Her Mother's Shadow by Diane Chamberlain

Jessica.
    Once she hung up the phone, her tears started. They lasted for five or six minutes, then faded away, and just when she thought she was done with them, she pictured Jessica’s smile and thought about the fear and disbelief Mackenzie was enduring, and her sobbing started again.
    She’d long ago given up asking why things like this happened. Her mother had died from a bullet meant for someone else. Her sister-in-law, Terri—Clay’s first wife—had died while doing search-and-rescue work. The losses seemed so random, so meaningless—although once this past year, she’d wondered if her mother’s death had been fitting punishment for all the cheating she’d done during her marriage. If God existed, though, she refused to believe he worked that way.
    She longed for the escape of sleep, but her nose was stuffy from crying and she could not prevent memories ofJessica from slipping into her consciousness. When they’d been very young, she and Jessica had been in Brownies together, with Lacey’s mother as their much-adored troop leader. Lacey could not count all the milk shakes and French fries they’d shared at McDonald’s over the years, or all the times she and Jessica had slept at one another’s houses. Jessica had changed dramatically during their time in middle school, when she’d become one of the “cool crowd,” leaving Lacey confused and envious, but after Mackenzie was born, she’d reverted quickly to the sweet person she’d once been.
    She heard Gina and Rani come home, followed by Clay a half hour later, but she didn’t want to get up to talk to them. The only person she truly wanted to talk to was the person she could never talk to again: Jessica. Why hadn’t she gone to Arizona to visit her sometime in the past twelve years? She had taken their friendship for granted. She should have known better than that. Now she was finally going to Phoenix, just a little bit too late.
    Someone knocked lightly on her bedroom door.
    â€œYou awake, Lace?” Clay asked.
    â€œYes.”
    â€œDad called to tell me,” he said. “Can I come in?”
    â€œI want to be alone,” she said.
    He hesitated a moment. “I’m sorry, sis,” he said, finally. “And I’m sorry for the things I said about Jessica yesterday.”
    â€œIt’s all right.” She pressed a damp, overused tissue to her eyes. “Clay?”
    â€œYes?”
    â€œI love you. Please don’t die.”
    She heard his soft laughter through the door. “I love you, too, Lacey,” he said. But he didn’t promise her anything. He knew better than that.
    Â 
    She did not sleep, did not even doze, the entire night. She lay with the box of tissues on the pillow next to her and the phone clutched in her hands, waiting for the return call from Nola. But the call never came, and it would be nearly noon the following day before she understood why.

CHAPTER 11
    L acey didn’t go into work at the animal hospital the next morning. It was Saturday, and the hospital would be packed with patients, but she knew her father would understand. Instead, she sat in her home studio trying to reach Nola and getting no answer to her calls, not even an outgoing message on an answering machine. She studied the piece of paper on which her father had written the phone number. Whose number was it, anyway? A friend of Jessica’s probably. She knew Jessica had several good friends in Phoenix, since she’d talked about them over the years. Lacey had always felt an uncomfortable mixture of happiness and envy during those conversations, glad that Jessica had those friends, yet jealous that they had taken her place.
    Between phone calls, she tried cutting glass for a panel she was making, but her heart wasn’t in it. She knew better than to cut glass when she could not give it her full attention. Finally, she took off her safety glasses and