excerpt
Tanya drifted off to spend time with her friends. She seemed to
know a lot of people on the grounds and was very busy visiting
them. When he saw her with her friends in a show barn, it looked
to Joel like Tanya was in the middle of a reunion. Must be nice to
be popular, he thought. He was envious of this young woman’s
magic way of connecting with people. The incredible gift that
Tanya had for making friends was something that had been
totally absent in his own life.
There it was again. That head and heart thing. Joel had found it
too easy to escape into his head and block out the people around
him. One day, he had returned home from yet another engineering
assignment to realize that he had blocked out the people who cared
about him the most, his wife and baby daughter. Sure, that had
been a lot of years ago, but he paid the price for that every day. Not
that he missed his wife anymore. It wasn’t about that. It was about
his daughter. Joel had exhausted all means of tracking her down.
Maybe that is why Tanya was so special to him.Maybe Tanya was
becoming the daughter that he no longer had.
It had been fourteen years earlier that his wife Carolyn had left
him and taken his precious baby daughter Amber. His job had
him spending more time on the road in foreign countries than he
would have liked, but back then, he was prepared to write it off as
part of the territory of his job. If he insisted on just taking the
North American assignments, then he knew it would be a
career-limiting move. And he knew that Carolyn enjoyed living
close to her family in their New Jersey home. Too close to home
it seemed. The story, or as much of the story as Joel was able to
figure out, was that in his absence, Carolyn grew friendly with an
old flame from her high school days. One day, Joel returned from
a three-month assignment in Saudi Arabia hoping to convince
Carolyn to bring the baby along with them on his next assignment
in Venezuela. The more he pushed Carolyn on this point
the more defensive she became, and finally, one day after a trip to
the New York office, he returned to discover that Carolyn and his
daughter were gone.
Libros Libertad 