Read Online Bombshell by Lynda Curnyn - Free Book Online

night if one hopes to find oneself in the company of others. But I had already decided I didn’t want to socialize. Claudia had pressed me for a post-work cocktail on my way out of the office, but I didn’t feellike standing at some bar, listening to my more-bitter-by-the-hour boss rail against the injustice of Courtney’s sudden rise to the right hand of the Dubrow family, especially when the place she had taken in Michael’s heart still stung. And how it stung. Even more so when I saw the way Dianne embraced the happy couple, welcoming Courtney to the family in a way that filled me with a strange longing. I knew now why I never felt a part of the Dubrow “family.” Because I wasn’t. And never would be.
    That thought sent me straight to the liquor store after Zabar, to pick up a bottle of wine. I had felt a determination to make this evening alone just as pleasurable and relaxing as it might have been had I spent it with someone else. I even splurged on a French Bordeaux.
    So it was with a bag of produce and a bottle of wine that I sailed through my front lobby. I even winked at Malakai, my ever-friendly and ever-accommodating doorman, who graciously held open the door, eyeing my purchases as I glided through. “Is my tall friend coming by?” he asked cheerfully, referring to Ethan. Malakai always referred to the men in my life by some physical characteristic. My last boyfriend, Drew, had been his “blond friend.” Even Michael, despite the fact that his visits were few and far between, had earned the moniker of Malakai’s “blue-eyed friend.”
    This was the problem with doormen. You couldn’t hide your love life—or lack thereof—from them. Though we only had one and he only worked five to midnight, Malakai’s shift covered that crucial period of the evening when everything did—or didn’t—happen in a woman’s life.
    â€œNo, no one’s coming by,” I said, with a bracing smile as I transferred my bags to one arm and headed for the line of mailboxes at the other end of the lobby, trying to escapeMalakai’s inevitable teasing comment about how he would never let me spend an evening alone if he were twenty years younger.
    I knew he meant well, in the way that aging uncle of yours meant well when he sang you the Miss America song when you were six. But I just wasn’t in the mood.
    Once at the mailboxes, I slid my key in, then grabbed out the handful of catalogs, bills and credit card offers that were my daily due, when a letter caught my eye, the return address as familiar to me by now as my own.
    K. Morova. Brooklyn, NY.
    I knew that handwriting, though I did not know the writer herself. Had traced my finger often enough over the signature that had come back on the return receipt for the letter I had sent Kristina Morova, all those months ago.
    My mother, at least in biological fact.
    The woman whom I had believed, up until this moment, had no interest in meeting me.
    I ignored the pulse of pure fear that constricted my throat and quickly slid the letter between the pages of a Pottery Barn catalog, as if to protect myself from its contents, then headed for the bank of elevators that flanked the lobby.
    â€œFinally getting that nice cool weather,” came a voice, startling me out of whatever scattered thoughts I was having. I looked up to see Mrs. Brandemeyer, who lived a floor below me and had been a tenant of 122 W. 86th Street since the sixties. Her long-term residency, combined with her elderly status, seemed to give her certain inalienable rights. Like laundry room usage (you always forfeited the remaining dryer to Mrs. Brandemeyer, who was “too old to be riding up and down, up and down”) or the proprietary air she took when it came to Malakai.She had treated me rather suspiciously when I had first moved in six years earlier. “I don’t like loud music,” she proclaimed just moments after she