The Girl Who Chased the Moon by Sarah Addison Allen Read Free Book Online Page A

her?”
    “I’m not acting any way around her.” Julia frowned. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
    “I’m just surprised, that’s all. I mean, come on. You’re the least maternal person on the planet.” Stella laughed, but stopped when she saw the look on Julia’s face. Julia had gotten used to people saying that to her, but it didn’t make it any easier to hear. It was the price you paid when you were thirty-six and had no apparent interest in sharing your life with anyone. “Oh, I didn’t mean it in a bad way.” And Julia knew Stella didn’t. Neither did Julia’s friends in Baltimore when they said, You love your independence too much . Or You couldn’t be a mom because you’d be cooler than your teenager . “Let’s go out on the back porch and have wine.”
    “No, thanks.”
    “Julia …”
    “I know you have something sweet in here,” Sawyer called from the kitchen, followed by the banging of cabinet doors.
    Stella rolled her eyes. “That man can find my stash of Hershey’s Miniatures no matter where I hide them.”
    “Let him have them before he tries to raid my kitchen,” Julia said as she headed for the staircase. “I have work to do.”
    EMILY SAT on her balcony when she got home, the yearbook on her lap. Earlier that day, she’d gone through the closet and all the drawers in her bedroom, in search of … something. Some clue to her mother’s time here. She’d begun to feel strangely suspicious, like there was something she needed to know that no one was telling her. But there was only her mother’s name on the dusty trunk at the foot of the bed to give any indication that Dulcie had ever even lived there. There was nothing personal. There were no photos, no old letters, not even a scarf or an earring left behind. That’s why Emily had gone over to Julia’s. She’d felt awkward about it at first, but now she was glad she’d done it. The yearbook was such a treasure, if a little confusing. One of the tenets of Roxley School for Girls was that there was no caste system, no superlatives, no elections. How could her mother have been prom queen?
    Emily remembered her mother never let her go to the mall because of the open competition there to have something as good as or better than the next person. She always said that fashion should never be a factor in determining someone’s self-worth. So of course Roxley School had uniforms. Yet, here in the yearbook, her mother was in the trendiest clothes of the time, and she had mall hair .
    Maybe she’d been embarrassed by who she’d been as a youth. Maybe she thought her grassroots reputation might have been hurt by her tiara-laden past.
    Still, that seemed like such a peculiar reason never to come back.
    Emily looked up from the yearbook when she heard voices gliding through the still night, coming from the back porch next door. A woman’s laughter. A tinkling of glasses.
    Sitting at the old patio table she’d cleared of leaves, she smiled and leaned back. The stars looked twisted in the limbs of the trees, like Christmas lights. She felt like part of the hollow around her was filling. She’d come here with too many expectations. Things weren’t perfect, but they were getting better. She’d even made friends next door.
    She took a deep breath of the sweet evening heat, and began to get sleepy.
    She only meant to close her eyes for a moment. But she dozed off almost immediately.
    WHEN SHE woke up, it was still dark. She blinked a few times, trying to figure out what time it was and how long she’d been asleep.
    She looked down and saw the yearbook had fallen from her lap to the leaves on the balcony floor. Her back stiff, she leaned down to retrieve it. When she sat back up, her skin prickled.
    The light was back! The light Julia said people thought was a ghost.
    Frozen, she watched it in the woodline beyond the old gazebo in Grandpa Vance’s backyard. It didn’t disappear like it had last night. It lingered instead, darting