The Breadwinner Trilogy (Book 1): The Breadwinner Read Online Free Page A

“Can you give us a minute?”  His father and housekeeper left the two alone.
    Moira cried in his arms and he held her gently.  She had nowhere else to go.  She began showing and her drunken father threw her out.  She had no job, no friends and no other family.  “I’m sorry.”  She looked at him with her big blue eyes and didn’t bother wiping the tears from them.  Samson didn’t know how else to respond other than to take responsibility for his drunken carelessness in Miami.  They were married in an expensively quiet ceremony without love or enthusiasm the following month on a weekend where he normally would have been out with his new law school buddies.  His father paid for an apartment and a nanny off campus for Moira and Keira, the new baby, when she was finally born.  Samson had never seen himself as a family man, but he was ready for this life whether he liked it or not.
    He finished law school and Moira relished in his family’s money, becoming the woman he always knew he would grow to hate.  Keira of course had nothing but the best, but so did Moira, and she had no shame in letting Samson know how much she adored his money.  That’s the way it started and that’s the way it had always been.  A few years later they had their second child, also an accident, but also equally amazing for Samson and Moira.  It brought them closer for a while, but eventually they fell out of whatever temporary love they had found themselves in and went through the appropriate motions of wealthy family life in a wealthy family town.
    “Did you hear me?!”  Moira yelled from behind him, snapping him out of yet another cruel daydream.  Samson hadn’t heard anything else and almost continued ignoring her but Moira’s voice became soft.  “We can’t do this without you.  Babe.”  She lingered condescendingly on the last word and he knew the face she was making without even having to see it.  Big doe eyes and pouty lips.  It was a daily routine with her.  The madness that was his wife, almost like a game.  Seeing how far she could push him.  All for fun, all for her own benefit, all to make him feel like the man he had now come to be, and never letting him forget that in their status of society, no matter how crippled the world, he was the breadwinner.  The staple of the family.
    Family, he thought to himself before he answered.  “I’ll make sure things are right next time.”  Samson slammed the door behind him as he ventured out of their home in Franklin Woods.
    V
    Samson walked down the driveway and quickened his pace as he passed the wreck in in the street before his house.  If I could find a tow truck, I’d move this shit myself.  He hated that their house was one of the first in the development.  “Too much noise and traffic”  he had told Moira when they were first looking at houses several years ago, but she had fallen in love with it the moment she stepped foot in the damned place.  So in Samson’s mind, the brutal accident that had become a permanent fixture on his property all came back to that miserable decision to purchase the third “Castle” (as Moira so tenderly referred to it) from the guard house in Franklin Woods.
    As he strode by the empty houses toward the exit, he thought of all his neighbors, now dead, some from his own doing, and the others probably offed themselves before they could succumb to the travesty of the world.  He remembered the wild, angry look on Will’s face when he had first spotted Samson in his yard during the first few days of the infection.  Samson knew his longtime golf buddy had plenty of plywood in the shed next door that he needed for their windows.  He hadn’t seen Will or his wife Tracy since it had all started so he figured they had gotten out of dodge as quickly as they could. 
    Samson had entered the yard quietly that afternoon, making a beeline for the shed.  He hadn’t noticed Will in his haste, half standing, half leaning, on