Read The Man She Once Knew for Free Online

could never be said.
    “Please,” his mother said to Callie. “He doesn’t mean offense.”
    Her pleading tone grated on him, but her genuine fear was palpable. If he pushed too hard, in a matter of days, weeks at most, the lawyer and Callie could have his mother out on the street, with no place to go. All of them knew that.
    “Forget it,” he said, even though everything in him wanted to fight the threat they presented.
    But the lawyer was right. He was in no position to demand anything.
    He turned on his heel and walked away.
     
    T HE AIR , poisoned by the cloud of his fury, was too thick to breathe.
    “Being back here is hard for him,” David’s mother defended.
    Callie could relate. She wanted to be in Philly, not touring these properties, but Albert had insisted, intent on bringing these people alive for her so that she couldn’t easily walk away from her inheritance.
    In reality she didn’t want to walk, she wanted to run. Faster even than David had disappeared, she longed to put distance between herself and this place, between past and present.
    She’d worked hard to grow beyond the troubled teen, to prove herself worthy and to be a success. She hadn’t planned on the case of a lifetime coming her way or a bad break pushing her into a gamble that now jeopardized the very foundation of the life she’d made.
    But the pale, thin woman before her was not at fault. “We’ll figure something out, Mrs. Langley,” she said.
    “Compton,” Albert prompted.
    “Langley,” David’s mother argued, raising Albert’s eyebrows with the unexpected vehemence. “David is trying, you have to understand. I let things get out of hand when he was—when he was away.” She shifted her gaze back to Callie, eyes pleading. “He’s a good man. You know who he really is.”
    Do I? Callie wondered. She tried to square the boy she’d known with the hard, angry man she’d encountered this time around. She knew what prison did to people—hadn’t she seen the revolving door often enough? To survive inside those walls required turning your back on every scrap of humanity you possessed.
    Delia Langley gripped her forearm. “Please. He’s doing all he can to get us back on solid footing. He only needs a little more time.”
    “Mrs. Langley…” I can’t do this. I don’t want the responsibility. Walking through the monk’s cell that was David’s room, the sense of wrongness, of trespassing had rolled through her stomach in greasy waves.
    What did missed payments matter to her when she would return to her life and her salary and her small but hardly used apartment? They counted for much more to a woman who’d lost two husbands and, for all intents and purposes, a son she had adored. How could Callie tear Jessie Lee’s world apart, or this woman’s, or any of their neighbors’? Life here was too hard without being tossed from their homes by some bureaucrat or number-cruncher.
    She didn’t want to stay for Miss Margaret’s thirty days, but she would remain here long enough to craft a solution, and legally break her great-aunt’s provision, and then she would be able to leave Oak Hollow and her memories behind, perhaps even put them to rest.
    “You won’t lose your home. Miss Margaret wouldn’t have wanted that.”
    The relief that rose brought a little color back into the woman’s cheeks. “She was always very kind to me, to a lot of folks.”
    “I know. I was one of them.” This was the closest she had ever come to a discussion of the past with the woman who’d despised Callie for luring her golden son into his downfall, dressing like a siren and acting much older than she was. David, though compassionate and mature, was also a teenage boy with all the attendant hormones, and Callie, with only her mother as an example of how to treat men, had taken advantage. “I’ll see what can be done to give him more time to come up with the money.”
    “Thank you,” the woman murmured. “Thank you so