Shadow Creek Read Online Free Page B

responsible for his actions, to urge herself to try harder, be more desirable, more available, more … all the things she obviously wasn’t, all the while reminding herself that nothing mattered except that she was the one he really loved, and that no matter how far or how often he strayed, he would always come back to her.
    Evan wasn’t her father.
    She wasn’t her mother.
    Yet Val had been devastated to realize that she’d fallen into the same trap as her mother after all, which made her all the more determined to react differently, to not give up, and to fight for her man with every ounce of her being. She hadn’t even allowed her pregnancy to slow her down, indulging Evan’s combined love of travel and danger by continuing to chase him down the steepest slopes and up the highest peaks. She’d missed her daughter’s first birthday so that she could accompany him to the Himalayas, justifying the trip by rationalizing that her husband came first, that a year-old child couldn’t differentiate one day from the next, and that they’d celebrate Brianne’s birthday when they got home. She even wrote an article about their trip that was subsequently published in the travel section of the
New York Times
.
    It was the beginning of an unexpected, and unexpectedly successful, career, a career that came to an abrupt and equally unexpected halt the day Val returned home early from a trying day of dealing with her mother to find Evan in bed dealing with the comely Jennifer.
    It’s my fault, Val told herself at the time. I got careless, complacent. As the years had progressed and Brianne had grownfrom infant to toddler to little girl who needed her mother, Val had become more and more loath to leave her. The threat of danger no longer held the same appeal it once had. She was a mother now. She had responsibilities. She even had a career. It wasn’t just about her anymore.
    Except it had never really been about her. It had been about Evan.
    Always about Evan. Even now.
    How did that happen?
    Val wasn’t some stupid little girl. She wasn’t a complainer or a crybaby. She was very much in control of every aspect of her life, except one—Evan. And maybe her mother. Okay, so, two aspects of her life. Make that three, she decided now, thinking of Brianne. “Brianne,” she shouted up the stairs in a renewed effort to silence the voices in her head, “get a move on.”
    The phone rang.
    Hopefully my mother calling to wish me a happy birthday, Valerie thought, cutting across the front foyer to the stainless-steel kitchen at the back of the house. Was it possible she’d actually remembered? Val shook her head. More likely, she was calling to ask whether Val could drop off a few bottles of Merlot on her way into Manhattan.
    The sun had temporarily managed to break through the heavy rain clouds that had been hovering over the area for the better part of the week and was shining through the two-story-high window that took up the kitchen’s entire west wall. Val hoped the rain had finally ended. The Adirondacks were undeniably beautiful, but camping wasn’t a whole lot of fun in the rain, and unlike Val, Brianne was a reluctant camper at best.
    “Why do I have to go on this stupid camping trip anyway?” she’d been whining for weeks. “I’d much rather go into the city with you and your friends, go shopping, see some shows …”
    “I’d like that, too, sweetheart,” Val had said truthfully. It was so rare that Brianne expressed an interest in doing anything with her these days. She was at the age where she considered her mother a necessary nuisance at best, an outright pain in the butt at worst, and it seemed they hardly spent any time together anymore. What time they
did
spend together was filled with pointless arguments that went nowhere and exhausting confrontations that left Val despairing over who this strange and willful creature was and what she’d done with her daughter. Brianne was growing up and away from