The cable guys had pulled a line out to the boathouse. Ben set up that network and set about learning more about Autumn Chase.
She was a very attractive woman, but now only occasionally appeared in movies. There probably weren’t many parts for women in their forties. She kept herself in the public eye through her Lifestyle Collection, a line of products sold on a television shopping channel. She had purses, jewelry, kitchen accessories, bath mats, wallpaper, and organizers of every description. She offered items in a range of price points, and even the lowest-end items were made in the United States.
On her blog, she offered little tidbits of advice about “living beautifully.” None of her advice involved spending money on anything, including Autumn’s own products. She didn’t tell her fans to exercise self-care by booking a massage; she told them how to moisturize their own feet with whatever product they happened to have. The advice she was offering was realistic about what a woman without much disposable income could do. She was respectful of the challenges such women faced. She was forgiving about the shortcuts they needed to take. A woman wasn’t a failure if her kitchen drawers were a mess.
He liked that.
He watched a clip of an appearance on the shopping channel. Her manner was warm and appealing; she seemed authentic. Viewers must feel as if they were getting to know the real her. No wonder her fans were so devoted to her.
He went back to the message board that was on her site. A new banner was up, announcing that the site was now being moderated. Each post would have to be approved by an administrator. That was good. He scrolled through the threads. The angriest comments had been removed. That was even better.
The other site, the unauthorized FindAriel.com, wasn’t moderated. People could post anything, and they were. Ariel was being selfish, one thread argued, by refusing to reveal herself. Didn’t she owe it to Autumn to come forward? Another thread countered that perhaps Ariel needed to be rescued. Perhaps she was too afraid of her “second family” to come forward.
Whoever Ariel might be, she sure as hell should be afraid. Didn’t people know how dangerous the internet could be?
He might not be any good at the emotional-support thing. But this was something he could handle. He could crash the site. All it would take was a DDoS—Distributive Denial of Service. You hammered the site with so much traffic that it shut down. A message board like this wouldn’t have the infrastructure to repel such an attack.
Sure, the organizers could set up another site, but the crashed-site alert about third-party applications or unwanted website visits was enough to unnerve most amateurs, especially if it happened a second time.
He found Colleen in the library; she was on her computer again reading the FindAriel.com board.
“This can’t be a good way for Autumn to go about finding Ariel,” he said.
“There are a lot of weird people posting,” she admitted.
“Worse than weird, I’d say. I am thinking about crashing the site.”
“What do you mean? Crashing it? Like taking it down? Is that legal?”
“It’s not as if I would be stealing passwords or people’s data.”
“But is it legal?”
He shrugged.
“No, Ben, really.” She pushed her computer away. “I know that you have had to learn how the hackers do all the bad things that they do, but surely you all are supposed to be like doctors—‘first, do no harm’ and all. Doesn’t your school have a code of ethics?”
It did, and when he had tried to contact Leilah last week, he had adhered to it. He had done a deeper search than your average Joe could do, but he had not crossed any lines. “I would not call this doing harm. They are the ones causing damage.”
“If you want to work for the government, aren’t they going to ask you if you’ve ever done anything like this?”
She had a point. The security clearance you needed for the best government jobs could be denied for pretty minor infractions. “There are lots of other places that only care what you promise to do in the future.”
“Haven’t you already done this to yourself once before?” Colleen demanded, her voice a little sharp.
Where was that tone coming from? She was sitting up very straight and looking at him directly, her eyebrows raised, her head slightly tilted. Apparently he had not been turning in his French homework on time. “Once before? What are you talking about?”
“Once before,” she continued, “you ruined your professional opportunities. You can’t work for any of the major snowboarding programs. Are you trying to make sure that you can’t work for the government either?”
Wow. He hadn’t see this coming. “That was different. I don’t want to coach in a program that I don’t think is safe enough or fair to the parents.”
“Then this is even more stupid because you wouldn’t have any high-falutin’ reason for doing it.”
Protecting innocent people from being harassed seemed plenty “high-falutin’” to him. “You’re making too big a deal of this. I don’t know for sure what jobs require a security clearance and whether something as nickel-and-dime as this would matter.”
“I don’t care if it is a half-a-cent matter.” She was very definite. “I won’t having you mess up this career on my account. If you don’t want to be in cyber-security, face that. Don’t back-door your way out of it. Whatever self-destructive urges you’ve got, you need to own up to them.”
