"Spindler, Erica - In Silence" - читать интересную книгу автора (Spindler Erica)

"Yes. He was worriedabout you."

"About me?" She frowned. "Why?"

"Because your mother died before the two of you worked out your issues."

Issues, she thought. Is that how one summed up a lifetime of hurt feelings, a lifetime of longing for her mother's unconditional love and approval and being disappointed time and again? Her head filled with a litany of advice her mother had offered her over the years.

'Avery, little girls don't climb trees and build forts or play cowboys and Indians with boys. They wear bows and dresses with ruffles, not blue-jean cutoffs and T-shirts. Good girls make ladylike choices. They don't run off to the city to become newspapermen. I hey don't throw away a good man to chase a dream."

"He thought you might be sad about that," Hunter continued. She was. He hated that she died without your making peace."

"He said that?" she managed to get out, voice tight.

He nodded and she looked away, memory flooding with the words she had flung at her mother just before she had left for college.

"Drop the loving concern, Mother! You 've never approved of me or my choices. I've never been the daughter you wanted. Why don't you just admit it? "

Her mother hadn't admitted it and Avery had headed off to college with the accusation between them. They had never spoken of it again, though it had been a wedge between them forever more.

"He figured that's why you hardly ever came home." Hunter shrugged. "Interesting, you couldn't come to terms with your mother's life, he her death."

She jumped on the last. "What does that mean, he couldn't come to terms with her death?"

"I would think it's obvious, Avery. It's called grieving."

He was toying with her, she realized. It pissed her off. "And when did all these conversations take place?"

Hunter paused. "We had many conversations, he and I."

The past two days, her shock and grief, the grueling hours of travel, the onslaught of so much that was both foreign and familiar, came crashing down on her. "I don't have the energy to deal with your shit, even if I wanted to. If you decide you want to be a decent human being, look me up."

One corner of his mouth lifted in a sardonic smile. "I didn't answer your question before, the one about my opinion of the local buzz. Personally, I figured you'd pop your old man in a box and go. Fast as you could."

She took a step back, stung. Shocked that he would say that to her. That he would be so cruel. After the closeness they had shared. She pushed past him, unlocked her front door and stepped inside. She caught a glimpse of his face, of the stark pain that etched his features as she slammed the door.

Hunter Stevens was a man pursued by demons.

To hell with his, she thought, twisting the dead-bolt lock. She had her own to deal with.



CHAPTER 4

Hunter gazed at the row of unopened bottles: beer, wine, whisky, vodka. All sins from his past. Each a nail in the coffin of his life. He kept them around to prove that he could. Such a strategy went counter to traditional AA teaching, but he was a masochistic son of a bitch.

Hunter thought of Avery and anger rose up in him in a white-hot, suffocating wave. Once upon a time they'd been the best of friends: him, Matt and Avery. Before everything had begun spin-ning crazily out of control. Before his life had turned to shit.

He pictured her sitting next to Matt at his family's dinner table. All of them laughing, swapping memories. Reveling in the good old days.