Therese Fowler - Reunion

THERESE FOWLER

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

AVON

A division of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 2008

Copyright © Therese Fowler 2008

Therese Fowler asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9781847560247

Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2009 ISBN: 9780007287635

Version: 2018-05-29

This, my second novel, was so much a labor of love: Love for writing and for telling a story that engaged my imagination so thoroughly; love for my new profession and all the excellent people who publish my work; love for the readers whose responses to my first novel, Souvenir , have humbled me beyond words . . . To those readers I send my most heartfelt thanks.

Second novels are, they say, the hardest to write. The quandary is in deciding how similar the second book should be to the first. I decided to approach the matter much the way a singer might when selecting which songs to record for a new CD. Listeners don’t want the same song on every track, but they do need to recognize the sound as uniquely that artist’s. Consider this book my track #2, a contemporary, slightly up-tempo offering that I hope will be as captivating as readers and reviewers say the first track is.

I have to thank my lovely UK editor Maxine Hitchcock, as well as the entire HarperCollins/Avon team, for their faith in my taking this approach.Without Maxine, I would not have UK readers waiting to see whether this book measures up.

Linda Marrow,my US editor, has earned my unwavering respect, affection, and gratitude for her expert editorial guidance and overall wonderfulness.

Speaking of wonderful: my agent,Wendy Sherman, is precisely that. She and Jenny Meyer, who handles most of my foreign rights, are an author’s dream team. It’s my good fortune to be in their capable hands.

I treasure the camaraderie and support of my writing pals, who know better than anyone else the struggles that take place at the keyboard and behind the scenes.

Most of all, I treasure and thank my enthusiastic family (and not only for the unpaid publicity efforts!). My husband Andrew and our four boys get both the pleasures and the pain of living with a “creative type,” and seem to love me just the same.

For Andrew, who reminds me that things always turn out pretty much the way they’re supposed to.

Love to faults is always blind , Always is to joy inclin’d, Lawless, wing’d, and unconfin’d, And Breaks all chains from every mind.

William Blake

Cover Title Page Copyright Epigraph Prologue Part I Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Part II Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Part III Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty-One Chapter Twenty-Two Chapter Twenty-Three Chapter Twenty-Four Chapter Twenty-Five Chapter Twenty-Six Chapter Twenty-Seven Chapter Twenty-Eight Chapter Twenty-Nine Part IV Chapter Thirty Chapter Thirty-One Chapter Thirty-Two Chapter Thirty-Three Chapter Thirty-Four Chapter Thirty-Five Chapter Thirty-Six Chapter Thirty-Seven Epilogue About the Author By The Same Author About the Publisher

Her name was Harmony Blue. Harmony Blue Kucharski, not Forrester, as it ought to have been by then. Unmarried, nineteen, she lay in her narrow bed in the smallest of the rundown rental’s bedrooms. Her groans had already driven one of her housemates away, leaving only two people to tend her: the midwife, whose name at the time was Meredith Jones, and a teenage girl who wanted to be known as Bat .

“ I’m looking out for you,” Bat said, sitting on the bed’s edge and holding her friend’s clammy hand .

Like all of the fledgling adults who came and went here, Bat was hardly capable of looking out for herself. But if her words had little impact—the young woman hardly cared what she said—the fact of Bat being there was real comfort in between the pains .

Harmony Blue, sweaty and exhausted, had once been described as “fetching.” She tried to remember where she’d heard it, who had used such a word … Then she had it: an old farmer in Wisconsin, five or six years earlier; she had been trying for the Miss Junior Dairy Maiden crown, despite never having been within milking distance of a cow. Entering the pageant had been her mother’s idea, a chance for the two- hundred- fifty- dollar prize. Pink and white hair ribbons, the young woman remembered; ruffles at her throat and knees; a rhinestone tiara that was lost in the next move .

She looked at Bat’s reflection in the mirrored closet door, at bony shoulder blades visible inside a black Duran Duran tour t-shirt, black hair cut asymmetrically, longer on the left and striped with one fuchsia swath behind her ear. Bat had style, identity, whereas she had neither. What she had was matted hair, a stretched- to- its- limits red sweatshirt, a swollen belly and a rounded, pallid face .

Excepting the belly and the fullness of her face, she appeared to be the same untethered person who’d taken refuge here ten months earlier—which just went to show how untrustworthy an image could be; nothing but the visible bit of an iceberg that was otherwise out of sight. She wasn’t the innocent she’d been when she got here. She was no longer quite so naïve .

She watched the mirror, saw her eyes narrow and her lips flatten as another contraction began and tightened, a cinched string yanking her entire body inward to its core. Then she was seeing nothing but the black heat of pain as Bat said, “Breathe, remember? Breathe! ”

Slowly, her vision cleared, and the midwife examined her again. “Just about time to push,” Meredith said. Meredith’s face was thin but kind, and not so much older looking than her two companions’, whose desperate faith in her was all too common .