Yesterday's Gone (Two Daughters Book 1) by Janice Kay Johnson Read Free Book Online

in.
    She’d always known the truth. They hadn’t taken her because they’d fallen in love with her, but rather as penance. They felt guilty because they had failed their perfect daughter. For their own spiritual salvation, they needed to save another child.
    Which still didn’t mean she hadn’t been lucky to be that child.
    She remembered her first visit to this house, when Kirk had opened a door partway down the hall and said, “This will be your bedroom.”
    Now she knew it had been a guest bedroom before she had arrived. Then, given the way she’d lived before she got taken into the foster system, she’d been thrilled because she’d have a queen-size bed all to herself and her own dresser and closet and everything.
    Karen had stepped into the room behind Eve and looked around. “We’ll paint and decorate once you’ve decided how you’d like it to look,” she said. “What is your favorite color?”
    “Pink,” she had whispered, and then seen the expression on the face of a woman who was thinking about becoming her mother. “And yellow,” she said hurriedly. Yellow, she saw, was safe.
    She had lived with them for a week before she worked up the courage to open the door to the other bedroom that nobody went in or out of.
I want
this
bedroom
, she’d thought, indignation swelling in her, but she never said a word, because she knew. It was
her
bedroom. The lost daughter the social worker had told her about. The Lawsons had insisted that of course they would keep Eve even if Hope was restored to them, but then, she wasn’t sure she believed that. She’d stared at the pink bedroom with furniture painted white and edged with gilt, and at shelves filled with dolls dressed in beautiful clothes, and most of all at the bed with tall posts and gilt-painted finials and a white lace canopy, and she had envied until she ached.
    She had mostly been ashamed of that envy, because the pretty blonde girl in all the pictures was probably dead even though her parents kept her bedroom for her and told everyone that they knew she was alive and would come home someday. But the envy had crept into her heart and stayed no matter what she did to root it out, and today it had made her say, “The
real
daughter returns.”
    Of course Mom and Dad were ecstatic. They’d been given a miracle. Eve loved them. She had dreamed of seeing them truly happy, and now they were.
    Just not because of any accomplishment of hers, any gift she gave them. She’d always believed, in the back of her mind, that she was engaged in a competition. She’d just never let herself see that it was one she
couldn’t
win. Her bringing home a gold medal in athletics, being accepted to Harvard Law School or crowned Miss America, none of those achievements would ever have erased the grief that cast its shadow over both of them. Only the return of their precious Hope could do that.
    And I
am
happy
, Eve told herself. Just...envious, too.
    She smiled at her mother. “Hope’s coming to breakfast?”
    Karen Lawson’s face was both softer and younger than Eve had ever seen it. “Yes. But remember she asked us to call her Bailey. Oh!” She hugged herself. “I can’t believe it.”
    Eve offered to come over and make breakfast, but no, Mom wanted to make it with her own hands, because she’d been cheated of the chance of feeding her daughter so many other breakfasts.
    “Waffles,” she decided. “Or crepes. I have all those lovely raspberries. Oh, my. I should have asked her what she likes.” Her expression cleared. “But of course she loved raspberries. Do you remember, Kirk? That time we took her with us to pick berries, and lost sight of her for a minute?” That clouded her face momentarily, but the smile broke through again. “And when we found her she was stuffing herself with berries, and her hands and face were stained with the juice?”
    He chuckled. “She tried to claim she hadn’t been eating them and was astonished we didn’t believe