Read Last Safe Place, The for Free Online Page A

Gabriella has changed and the ancient place of safety has remained exactly the same.
    At the very least, her perceptions of it have changed because in the beginning it was a much more specific, detailed, real-life place, with real world attributes. Dirt on the ground. The smell of pine in the air. Cold stone, bright lights and a distant rumbling sound like a bowling alley next door. Now it has taken on that blurred-around-the-edges quality of dreams and fantasies with nothing at all that is substantial or earthly.
    But one thing that hasn’t changed over time is the beauty of the glow itself, the golden light that is the color of the amber stones in the room in the house where precious treasures were kept when she was a child in cabinets she wasn’t allowed to touch. The glow shifts through amber, caramel and yellow like the colors in a kaleidoscope, and grants her brother’s pale face the hue of a brown-toast suntan.
    Garrett smiles at her. He has no front teeth and the gap-toothed grin is indescribably endearing. He speaks, but she doesn’t hear. Either the distant booming drowns his words or the glow itself absorbs them because here there is no need for language.
    Drumma du, Gabriella. Twin speak for I love you. Maybe Garrett says it, or maybe he doesn’t but she hears the truth of it all the same.
    Drumma du, too, Garrett.
    Sometimes it’s Ty’s face instead of Garrett’s.
    But it’s never Grant’s face. Grant’s dead and it is her fault. Hers and Garrett’s. She understands that and what it means with a profound despair that is far beyond a child’s ability to process.
    And with that thought the sense of goodness, hope and safety fades and the glow dims like a dying candle and goes out.
    By then, Gabriella was asleep.
    When she awoke, a wisp of the golden-glow fantasy/dream blew through her mind like a tiny cloud driven before a mighty wind. Then itwas gone. The room was no longer filled with morning sunshine. The sun was on the other side of the house now; it was early afternoon. The space beside her was vacant, the sheets cold.
    She raised up on one elbow. Her mouth tasted like old tennis shoes and her eyes were gravelly. She was rested, though. Perhaps she’d gone to The Cleft. She suspected she’d dreamed of it again because she felt calm and relaxed as she always did when she awoke after dreaming about it. But more than that, she felt a sense of purpose now. At some point during the night—or during the dream—she had made a decision. She knew what she had to do—whether Bernie liked it or not. And he definitely wouldn’t like it. Whether Ty or Theo liked it or not, and she couldn’t predict how the two of them might respond.
    There was a knock at the door.
    “Who is it?”
    “I left you something to wear,” Bernie called through the door. “On the chair.”
    Gabriella rolled off the bed and got to her feet. She was dressed in a t-shirt Bernie had given her last night to replace the bloody white nightgown she’d arrived in. The dress draped over the chair was black—of course—and floor-length, made of satin. It had long sleeves flared at the ends and scalloped—like a bat’s wings—with black lace at the neck and around the hem. She recognized it as one of the rejects. Bernie had provided dozens of costumes like this for her appearances at events and book signings and this was one of several she’d refused to wear. It was too low cut, showed too much cleavage.
    She sighed. The dress was better than wrapping herself in a sheet.
    She was tugging upward on the lace in front a few minutes later, trying to pull it up to her chin, when there was another knock at the door.
    “It’s me, Gabby.” Bernie again.
    Bernie was the only person in her life who called her Gabby. She hated it. But that was the least of the bones she had to pick with her ever-offensive literary agent who raked his 15 percent off the top, spoke for her and about her but only rarely to her. Smokey had talked her into