Until Now by Rebecca Phillips Read Free Book Online Page A

and every step.
     
    * * *
     
    When I emerged from my room several hours later, my stepfather was gone. Probably at his downtown apartment with one of his bimbos , I thought, grabbing a handful of ice cubes out of the freezer and wrapping them up in a cloth. My eyes were so sore and swollen, I could barely see.
    As I leaned against the granite counter top, ice pressed to my eyes, my mind strayed again to all those beer bottles in the fridge. More than anything right now, I wanted to be messed up. Wasted. Obliterated. Nothing was stopping me anymore, aside from the darts of guilt in my stomach whenever I thought about twisting off that first cap.
    And my best friend, of course. Taylor would kill me if I ever went back to my old ways. In the past three years, she’d acted as my sponsor of sorts, keeping me on track whenever I so much as hinted at backsliding. I would’ve called her now, but I knew she was at Moretti’s today, the Italian restaurant she’d worked at since high school. I could’ve called someone else, one of the few friends I’d made during my post-partying college days, but Taylor was the only one who knew every gritty detail about my past.
    I pictured myself downing all those beers and then hiding in my room like the dramatic teenager I used to be, blinds shut against the sunlight. I took the ice off my eyes and sighed. No. Blocking everything out would bring relief for a little while, but my denial wouldn’t help the twins. They were counting on me to figure out some way to fix this and bring them home. I needed to stay sharp. I needed to contact a lawyer.
    Maggie would be happy to help , Jane from gymnastics had told me about her lawyer daughter-in-law. Lovely, caring Jane, who’d invited an obviously troubled girl she’d just met to her house for Sunday dinner.
    My stomach grumbled, protesting its twenty or so hours without food. I was kind of starving.
    Rejuvenated, I dug the Target receipt out of my purse and called the phone number scribbled on the back. Jane answered on the second ring, like she was just waiting by her phone for me to call. “Of course,” she said when I asked if her offer to join them for dinner was still open. “Four o’clock. We’ll look forward to seeing you.”
    Four o’clock was only an hour away, so I hurriedly made myself presentable—shower, flat-iron, makeup, skirt, blouse, heels. I wasn’t sure how one dressed for Sunday dinner, as I’d only been to a few. Traditional, sit-down meals had never been one of Mom’s priorities.
    My phone’s GPS directed me to a cozy-looking brick house in an older, well-established neighborhood in the city’s south end. The driveway was full, so I parked my Sentra along the curb and climbed out, straightening my white eyelet pencil skirt. I possessed enough manners to know you should always bring something when invited to dinner, so at the last minute I’d grabbed an unopened bottle of wine from the wine rack at home. An expensive one. Clutching the bottle’s neck in my fist, I walked up to the house and rang the bell.
    “Robin!” Jane’s friendly face greeted me, and I was relieved to see that she was dressed semi-formally herself in black pants and a lavender top. Her hair was different too, swept back from her forehead, but her eye-crinkling smile was the same. “So glad you could make it.”
    “Thanks, Mrs...um.” Now that I was on her turf, I wasn’t sure how the etiquette worked.
    “It’s Monahan, but you can still call me Jane. Come on in, Ms…um,” she added, making me smile.
    “Calvert, but you can still call me Robin.” I handed over the wine as I stepped into the warm, fragrant house. It smelled like a mix of brown sugar and onions. My stomach gurgled again.
    Jane made impressed noises over the wine and then brought it—and me—through the house and into the kitchen, which was sauna-hot and teeming with people. They all stopped talking to look at me, and I wondered briefly if my eyes still resembled