Self-destructive urges? Not want to be in cyber-security? She was really going overboard. Sure, a felony conviction wouldn’t look great on a résumé, but no prosecutor would ever go after him for shutting down an amateur message board when there had been no monetary damages.
He could hair-split this until the cows came home, but he had asked her opinion. He probably hadn’t expected her to give one, but she had. He couldn’t go out and do it now.
At least he could leverage this noble behavior. “If I leave the message board up, I need you to agree to my staying here.”
“Why?” She suddenly looked a lot less schoolmarm-ish. Apparently her students didn’t try to make deals, or they weren’t as good at it as he was. “Are you afraid that I will do something stupid?”
He didn’t answer.
“Are you about to say that if I don’t agree, you will call my father?”
That had never occurred to him, but it wasn’t a bad idea, not because Dr. Ridge was her daddy, someone with patriarchal authority over her, but because he had been named executor. The executor was really the only one to authorize who could stay at the house.
“The estate doesn’t have an executor yet,” he answered. “When it does, I will ask permission. In the meantime, I hope you and I could discuss this as adults.”
“Oh, fine.” She sounded annoyed. “As long as you promise me that you won’t get all wizardy with this site.”
“I promise.”
* * * *
He came to regret that promise as the week went along. By Tuesday morning the Find Ariel people had found a likely candidate, a graphic artist in San Francisco. She was adopted. She was the right age. She had an October birthday. She was petite and delicately beautiful just as everyone was imagining Ariel to be. Tuesday night the website published her name and the addresses of her apartment, her office, and her parents’ home. By Wednesday Autumn’s fans were waiting outside her apartment, trying to get her DNA, refusing to leave her alone. By Friday her parents had hired a lawyer and had released a copy of her adoption papers, both the translation and the original Korean. She was petite and delicately beautiful because, as anyone looking at her picture should have known, she was by birth Asian.
What a nightmare for that family. Surely they would have wished that Ben had risked a future security clearance and shut down the site.
Feeling a little like a stalker, he checked Colleen’s Charlottesville address on Google Earth. She lived in a slightly funky old Victorian house that appeared to have been cut up into apartments. The street was residential. People could easily gather on the sidewalk. He looked at a map of her school. Its campus had several buildings and was connected by sidewalks to the grounds of a large church. A public road lay between the school’s main campus and its sports fields. She would be vulnerable there too. At least here at the lake there was only the one unmarked driveway. Colleen was probably safer here than anyplace else.
At least physically safer. Emotionally she didn’t seem to be doing so well. Once she finished her grandmother’s room, she pulled everything out of the downstairs coat closet and the closets in the attic bedrooms. By Thursday she was unfolding tablecloths, measuring each one, guessing the fiber content, assessing the stains, noting all this on a card, and refolding the cloth. Ben couldn’t imagine why it was important to do this.
He did not know what to do. He asked her if any of her friends were planning on visiting. That would be good. Maybe they could help her more than he could.
She said that, yes, Amanda and Jason were coming the Fourth of July; they might be bringing some other people. No, they couldn’t come any earlier. Amanda was working in the school’s summer athletic camp. The Fourth of July was the only time she could take more than one day off.
He felt helpless. One of the picture books that his older sister used to read to the rest of them had had a picture of a knight standing at the base of a stone tower. A beautiful princess was imprisoned in the top of the tower behind its one lone window. The knight had had a horse, armor, and a lance or whatever it was that knights had. None of those were going to help him reach the princess. Ben couldn’t remember which story it was or how it ended, but he supposed one or the other of them had figured something out.
Which was more than he could do. He longed to help Colleen…although it wasn’t clear that she wanted help from him. This Rapunzel was not going to let down her long hair, not when she didn’t trust the knight waiting below.
They had known each other forever. Their mothers had been such good friends. Why wasn’t that helping him reach her?
There was one other thing. It seemed like a very odd idea, but he couldn’t think of anything else. At lunch on Saturday, he suggested it. “I’m going to the five-thirty mass in the village tonight. Would you like to come with me?”
He had decided that he needed to phrase this as being about him wanting to go. This might result in him being stuck going to mass by himself, which would truly be a unique moment in ecclesiastical history, but at least it wouldn’t keep him from getting a security clearance.
She looked for a moment as if she might refuse, but then thought about it. “Actually, that would be nice. I mean, good,” she added quickly. “Good.”
The church in the village was small and built of rough-hewn stone; dim light came through the small stained-glass windows. Colleen paused inside the door to light a candle. After they took places in one of the wooden pews, she clasped her hands and bent her head. The window near them showed the Adoration of the Magi, and a ray of blue light, filtered by the Virgin’s dress, touched Colleen’s cheek.
