Read Online Harvesting the Heart by Jodi Picoult - Free Book Online Page B

to her, reading Gray's
Anatomy as
if it were a murder mystery. "I don't know how you memorize all
this stuff, Nicholas," she said. "I couldn't even do the
bones." She looked up at him. "I tried, you know. I thought
if I remembered them all without peeking, I'd impress you."
    "You
already impress me," he said. "I don't care about the
bones."
    Paige
shrugged. "I'm not impressive," she said.
    Nicholas,
lying on the couch, rolled onto his side to look at her.
    "Are
you kidding?" he said. "You left home and got yourself a
job and survived in a city you knew nothing about. Christ, I couldn't
have done that at eighteen." He paused. "I don't know if I
could do that now."
    "You've
never had to," Paige said quietly. Nicholas opened his mouth to
speak but didn't say anything. He never had to. But he had wanted to.
    Both
of Nicholas's parents had, in some way, changed their circumstances.
Astrid, who could trace her lineage to Plymouth Rock, ad tried to
downplay her Boston Brahmin ties. "I don't see all the fuss
about the Mayflower," she
had said. "For God's sake, the Puritans were outcasts before
they got here." She grew up surrounded by wealth that was so old
it had always just been there. Her objections were not to a life of
privilege, really, only to the restrictions that came with it. She
had no intention of becoming the kind of wife who blended into the
walls of a house that defined her, and so, on the day she graduated
from Vassar, she flew to Rome without telling a soul. She got drunk
and danced at midnight in Trevi fountain, and she slept with as many
different dark-haired men as she could until her Visa ran out. Months
later, when she was introduced to Robert Prescott at a tailgate
party, she almost dismissed him as one of those rich, have-it-all
boys with whom her parents were forever throwing her together. But
when their eyes met over a cup of spiked cider, she realized that
Robert wasn't what he appeared to be. He seethed below the surface
with that hell-or-high-water pledge to escape that Astrid recognized
running through her own blood. Here was her mirror image—someone
trying to get in as
badly as she was trying to get out.
    Robert
Prescott had been born without a dime and, apparently, without a
father. He had sold magazines door to door to pay his way through
Harvard. Now, thirty years later, he had honed his image to a point
where he had such financial holdings no one dared remember if it was
old money or new. He loved his acquired status; he liked the
combination of his own glossy, crystalline tastes butted up against
Astrid's cluttered seventh-generation antiques. Robert understood the
part well—acting stuffy and bored at dinner parties,
cultivating a taste for port, obliterating the facts of his life that
could incriminate. Nicholas knew that even if his father couldn't
convince himself he'd been to the manner born, he believed he
rightfully belonged there, and that was just as good.
    There
had been a bitter argument once, when his father insisted Nicholas do
something he had no inclination to do—the actual circumstances
now forgotten: probably escorting someone's sister to a debutante
ball or giving up a Saturday game of neighborhood baseball for formal
dancing lessons. Nicholas had stood his ground, certain his father
would strike him, but in the end Robert had sunk into a wing chair,
defeated, pinching the bridge of his nose. "You would play the
game, Nicholas," he had said, sighing, "if you knew there
was something to lose."
    Now
that he was older, Nicholas understood. Truth be told, as much as he
fantasized about living the simple life of a lobster fisherman
in Maine, he enjoyed the perks of his station too much to turn his
back and walk away. He liked being on a first-name basis with the
governor, having debutantes leave their lace bras on the back seat of
his car, getting admitted to college and medical school without even
a half second of self-doubt or worry about his chances. Paige