The You I Never Knew by Susan Wiggs Read Free Book Online

to put things into compartments. Here, in this box—worries about Cody. She spent a lot of time sifting through them, never getting to the bottom, because every day he came up with a new challenge, from asking to get his eyebrow pierced to wanting permission to go to an overnight rock concert.
    In another box—work. The agency liked her because she did good work and kept her clients happy. This spring, she would make partner and would earn more money than she ever dreamed of. The other partners lived in fear that she would leave them for a bigger, more lucrative firm, taking her clients with her. But why go elsewhere? To draw bigger, more lucrative ads for fertilizer and tampons?
    Another box—Brad. After three years together, they hovered in the same spot where they had begun. They’d bought side-by-side units in a tony Seattle town-house complex, their outdoor decks divided by a wall of cedar planks. They were socially compatible. Sexually compatible. Financially compatible. Rough when it came to Cody, because he and Brad didn’t get along.
    Now she had a couple of other boxes under construction. Her father, whose life depended on her giving him one of her kidneys, took up a lot of space in her thoughts. For most of her life, he had ignored her, and only when his survival hung in the balance did he acknowledge her existence. A psychiatrist would have a field day with the two of them, she reflected wryly. Sharing their flesh, an organ, the mysterious life force—so damned symbolic. And—she kept telling herself not to think this but she couldn’t help it—it was
icky.
There, thought Michelle. I’m a terrible person. Acting like Mother Teresa on the outside, while the coward inside trembled in horror at the ordeal to come.
    And now Sam. Good God, Sam McPhee.
    “I don’t need a drink,” she muttered under her breath, regarding the array of bottles. “I need a twelve-step program.”
    “Try the Booker’s. Used to be my favorite.”
    She whirled around, startled. “Daddy. I didn’t hear you come down.”
    He winked, looking spruce in a thick terry-cloth robe and leather slippers. “Light on my feet.”
    Obediently, she poured a splash of Booker’s over some crushed ice. The first sip brought tears to her eyes. “That’s lighter fluid, Dad.”
    “Good, huh?”
    She coughed a little, feeling the rich amber liquid burn her throat. “You want something?”
    He held up a tumbler. “My trusty cranberry juice. I’ve been on restriction for a long time.”
    A long time
. When had he first fallen sick? How long had he suffered with no one to talk to about what was happening to him? Michelle didn’t know him well enough to ask.
    They sat together in the sunken living room. Rustic millionaire, she mentally classified it. Muted evergreen-and-burgundy plaid, peeled lodgepole pine, a massive fieldstone fireplace. She stared intently at the flames lapping at a big log and sipped her single-barrel bourbon.
    “So here I am,” she said, hopelessly inane.
    “Here you are. My angel of mercy.”
    She blinked fast, taken aback by the bitterness in his voice. “You’re mad at me?”
    “Hell no, honey, I’m mad at the world. Have been ever since the frigging diagnosis. I failed the medical standard for renewing my pilot’s license.”
    “Daddy, I’m sorry.” Everyone knew how much flying meant to him. A week seldom went by that he didn’t take off, even for a little while, in his beloved airplane. He had brought her to Blue Rock for the first time in his vintage P-51 Mustang, modified to accommodate two seats, and she used to love flying with him.
    “Do you still have your plane?”
    “Yep. I keep the Mustang out at the Meridian County Air Park. And a biplane for stunts.” He held up his glass. “Can’t even have a drink with my long-lost daughter. The kidney specialist has some diet Nazi monitoring me almost twenty-four hours a day.”
    “Does it help?”
    “Yeah, kept me off dialysis longer than it should