The Sister-in-Law by Pamela Crane (great books for teens txt) 📗

lifetime, or diamonds that you could pass on to your kids, it wasn’t worth the money. If the baby would spit up on it, poop in it, or spill food on it, you didn’t pay $1,200 for it.

All of these demands for a baby that wasn’t even his.

Before burdening Lane with this new information, I decided I’d do my own digging. I would winnow the wheat from the chaff, the truth from the lies. There were so many puzzle pieces that didn’t fit together when it came to Candace, but what was her ultimate angle? I knew my brother was an easy target for any single woman looking to start a family. He made good money as a nurse, he was handsome and loyal, owned his own home, had saved a nice little nest egg, drove a reasonable car. Who wouldn’t want a guy like him? And his best trait also made him the best target: he was trusting to a fault. Even I had taken advantage of that a time or two. But I couldn’t let someone else, someone who wasn’t family, do that to him.

I had two questions for Candace, and I suspected if I unraveled the answers to them, I’d unravel a lot more of her secrets. If the baby wasn’t Lane’s, whose was it? And why was Candace pretending it was Lane’s?

Chapter 14

Candace

I could swim in your depths forever.

If only I could promise you forever.

In my previous life I didn’t have a pool, so as a child, during the most brutal beatings of summer heat, I often had to go in search of one. Back then I found a lot of things, and I lost a lot of things too. When food was scarce, I hit up local soup kitchens. When my parents had an overdue bill, I stole money from my friends’ parents to keep our electricity on. When I was lonely, I found love. But more often than not, I lost love. It was hard to love a rebellious, thieving orphan like me. Maybe that’s why I settled for the wrong man. Or maybe that’s why, when I found the right one, I wouldn’t let him go.

With arms outstretched, I glided across the pool water, face up, squinting at the sun. Already my skin was tanning into a freckled bronze. With my ears beneath the surface, all I heard was the low hum of the pool filter. My belly hovered just above the water line, a small bump showing at last! I had eagerly waited to see the firm contours of my abs smothered in baby weight. I wondered if I’d need a pregnancy swimsuit, or if my bikinis would suffice for the rest of the summer.

Where I grew up in the sticks, people didn’t have in-ground pools. We had cheap, plastic, baby pools that you could find at the Family Dollar store, just deep enough to soak in. If you had extra money at the end of the month – which my family never did – you could maybe afford the smallest above-ground pool, which you then paid for in installments. Luckily, the elderly lady two streets down from my house had that extra money to buy one. And, luckily, she always went to bed around eight o’clock, which gave me just enough time to night swim before my legal guardian noticed me missing from my bedroom.

After my parents died when I was ten, my grandmother took me in when she felt like it, and my legal guardian took me in when she didn’t. My secretive nightly swims were the only structure in my life, the only time I could breathe, feel free. I was constantly being tossed back and forth between houses, which made me easy to lose track of. Maybe this lack of structure was the reason for my urge to swim. There was something therapeutic about water, floating as if outside of my body, defying gravity, unbound by physical restraints. On the ground I felt heavy with sadness. In the water I was uninhibited. In the water I was at peace.

In my Northern hometown, only the privileged had pools, and you were lucky to get a solid two months’ worth of swimming in. But here in North Carolina, where you’re battling 80-degree heat in May, every other house had one, and the swimming season was twice as long. I had escaped to the right place.

I paddled myself to the pool steps, ready for a snack. With the nausea popping in every couple of hours, I found myself snacking throughout the day, whenever I felt up to it. Whoever named it morning sickness had not given credit to the all-day plague that it really was.

I had barely toweled off when Harper came storming out onto the patio, her face splotched with anger, her hair wild with red fury, her lips an angry pink slit through her face. Her thin lips reminded me of a sideways parenthesis, always downturned. Her heart was a waste of space because it didn’t feel, and Harper lived up to her name, because the woman harped on everything. Dishes in the sink. Dust on the furniture. Unmade beds. Her obsession with cleanliness was boundless. I wondered what expectation I had failed to meet this time.

‘What now?’ I grumbled.

And then I saw it.

A thin wisp of paper in her hand. A black-and-white blur. She waved it at me. The ultrasound photo. How had that snoop found it? I was sure I had put it back in my drawer after looking at it this morning, a routine I did daily in private. Starting the day with a shared moment together, face-to-face, mother to child.

Harper swung the pool gate open with force, and it nearly smacked her as it bounced back.

‘Care to explain this?’ She flapped the photo at me, her voice lifting in an accusing pitch.

‘It’s an ultrasound photo. I would have thought you’d be familiar with them after having kids.’

The smartass in me was coming out,