He had always liked this about church, the peace. Mass had been the one time each week that the noisy Healys were quiet for an hour. His liking that silence had led his mother to think he should become a priest when, in truth, he hadn’t been paying any more attention to the service than his brothers.
The service opened with words that were deeply familiar. There were few other worshipers, so he and Colleen didn’t have to share a hymnal. He was sorry about that. As soon as Ryan and Kate had been old enough to keep order among the rest of them, his parents would sit side by side during church, holding hands. Then when they would stand for the hymns, they would be so close together that his mother’s curling red hair would flatten against the sleeve of his father’s dark suit.
Maybe that was part of why his dad liked going to mass.
He had made a dinner reservation at the historic inn that proudly displayed the bullet holes and scorch marks made during a Civil War skirmish. The hostess escorted them to one of the original rooms, small and away from the noisy family groups.
At each place setting, the utensils were rolled inside the napkins. Colleen unrolled hers and carefully placed the fork on the left and the knife and spoon on the right. She flipped the knife over so that the straight edge was next to the spoon. She was still adjusting the handles, making them line up perfectly, when she spoke. “I wish I had gone to confession. I am not proud of how I have been this week.”
He wasn’t sure that was a mortal sin. “You’ve been dealing with a lot.”
“I’m so full of resentment.” Now she was looking around the room. “I feel like Grannor was treating me like the paid help. All through Christmas I unpacked the crystal and silver. She told me the history of the pieces, but not once did she indicate that I wasn’t her ‘real’ granddaughter.”
“She probably thought that she was being generous including you in the will at all.”
“Like I said, paid help. She left her former maid money too. And it’s not just her. It’s all of them. My father is too angry to care about what is happening to me. He’s still refusing to be executor of the will. And my brothers. They work together; Patty and Liz are best friends. I felt left out. My whole family is falling apart. We weren’t like this when Mother died. I remember at her funeral feeling like we were all so close, that we would go on being a family even without her, but now…”
“Does that make Autumn Chase seem like a tempting option?”
“Well, sure, sometimes. If they don’t want me, I’ll find someone who will. But also no. All that stuff about second families. That’s not me. I just want my own family not to make me feel like an afterthought.”
“Have you told your father how you feel?”
“I don’t want to hurt him.”
“Colleen!” This was what was so frustrating about her. “I know this is going to sound super-critical”—he really did suck at emotional support—“but there is a consequence to spending so much time keeping from hurting other people’s feelings. They may not have any idea that they have hurt yours.”
“I’m not a victim, Ben,” she spoke firmly. “I don’t let people push me around. But I don’t want to make my problems a big deal for everyone else.”
She started to sound a little defensive. She wasn’t used to being criticizing. People didn’t criticize her, not because she was some kind of Queen Bee bitch whom people were afraid of, but because she really didn’t do much that was wrong. Her mistakes came when she acted from a quick impulse of her heart—which was what was worrying him about this search for Ariel.
He felt like he was stumbling through a jungle without a map. “Okay, but it ends up with people not understanding you. Or even resenting you.”
“Resenting me? Why would anyone ever resent me?”
“Leilah did.”
Oh, shit. He really should have called AAA for a TripTik before starting on this conversation. At some point he knew he needed to talk to Colleen about Leilah, to try to explain a little of what had happened. But now? What kind of timing was this?
She was waiting for him to say something. Finally she spoke again. “You have to say something, Ben. You can’t get away with the strong, but silent act, not after saying that.”
He nodded, acknowledging that she was right. “Because you don’t want to make a deal over your problems, you make it seem like you don’t have any, like everything comes easily to you. You’re always so pleasant; everyone always likes you. It seems as if you are sailing through life.”
The waiter arrived with their salads, and Colleen could only glower at him through the freshly-ground-pepper routine.
“You know that’s not true,” she said as soon as she could.
“I’m saying that’s the appearance you give.” There must be a lot of vinegar in the salad dressing. Ben could smell it without having picked up his fork.
“Okay, but why would Leilah care one way or the other about me and my life?”
“Honestly, I don’t know enough about her to be able to tell you why, but you saw how she acted like you were too spoiled to ever help with anything.”
“That drove me nuts, and it wasn’t like that at all when I was there at Christmas. I helped her with everything then. Wait.” She suddenly sat back from the table. “The two of you didn’t talk about me, did you? Oh my God, I do not want to hear about those conversations.”
