She scanned the sender addresses on the new messages and her heart stopped. She closed her eyes briefly but when she looked again it was still there, a message from Linda. Her throat tightened as she relived all the months she had wanted to see that name. The subject line was “Up to You.”

Dear Marissa,

I’m not perfect, but I’m not a bad person, either. If you do look at the book I gave you I am hoping you can understand why I let go of you until now.

I will be in the area for at least another week, perhaps as long as a year if I am fortunate enough to get the job I interviewed for. I’m only telling you that because I won’t be in touch again. It’s up to you.”

Yours, Linda

The bottom of the message gave a cell phone number.

“It would serve you right if I never got in touch,” Marissa said to the screen. The stinging tears of hurt were a surprise. Hadn’t she cried enough? Hadn’t she changed enough? Why was Linda so far under her skin?

She glanced over at the package on the counter then resolutely went to bed.

The package was still there in the morning. After communing with the scale, opening her first Diet Coke, munching an energy bar and packing up a few things from the fridge, Marissa could ignore it no longer.

“I’ll glance through it at lunch,” she told herself. Running through the rain she got to the car in record time. She tossed her daypack on the passenger seat and the package on top of that.

It was a very long red light to get onto the main boulevard toward work, so it made sense to pick the package open at least. After all, the paper was wet. She didn’t want to ruin the book. It would save time doing it later.

“Damn,” Marissa swore, when the light turned green. She set it aside, paper half torn, and dang it all, the lights were green all the way to the office.

It wasn’t until after an all-staff meeting followed by a sales staff meeting followed by a management meeting where she and Ocky drank too much coffee and fussed about loan interest rates that Marissa found any time alone in her office where she could finish unwrapping the book.

She didn’t know what she had expected, but it wasn’t a trade paperback with a blue cover and simple white lettering reading Winning at any Price: the Story of a Daughter and Mother. At the bottom the author was given as Lindsey Vanessa Bartok Price. So Linda had written a book?

She flipped the pages to find an About the Author or Foreword but instead the book opened to a substantial middle portion of photographs. The first literally took her breath away.

She would know those eyes anywhere, the curving smile equally so. They belonged to a teenager with incredibly long legs, a waist that seemed nonexistent and long, dark hair that shone as if with its own light. Clad in a glittering one-piece swimsuit and strappy sandals, she posed with one leg back, one hand resting lightly on her hip.