
    Az liked working at night, and he liked working alone. If he was quiet when he made his rounds, he could hear buds burst; he could smell the turn of the seasons. On occasion he would lie on his back, his hands propping up his head, and watch the stars reconfigure themselves into the constellations of his life—an angry bull of frustration, the imbalanced scales of justice, the twin loves he’d lost ages ago.
    He wondered