“No. Never.” At least he had clear road here. “We didn’t talk about much, but certainly never you. I don’t mean to excuse myself here—”
“You don’t have to make any excuses. You didn’t owe me anything at that point.”
He ignored that. “The first moves were hers. It was a surprise, let me tell you. Your grandmother must have told her that you and I had been together, and she wanted to take away something that you might want.”
“Maybe.” Colleen didn’t sound convinced. “But, Ben, you are a very good-looking man. Maybe she just wanted you for yourself.”
He never knew how to respond to comments about his looks. He’d made a lot of money off of them, but the other guys were earning because of their success in the sport. He would have rather had that kind of money.
“It was more than that. Even though we never talked about you, I think the relationship was a whole lot about you.”
She stared at him, then slowly shook her head. “That makes me very uncomfortable.”
She looked as if she wanted to grab her purse and run. Some women did things like that. But she wouldn’t. She was a whole lot tougher than most people gave her credit for.
“Let me finish. You nailed it the other day, taking about my self-destructive tendencies, making sure that something good isn’t going to happen. I was as drawn to you as I was four years ago, but this time I knew that it wouldn’t be ‘something good,’ not in the long run. Your grandmother tried to fix us up without having a clue if I could make you happy. I don’t think that I could. We would end up just as before, and it would hurt more this time.”
Colleen looked at him with another one of her schoolteacher looks. That was something else that was different about her, everything she had learned from being a teacher. She picked up her fork. “Not thinking you can do something is pretty much a guarantee that you can’t, isn’t it?”
* * * *
Colleen had not liked hearing that anyone thought things came too easily for her. Okay, she didn’t have student loans, and maintaining a healthy weight wasn’t the nightmare that it was for some women, but still…especially now with her mother dead and her grandmother having disowned her, what was easy about that?
She hoped that Ben remembered what he had always said about his friend Seth, that no one worked harder or practiced more to make his tricks look effortless.
And Ben…was he correct about them not being right for each other? It was an awful thought, but they were both so quick to criticize the other, she accusing him of self-destructiveness, he accusing her of not having any backbone. Neither one of them was critical by nature. They weren’t bringing out the best in each other.
On their way to mass, they had picked up the mail and the newspaper from the end of the driveway. Colleen put the junk mail in the recycling bin and took the bills to the front room, where Leilah had kept Grannor’s checkbook.
They weren’t the first bills that had come in, and something was going to have to be done about them. The utility bills were coming due, and the semi-annual payment for the insurance on the house had to be paid by June. So far no medical bills had come; they must have first gone to Medicare and Grannor’s supplementary insurance, but eventually some percentage of them would need to be paid. Colleen had learned from the internet that Grannor’s estate would pay for all of this; the executor would have to set up a new checking account. But at the moment there wasn’t an executor.
Ben was definitely right about this—she needed to call her father and try to make him understand. Her father was entitled to be angry. Genevieve had been right about that. But if he let the anger block out everything else, he would cause more pain than he would ever allow a patient in his dental chair to feel.
She and Ben had gotten back from dinner at a little after eight. It was only seven o’clock in Chicago. There was no excuse not to call.
She got straight to the point. She wasn’t going to let this be just about the practicalities of paying the bills. “Dad, I know what is in your heart, but your actions are saying that you aren’t looking out for the three of us.”
“Have you been talking to Genevieve?”
“No, of course not.”
“She’s been saying that my refusing to be my mother’s executor may seem like I am abandoning you three.”
In her uneasiness about her father’s remarriage, she sometimes forgot that Genevieve Sisson had been her mother’s best friend. Genevieve probably knew more about Colleen and her brothers than anyone except their parents. “Yes, Dad. Yes, it does.”
“And she says that maybe this isn’t the best time to be neglectful of you.”
Genevieve must have been talking about Autumn Chase. “I know that you love me, Dad.”
“That isn’t something that should be ever called into question. I’ll call Tim Healy on Monday and tell him that I will handle the estate.”
He must have told his siblings first because Sunday morning Colleen got a call from Aunt Laura. “Colleen, dear, you do know, don’t you, that much of the jewelry is actually mine? Mother gave it to me on various occasions. She was just holding it because I travel so much.”
“I don’t know anything about that.”
“Why would you? But there’s no reason to go to the expense of appraising the things that belong to me. I’ll send you a list. If you send those pieces straight to me, they won’t have to go through probate and any nonsense about ownership and taxes.”
“We all have to do what the executor and the lawyers say.”
