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

half jar of relish. Paige had obviously walked all the way here with groceries, and he was shocked at how his whole center seemed to soften at the thought.
    She was sitting on the floor, with her hands spread over the pages of Gray’s Anatomy as if she were modestly trying to cover the naked musculoskeletal image of a man. At first she did not see him. “Phalanges,” she murmured, reading. She pronounced the clinical names for fingers and toes all wrong, as if it rhymed with fangs, and Nicholas smiled. Then, hearing his footsteps, she jumped to her feet, as though she’d been caught doing something she shouldn’t have been doing. “I’m sorry,” she blurted out.
    Paige’s cheeks were flushed; her shoulders were shaking. “What are you sorry for?” Nicholas said, tossing his bag onto the couch.
    Paige looked around, and following her glance, Nicholas began to see that she’d been doing more than baking cookies. She had cleaned the entire apartment, even scrubbed the hardwood floors, from the looks of things. She had taken the extra quilt out of the linen closet and draped it over the couch, so bright colors like lime and violet and magenta washed over the Spartan room. She had moved the copies of Smithsonian and the New England Journal of Medicine off the coffee table to make room for a Mademoiselle magazine open to a feature on shaping your buttocks. On the kitchen counter was a spray of black-eyed Susans, arranged neatly in a clean-washed peanut butter jar.
    These subtle changes took the focus away from the antiques and the sharp edges that had made the place look so formal. In one afternoon, Paige had made his apartment resemble any other lived-in apartment.
    â€œWhen you took me here last night, I kept thinking that there was something missing. It—I don’t know—it just looked sort of stiff, like you lived in the pages of an Architectural Digest article. I picked the flowers on the edge of the highway,” Paige said nervously, “and since I couldn’t find a vase, I sort of finished the peanut butter.”
    Nicholas nodded. “I didn’t even know I had peanut butter,” he said, still gazing around the room. In the entire course of his life, he’d never seen a copy of Mademoiselle in his home. His mother would have died rather than see highway wildflowers on a table instead of her hothouse tea roses. He’d been brought up to believe that quilts were acceptable for hunting lodges but not formal sitting rooms.
    When he started medical school, Nicholas had left the decoration of the apartment in his mother’s hands because he hadn’t the time or the inclination, and to no one’s surprise it came out looking very much like the house he’d grown up in. Astrid had bequeathed him an ormolu clock and an ancient cherry dining room table. She’d commissioned her usual decorator to take care of the drapes and the upholstery, specifying the rich hunter-green and navy and crimson fabrics that she felt suited Nicholas. He hadn’t wanted a formal sitting room, but he had never mentioned that to his mother. After the fact, he didn’t know how to go about changing one into a simple living room. Or maybe he didn’t know how to go about living.
    â€œWhat do you think?” Paige whispered, so quietly that Nicholas thought he had imagined her voice.
    Nicholas walked toward her, wrapped his arms around her. “I think we’re going to have to buy a vase,” he said.
    He could feel Paige’s shoulders relax beneath his hands. Suddenly she started talking, the words tumbling out of her mouth. “I didn’t know what to do,” she said, “but I knew it needed something. And then I figured—I’m baking cookies, did you know that?—well, I didn’t know if what I liked would be what you liked, and I started to think about how I’d act if I came home and someone I barely even knew