Chapter 1 Excerpt from
http://www.sweetvalleytenyearslater.com
EXCERPT – CHAPTER ONE
New York
Elizabeth had turned the key in the Fox lock, releasing a heavy metal bar that scraped across the inside of the front door with an impressive prison-gate sound, and was about to attack the Segal lock when the phone in the apartment started to ring. By the time she had opened the second lock and was sliding the key into the last one—this was New York, after all—the phone was on its fourth ring.
At almost midnight, it had to be the West Coast calling.
She could still grab it in time, but Elizabeth didn’t hurry. Slow, with purpose. Slow, giving the internal anger and hurt time to shoot from zero to a hundred. It needed only seconds, like the start-up speed of a Maserati. Except it was never at zero. Not anymore. Hadn’t been for the last eight months. And she couldn’t imagine a time when it would ever be there again.
As always, the hurt overpowered the anger, and what welled up into her throat came with tears that choked her.
“You going to get that?” David Stephenson, the young man standing next to her, asked as he stretched his arm over her head to hold the door open. David was six-three and at her five-seven it was way over her head.
“That’s okay,” she managed, quickly ducking her face away from him, stealing a sliver of extra time as she put the doggie-bagged pork chop she was carrying carefully and more precisely than necessary down on the hall table. It gave her enough time to catch her breath and let the tears slide back down her throat.