“What do they know about what my own mother said to me? I have pictures of myself wearing the pearls. There are three little rings in a small tin box, Mother gave them to me, and—”
Colleen stopped listening. Laura was lying. First of all, the stones in those rings were not little. Moreover, Grannor had said that she might give two of the rings to Will and Jeff. She had not given them to Laura.
A few hours later Colleen got a carefully worded message from Genevieve. Genevieve had offered to help Colleen’s father with the estate. There were a few things that had to be done at the lake. Would Colleen be agreeable to the two of them working together?
Colleen didn’t mind in the least. Genevieve was an interior designer with a successful business. Colleen’s mother had always said that Genevieve was the best person to be on a committee with. She always did what she said she was going to do and never complained about the way you did your share.
Colleen called her and told her that.
“What a nice thing to remember. I loved working with her too.”
The most urgent thing was to get the jewelry to a safe deposit box. Genevieve would work on finding one as soon as the banks opened on Monday, if Colleen would take the jewelry in.
“What about the house in Georgia?” Colleen asked. “Mr. Healy said something about having the fence and the chandeliers appraised separately.”
“I thought that the minute I saw the house. I am already getting some names together.”
Colleen decided to go look at the jewelry. Grannor’s triple-drawer walnut jewelry case was locked, but the key was in a small china dish on the other side of her dressing table. Colleen began unloading it, wanting to make a list of what was there. The pearls were in their own dark green padded velvet folder. Stamped in gold on the outside of the case were the name of a jewelry store and a street address in Paris. Colleen took the pearls over to the window and looked at them in the light. The silk thread had stretched enough that there were little spaces between a number of the pearls and the hand-tied knots. In some spots the thread was clearly fraying.
Just as she was putting them away, her phone rang. She didn’t recognize the number, but of course she answered anyway.
“Hi, it’s Kim. My mother gave me your number.”
Kim? Oh, Cousin Kim. Colleen couldn’t remember when they had last seen each other.
“She wanted me to talk to you about the jewelry, but as I see it, she’s trying to cheat both of us. She doesn’t want me to have it or for you to get paid for it.”
What a family. “I can only do what my father and Mr. Healy tell me to.”
“That’s good. I may not want any of that stuff, but I don’t want my mother getting it.”
“Grannor was very proud of the collection.” Colleen didn’t try to keep the reproof out of her voice. “Some of the pieces are beautiful.”
“Oh, God, I suppose I must sound awful, don’t I?” Kim apparently had some sense of decency. “But it was a surprise, my getting all this. For years Mother has been fussing that you might get more than your share because Grannor liked you so much. Every time she’d hear about you visiting her, she’d call me and say that you were sucking up, and that I needed to get in there too.”
Sucking up? All the time that Colleen was doing things that a daughter, that Laura herself, ought to be doing, and it was called sucking up?
“That’s why Mother made such a big deal out of me joining the DAR and the Daughters of the Confederacy because you couldn’t.”
Colleen had never given joining either organization a minute’s thought. “Why couldn’t I? Don’t adopted children count?”
“Apparently not. You have to have the blood. Mother always said that that was the one thing I had going for me in all this. I have Ridge blood. You don’t.”
If this was what Ridge blood amounted to, then her father might have been right. Colleen was lucky not to have it. “Kim, I hope you remember that the pearls absolutely have to be restrung.”
“What does that mean? Do you have to take them in to a jewelry store or something?”
“You should probably find a specialist. Seriously, Kim, that was one of the last things Grannor talked about.”
“Okay, sure. I’ll do it.”
Colleen didn’t believe her.
She felt uneasy. What if Laura tried to go to court to prove some of the jewelry was hers? How messy would that be? What Colleen needed to do was protect herself. She didn’t want there to be any question about what she was taking to the safe-deposit box.
Her grandmother had subscribed to the area newspaper. It wasn’t much of a paper. Some days she and Ben forgot to go to end of the driveway to pick it up. But it did have a Sunday edition. Colleen locked the jewelry back up and went outside to get it. She spread out the front page on Grannor’s bed and carefully photographed each piece of jewelry, making sure that the date was in the picture.
As she was taking a picture of the fox-head brooch, Ben knocked lightly on the frame of the open door. He looked at what she was doing. “I don’t know much about these things,” he said, “but isn’t that kind of ugly?”
“It’s hideous, but the eyes are diamonds.”
“Can you pry the diamonds out and sell them?”
“You’ll have to ask Kim about that. It’s hers.”
