Read Online One Night in Boston by Allie Boniface - Free Book Online

from the moment, it caused him such guilt and regret that he had to remind himself that it hadn’t been his fault. Not really. Her illness, her operation, her loss had stemmed from someone else’s mistake.
    But I could have stopped it , he thought. If only I’d known, I could have stopped it from happening in the first place. I could have saved her, protected her the way I was supposed to. Blood related or not, brothers are supposed to do that for their little sisters. No, Dillon hadn’t been the real villain all those years ago, but he’d stood by while it happened. In Maggie’s mind, he knew, that was the same.

2:00 p.m.
     
    Maggie stared out the back window of her workroom as she chewed on a thumbnail. The heads of her poor flowers bowed under the storm, petals damp and crushed, leaves lost. She wished she could hold up their tender blossoms and funnel them strength to withstand the wind and the rain. Hell, she wished she could do that for herself, right about now. She looked back at her desk and the list of landscaping businesses that Neve had found online. Ninety-eight listed just in the city of Boston. That didn’t include any of the suburbs. Ninety-eight ? Maggie wanted to cry.
    She sank to a seat and drummed her fingers on the desk. Her gaze fell on a bright red Christmas card, one she’d pulled from the back of a file drawer the other day. The scrawl inside she knew. Too well. He’d signed her birthday cards with that same squiggle, autographed the tree fort they built together one summer, forged a note to school so she didn’t get in trouble when she skipped and went to the mall. She’d recognize that handwriting anywhere, the way it swooped to the left at the beginning of words and tailed off at the end to nothing. A lump grew in Maggie’s throat until she had to turn away to draw a breath.
    I should have kept in touch with him. It would make the next twenty-four hours a lot easier. This holiday card from almost six years ago was the only reminder she still held of her stepbrother. She couldn’t believe she’d kept it after all this time, but it must have gotten stuck in a box of papers from college. She remembered the anger, the sadness, with which she’d first read it, tracing the words that wished her a merry winter season. Does he think this makes up for what happened that night? Does he think it changes what I lost?
    What the doctors had taken that long-ago day had healed. Only a small scar remained on her abdomen. But different scars marked her soul now. Deeper ones. Because the day Maggie left the hospital, she’d emerged as someone different, someone less whole, less sure, less herself.
    She knew Dillon meant well. He probably wanted to show her he still cared, still felt sorry, still wanted to make her world right. But years of silence couldn’t be mended by a card in the mail.
    She turned it upside down and stuck it under some junk mail. Maggie forced herself to remember what her mother had said about the name of his business. Something that rhymed. Or something that, for whatever reason, seemed silly to Hillary. Not a good name for a business. Maggie tucked her hair behind both ears. Okay, she knew her mother well enough to weed out a few. Pencil in hand, she went down the list, crossing out as she went and hoping against hope that she wasn’t deleting the very business she needed to call.
    A-Plus Lawn Care
    Beautiful Greens
    Smith and Sons Landscapers
    Maggie laid down her pencil and recounted. Eighteen names now had black lines through them. “Eighteen? That’s it? You’ve got to be kidding me.”
    There’s got to be a better way . If Dillon was working in Boston, then maybe he was listed in the yellow pages. Or the white pages. Or something. If he was such a hotshot businessman, maybe she could find some mention of him in an article or a link on someone’s website. Christ, maybe he has his own website . It was worth a try, anyway.
    She started up her computer and waited for the