"Alice Hoffman - Turtle Moon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hoffman Alice)

delight when she saw the slide and the swings, but Bethany ignored the
tightness in her own throat and stepped down harder on the gas. If she
was lucky, the housekeeper wouldn't worry and phone the police when she
arrived to find the doors locked and no one at home. If she was
unlucky, as she had been for quite some time, her husband already knew
she was gone.

She probably should have pulled over that night, but she kept going at
a slow crawl, never more than thirty miles an hour, until she reached
Delaware.

She parked down the street from the Wilmington Greyhound station and
when Rachel woke up, fussing, her diaper wet, Bethany climbed over into
the backseat, told the baby what a good girl she was, and quickly
changed her. Then she hoisted Rachel on her shoulder, grabbed the
diaper bag, and went out to the trunk for her suitcase. She left the
Saab where it was, keys in the ignition.
They washed up in the ladies' room at the bus station, got some
brealtfast from the snack bar, including a glass of milk to fill
Rachel's bottle, then waited for the eleven-o'clock bus to Atlanta.

By then, Bethany had not slept for two nights, and she barely had the
nerve to ask for her bus ticket. In the past four months she had spent
thirty thousand dollars on lawyers, and it had not done her a bit of
good. If she had just taken off at the start, she would have had fifty
thousand in her suitcase instead of twenty, but she had never made a
real decision until the day she drove past the park. She'd had faith
in her lawyer. She believed him when he insisted she'd easily win
custody, but somehow it hadn't worked out that way, and it took months
for Bethany to realize she'd been tricked. It turned out that the
house in Great Neck belonged not to her and Randy but to his family's
business. Even the Saab belonged to Randy's family. And now they had
decided the baby was theirs, too.

Bethany had been a freshman at Oberlin when she met Randy. His sister,
Lynne, was her roommate, and she'd warned Bethany that her brother was
the handsomest man she would ever meet.

He had dozens of old sweethearts from high school and college pestering
him, but when he saw Bethany he fell in love instantly. He told her it
was because she was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen, and in
fact she looked more like him than his own sister, with the same dark
hair and clear olive skin. But after a while Bethany came to believe
that he wanted her so badly because he had never in his life met a girl
quite so naive. She was perfect, if not for him, for his family. His
parents picked their house and their furniture and their cars, and they
thought Bethany was the sweetest thing they'd ever seen. It didn't
seem to matter so much that Randy was rarely home. Bethany didn't
question him when he worked late or on weekends. He managed, that way,
to be both married, which his parents insisted upon, and single, which