“Why are you photographing it on top of the newspaper?” he asked. “Wouldn’t it show up better on a blank background?”
“I’m establishing the date that I took the picture. People always talk about how time stamps on digital files can be altered.”
“That’s true, but all you’re doing is establishing that you didn’t take it yesterday. You could reproduce that shot any time from now on.”
He had a point. She slipped the brooch back into its little bag. “You know what, Ben? I don’t care. I agree that this might not make any sense, and I don’t really know why I am doing it, but I don’t think my relatives are very nice people. I’m circling the wagons.”
She didn’t usually worry about much. She used the same password on everything from her online banking to a junky cosmetics website. Circle the wagons? Pioneer Colleen would have gone out to greet the Indians with a potted plant and a tin of homemade cookies.
“Then print up a second copy of the pictures,” Ben suggested, “put them in an envelope, we’ll both sign our names across the flap. Mail it to yourself and then don’t open it. The postmark will set the date.”
“Would that work?”
He shrugged. “It can’t hurt.”
She sighed. She was being stupid. “This doesn’t make any sense, does it? I’m wasting time, aren’t I?”
“I think it’s good you are seeing the importance of protecting yourself.”
She recognized that tone. “This is about Autumn, isn’t it? Protecting myself against the perils of the internet?”
He didn’t deny it. “Have you seen the latest announcement on the website?”
She shook her head. “That was one of the things I promised myself during mass, that I would stop checking every five seconds. What’s the news?”
“Why don’t you finish up and we can sit down?”
“No. I can put away jewelry and listen at the same time. My auditory skills are actually quite good.”
She wasn’t usually this snippy, but between her awful relatives and Ben acting like she was six, some snippiness seemed in order.
“There’s going to be a television show,” he said, “a cable thing called Are You Ariel?”
“What?” A string of lapis lazuli beads slid out of her hand. “A television show? What are you talking about?”
Apparently one of the entertainment-oriented cable television channels was going to air a live special for the purpose of identifying Ariel. Any young woman who thought that she might be Autumn Chase’s relinquished daughter could submit an application. If she seemed to be a likely candidate, she would send a DNA sample. The samples would be tested beforehand, and the results would be revealed during the show while Autumn Chase herself sat in an off-stage room.
Colleen was sitting on the bed, looking up at him bewildered. “Like those shows where men find out if they are the dad or not the dad and end up throwing chairs? Like that?”
“They say it will be very tasteful. But I am surprised Autumn agreed. Her public persona has always been well managed until now.”
“Maybe some things are more important than public persona.”
“But she’s not just an actress anymore. She is a businesswoman. There are probably a lot of people whose livelihoods depend on the sales of her products. She must be feeling urgent to be taking this risk.”
Urgent? What did he know about the loss, the uncertainty, that Autumn might be feeling?
He waited for her to say something. When she didn’t, he came to sit down next to her. He had to pick up the beads. “Don’t you see that this is good for you? If one of them does prove to be Ariel, then you are out of it without any fuss or publicity.”
“So are you saying that my not being Ariel would be a good thing?”
“No, I am saying that a lot of publicity that we can’t control isn’t great, especially if it is pointless. And these women turning over their DNA? That’s risky. The producers say that they are promising confidentiality, but there’s too much at stake.”
“I don’t have anything to hide.”
“You don’t know that. Who knows what tests they will run? This isn’t supposed to happen, but you could have some marker that could someday make you uninsurable.”
She didn’t want to listen to him anymore. He was probably right, but she was a little tired of him being right. At least right about her life. He wasn’t doing such a perfect job of managing his own.
She pulled the beads out of his hand and jerked open one of the drawers of the jewelry box. She shoved the rest of the pieces back in, and locked it. She needed to find out about this TV show herself.
But as she waited for her computer to boot up, she knew that, however desperate she was to be doing something, she couldn’t fill out an application. It didn’t have to do with having a marker for strange, incurable diseases. It was her father.
He might not have the right to tell her not to contact Autumn, but Colleen certainly owed him the respect not to do it on national television.
She looked through the application on the website. They wanted a lot of information, birth certificate, height, weight, two pages of health history, a form that would allow them to access even more health records, previous addresses, Social Security number, and job history. If the DNA was going to give a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down, why did they need all this? What if the actual Ariel hated filling out forms?
She didn’t want to blame Autumn. Autumn was warm and generous, she was kind, she was funny. Autumn wouldn’t have had anything to do with designing this application. It had to be other people, not Autumn, never Autumn.