Bad Reputation. Melinda Di Lorenzo

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      “I know,” I told her. “I was trying to soften you up so you’d be nicer to me.”

      “Well, stop it.”

      “Sorry.”

      “How many boyfriends do I have?” Liandra asked.

      “None.”

      “None,” she repeated.

      “But at least you’ve been married,” I reminded her.

      “None,” she said a second time, this time heavily.

      “But—”

      She cut me off. “So. I’m a thirty-four-year-old woman with one failed marriage, one failed career, living off a student loan that I will probably never pay back, in some run-down, all-girls dorm with a self-pitying twenty-one-year-old who is sad because she has never been to Italy.”

      “You are trying to make me feel worse,” I accused.

      “I’m giving you perspective,” she corrected.

      And truthfully, what she was saying did make me feel better about my situation. When I had come to Liandra, I’d been in the lowest state of my life, and she had helped me rebuild. She’d had her share of hard times, and she understood loss. In fact, it was often what she had been through herself that inspired me. She’d left those details out of her little rant, but my mind went to them immediately. I thought of the fact that she’d battled breast cancer for eight years, and that the radiation treatment had resulted in infertility. And how her boss at the law firm where she’d worked had also been her husband. And that he’d fired and divorced Liandra after impregnating his office assistant.

      “Liandra?” I said softly.

      “Is it working?” she replied.

      “Is what working?”

      “My evil plan,” she said. “Are you lying there thinking about my crappy life instead of yours?”

      “Yes,” I admitted.

      She chuckled. “Good. And you’re welcome.”

      “Thanks,” I said belatedly.

      She was quiet for a minute, and I wondered if she had drifted back to sleep. Then she leaned across the space between our beds and squeezed my hand.

      “Your mom would be proud,” she told me. “I know it.”

      My heart ached for a single beat, and I pushed the pain aside. I’d come eight-hundred miles away from home so I could put the past and all that pain that went with it behind me.

      “Do you feel any better?” Liandra wanted to know.

      “A lot.”

      There was a pause, and I thought she might call my bluff, but instead she just said in a teasing voice, “Good. Now can we please get some rest? It’s 2 a.m.”

      “Today is Friday,” I reminded her. “You don’t have any classes. And neither do I.”

      “I know.” She yawned. “But you’ve got that rally thing in the morning, and work in the afternoon. And let’s face it, if you’re tired, you’re cranky. And if you’re cranky and tired, then you’re noisy.”

      “It’s not a rally, it’s a business meeting! And now that I’m thinking about that, I’m all anxious again.”

      “See?” she said. “Already cranky.”

      I threw my pillow at her, and grinned to myself when I heard her responding squeak.

      “Good night, Liandra,” I called out sweetly.

      “Good night, Tucker.”

      After a few more silent moments, my roommate’s breathing became even and slow, and I knew she had fallen asleep. But I was still wide-awake, thinking of my immediate future instead of my long-ago past.

      The project I’d taken on was a big one, and close to my heart. In fact, it was the biggest thing I’d ever undertaken. And the most personal. This wasn’t just some cause I’d read about, or some park that needed to be cleaned up. This was about me.

      A full year earlier, when I’d still been more or less picking up the pieces of my life after my parents had died and I’d left Mark, I’d heard that a local community center was being shut down. At first, I’d just felt a little sad that a place so similar to the one where I’d spent so much of my youth was going to be turned into high-rises and a mini mall. But the more I’d thought about it, the more it had upset me. And when I’d decided to visit it, I’d seen the number of kids there, and something in me had snapped. I couldn’t let it close.

      So I did the only thing I could. I volunteered to fix the whole damned thing. So I’d started researching. I invested quite a bit of time looking over the details, finding out how I could save it, or even if I could. The city owned the land and the community center, but the building was old and expensive to maintain, and someone in the line of officials had decided it was no longer worth the amount it cost. So the bottom line came down to one thing. Money. Of which I had little.

      I couldn’t buy the land, or even the building. But I could bring it back up to code. If I could come up with the thirty-thousand dollars.

      And then came the windfall, painful as it was.

      A fifteen-thousand-dollar insurance settlement from my mom. The lawyers had originally told me that my mom’s policy had been voided by the arson, but further investigation revealed that it was still valid.

      I couldn’t keep the money. Not for selfish reasons. But for the community center…it was just the bump I needed. Half the money I needed, ready to go. It gave me sway with the city officials and validated my proposal enough that they gave me a year to come up with the other half. Which led to the birth of my not-for-profit gardening service. With Liandra’s help, a generous grant and the assistance of many patrons of the community center, I was damned close to my goal of raising the other fifteen-thousand dollars.

      And the whole thing was a bonus I hadn’t counted on. The work distracted me from Mark and all the pieces of my heart he’d left behind. I didn’t need him, or romance or anything but my own cause. I felt good about myself. I could be happy on my own terms.

      Then, only just this week, I received a call that made me think it might all have been for nothing.

      Some bigwig developer wanted the land. Whoever he was, he thought we needed something better. Something bigger. Something profitable.

      With only six weeks left to raise the money, the city officials wanted to meet with me. Tomorrow.

      * * *

      I rolled over in my bed, found my phone squished under my face and realized immediately that my alarm hadn’t gone off.

      “Crap!” I yelled, then clamped my hand over my mouth СКАЧАТЬ