Read A Measure of Happiness for Free Online Page B

and busied themselves with their sippy cups, throwing their heads back to get the last drops. Mere weeks past picking up the boys’ first birthday cakes, their mothers nibbled the edges of their lemon bars, each of them gunning for baby number two.
    Common knowledge claimed having kids close in age guaranteed similarly close sibling relationships, the makings of a real family. Other people deserved such a blessing.
    Â 
    Other people shied away from dares.
    In middle school, Zach had taken the bait of a bully and eaten a mishmash of cafeteria mystery meat, spice cake, and something icky that went crunch, just for the bragging rights. High school kids were marginally more creative, and he’d lifted the answers for his tenth-grade calculus final, even though he’d never needed to cheat for high marks. Math inherently made sense. And college? He’d dared kids to dare him. Dare me to lock the RA in a bathroom stall, Silly String the chancellor’s office, “haunt” the dorm on Halloween as the Ghost of Christmas Past. The chains and moaning had lent a nice old-fashioned touch.
    Zach wasn’t a coward. So why was he acting like one? Holding his tongue when he’d waited a decade to be heard?
    â€œYou’re from Arlington, Mass. How did you end up here in Hidden Harbor, Maine?” Katherine asked.
    â€œMy parents kicked me out of the house.”
    â€œOh?” Katherine’s left hand fluttered to her neck, as though she were taking her pulse.
    â€œKidding! They strongly suggested I get my act together and take it on the road.”
    Nearly six years ago, on Zach’s eighteenth birthday, his parents had offered to give him nonidentifying information for his birth mother. But despite their support, he’d never taken the bait and grown up.
    Until three weeks ago, when they’d forced his hand.
    Zach squelched the urge to press his fingers to the pulse hammering his throat. He’d come home from an all-nighter to find his camp trunk and two suitcases by the front door, his mother’s handwritten note slipped under the plastic of the luggage tag: Find her.
    Inside the suitcase, he’d found the nonidentifying information for his birth mother. Clue number one for his Casco Bay scavenger hunt. Nothing about his biological father.
    Somehow, that had made it worse.
    Katherine took a breath and leaned back. A smile played at the corners of her mouth. “You’re hardly a child. They must’ve had their reasons. Kids, adult kids, aren’t supposed to live at home forever. I’ve been on my own since I was nineteen.”
    Zach shrugged, suddenly sheepish. Some people took longer figuring out what they wanted to do with their lives. Some people came home from five years of college and a double major without a single degree, looked up old high school buddies for a round of bar golfing, and tried to relive their childhoods.
    Who was he kidding? He’d never gone bar golfing in high school. “Your degrees are in criminal justice and psychology,” Katherine said. “Why do you want to work in my bakery?”
    Zach shook his head. “I attended UMass Lowell. Never finished either degree.”
    â€œWhy not?” she asked, curious, withholding judgment. Polar opposite of his father’s words when Zach had dropped out of school and materialized on his parents’ doorstep: “What the hell is wrong with you, Zach?”
    â€œI guess you could say I like to keep my options open.”
    â€œReally?”
    â€œYeah, sure. Figure this is a good time in my life to see more of the U.S. Who knows? Maybe I’d like to become a baker. How can I know until I try it, right? I’m a hands-on kind of guy. Sitting in a classroom doesn’t do it for me. I mean, how did you know you wanted to own a bakery?” God, he sounded like a loser. A shiftless, homeless dude who wandered the streets. Was that the way the Fitzgeralds saw him?
    Was