Читать книгу Saving Alyssa - Loree Lough - Страница 2

“My name is Alyssa. What’s yours?”

“Billie.”

“But … but Billy is a boy’s name.”

“Only if you spell it B-i-l-l-y. I spell it B-i-l-l-i-e.”

“There’s a boy in my class,” Alyssa said from the backseat, “and his name is Billy– Daddy! Look!” His child pointed across the street. “Isn’t that little white dog the cutest thing ever?”

If he ever said yes to a dog, it sure wouldn’t be a yappy ankle-biter like that one. “Uh-huh,” he said. When he had been forced to leave her favorite doll at the airport, Noah had soothed her tears by promising to replace it with a kitten.

“If I had a dog,” she said, “it would be big. Like the one you had when you were a little boy, ‘member, Daddy?”

How could he forget the gentle giant that had been more sibling than pet? “Cash. My dad named him Cash Money, because he’d been abused before we adopted him, and cost a fortune at the vet’s.”

Noah glanced over at Billie, and for a moment there, the woman in the passenger seat looked mildly interested. She pointed left. “You just passed my street,” she said.

Noah groaned. That meant driving up to Hamilton Street to make a U-turn in the post office parking lot. Halfway there, traffic on Main Street slowed, then came to a grinding halt. Noah gripped the steering wheel until his knuckles ached. Trapped at a dead stop between parked cars and the constant flow of traffic heading east, he and Alyssa–and Billie, too–might as well have bull’s-eyes painted on their foreheads… .