The Good Daughter (The Good Daughter #1) - Karin Slaughter Page 0,83

her, had cherished her. That Sam understood that Rusty needed Charlie. That Charlie needed to be needed by their father. That Charlie deserved to be happy, to enjoy her marriage, to have children—lots of children. That she was old enough to make her own decisions. That everyone was so proud of her, happy for her. That Sam would do anything if Charlie would forgive her.

“Please,” Sam had written at the end of the letter. “You have to believe me. The only thing that got me through months of agony, years of recovery, a lifetime of chronic pain, is the fact that my sacrifice, and even Gamma’s sacrifice, gave you the chance to run to safety.”

Six weeks had passed before Sam had received a letter in return.

Charlie’s response had been a single, honest, compound complex sentence. “I love you, I know that you love me, but every time we see each other, we see what happened, and neither one of us will ever move forward if we are always looking back.”

Her little sister was a lot smarter than Sam had ever given her credit for.

Sam took off her glasses. She gently rubbed her eyes. The scars on her eyelids felt like Braille beneath her fingertips. For all of her complaints about superficial, she worked very hard to mask her injuries. Not because she was embarrassed, but because other people were curious. There was no more effective conversation stopper than the words, “I was shot in the head.”

Make-up covered the pink ridges where her eyelids had been torn. A three-hundred-dollar haircut covered the scar on the side of her head. She tended to dress in flowy black pants and shirts to help camouflage any hesitation in her gait. When she spoke, she spoke clearly, and when exhaustion threatened to loosen her hold on language, she kept her own counsel. There were days that Sam needed a cane to walk, but over the years, she had learned that the only reward for physical hard work was more physical hard work. If she was late at the office and she wanted a car to take her the six blocks home, she took the car.

Today, she walked the six blocks to work with relative ease. In honor of her birthday, she’d worn a colorful scarf to brighten up her usual black. As she took a left onto Wall Street, a strong gust of wind barreled off the East River. The scarf flew behind her like a cape. Sam laughed as she tangled with the silk scarf. She wrapped it around her neck and held loosely onto the ends as she walked through her new neighborhood.

Sam had not been a resident of the area for long, but she had always loved the history, that Wall Street had been, in fact, an earthen wall meant to secure the northern boundary of New Amsterdam; that Pearl Street and Beaver Street and Stone Street were named after the wares that Dutch traders sold along the muddy lanes that spoked out from where tall, wooden sailing boats had once docked.

Seventeen years ago, when Sam had first moved to New York, she’d had her choice of law firms. In the world of patent law, her Stanford master’s in mechanical engineering carried significantly more weight than her master’s from Northwestern Law. Sam had passed both the New York bar and the patent bar on her first attempts. She was a woman in a male-dominated field that desperately needed diversity. The firms’ proffers had practically been extended on bended knee.

She had joined the first firm whose signing bonus was enough to cover the down payment on a condo in a building with an elevator and a heated pool.

The building was in Chelsea, a lovely pre-war mid-rise with high ceilings and a swimming pool in the basement that looked like a Victorian-era natatorium. Despite the rapid improvement of Sam’s finances over the years, she had happily lived in the cramped, two-bedroom apartment until her husband had died.

“Happy birthday.” Eldrin, her assistant, was waiting outside the elevator when the doors opened. Sam’s routine was so fixed that he could predict her movements down to the second.

“Thank you.” She let him take her briefcase, but not her purse.

He walked with her through the offices, doling out her schedule as he always did. “Your UXH meeting is at ten thirty in conference room six. You’ve got a phone call with Atlanta at three, but I told Laurens you have a hard out at five for a very