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    Flood Tide
    Flood Tide
    Flood Tide
    Ebook91 pages1 hour

    Flood Tide

    By Iris Forester

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Elena and Peter have known each other since childhood, but they grew up separated by a web of family secrets. Elena knows they can never have a future together unless she can prove to Peter what she has always known: That they are not, in fact, related. However, old secrets sometimes die along with people, and Elena has to struggle through stormy waters in an effort to discover the truth. Even when she uncovers the lies they both were told, it may be too late for her and Peter.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBryant Street Shorts
    Release dateSep 22, 2020
    ISBN9781094413747
    Author

    Iris Forester

    Iris Forester is never happier than when she’s tossed everything aside to follow one of the story threads that cross her path. She shares her home place with eagles, ravens and owls — but also makes time every year to spend in New York City. When she’s not writing, Iris works with paint, clay, and various difficult creatures.

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      Book preview

      Flood Tide - Iris Forester

      Prologue

      Sixteen-year-old Kristin held out her arms with a resentful scowl as her mother placed the baby carefully into them. It was about time; Kristin had been home from the hospital for a week already, waiting for her newborn daughter to be discharged. She lifted the pink blanket from the head end of the tiny bundle and then stared at her mother in shock. She didn’t have black hair when she was born!

      Babies’ hair always changes in the first few weeks, Marie replied and busied herself with unpacking diapers and formula. Kristin gazed down at the sleeping infant with a strange expression on her face, but her mother didn’t notice.

      Later that night, when the house was finally quiet, Marie got into bed beside her husband. Did it work? Does she believe it’s hers? he asked.

      Of course she believes it. She’s sixteen — what does she know? Marie answered with certainty and turned over to sleep with the satisfaction of a job well done.

      Chapter One

      Elena looked up and frowned as the boy walked into her living room with a duffel bag clutched in front of him.

      Don’t step on my wings, she ordered him. He stopped in his tracks, peering down over the bulky bag. A mess of tissue paper was spread across the floor at his feet, and in the middle of it all was nine-year-old Elena, near tears and covered in paste. She had told her mother she would need wings for her costume for the fourth-grade play the next day, but her mother had merely handed her a bag with some crumpled tissue paper and other packing material in them. Now, everything was sticky, and when Elena tried to unstick her fingers from the delicate paper, it simply disintegrated.

      Elena, this is Peter, Elena’s mother, Kristin, told the girl. Grandpa and Grandma are adopting him, so he’s going to live with us.

      You already told me, Elena reminded her mother. Why did grown-ups always have to say things over and over? Her mother and grandparents had been talking for weeks about how eleven-year-old Peter, who had been a foster child of some cousins, would be coming to live with all of them in their house. When they first mentioned it, Elena hadn’t been sure she liked the idea of another child in the house. In an effort to figure this out, she had asked if Peter was related to her.

      Elena’s mother and grandmother had exchanged tense glances, and then her mother said, He’s a step-relative.

      A step-uncle, actually, her grandmother Marie added, and again, an odd look passed between them. Elena didn’t know the word step, either, so she gave up on asking questions and decided to just wait and see what Peter was like.

      Now, he was standing in front of her, and he looked startlingly like Elena’s mother. The resemblance was so striking that Elena decided step-uncles were obviously related somehow. She stared at him, examining his fine, straw-colored hair. It fell in the same silky strands as Kristin’s, brushing past thin high cheekbones. And his eyes: Those were her mother’s deep blue eyes. Even the sprinkling of freckles across his pale face was familiar.

      Families are weird, Elena thought. She herself looked nothing like Kristin or Peter. Elena’s plump pink cheeks and dense, short brush of black hair were woven into family storytelling as the surprising outcome of her father’s Sicilian heritage. Elena’s father had never been married to Kristin, and he had left when Elena was still a baby. Kristin had been so very young, only sixteen, when Elena had been born, and the entire episode was shrouded in deep shame. One of the many unspoken household rules was that Elena must never ask questions about her father. When she tried, her mother fell into a bleak silence for three or four days that Elena found terrifying.

      Elena scrutinized Peter further to determine if he was someone she could like. The boy dropped to his knees near her project and asked what she was doing. His eyes may have looked like her mother’s, but they shone on Elena with an entirely different gaze. His face was lit with warm curiosity, and his mouth looked somehow gentle. Despairingly, Elena explained that she was supposed to be Tinkerbell in the fourth grade play and she didn’t know how to make wings. Tinkerbell had to have wings. Peter picked up a few of the pathetic scraps, and seeing them in his hands made Elena realize freshly how hopeless it was. The tears that had pooled in her big brown eyes began to roll down her cheeks.

      Now, Elena, Peter’s tired from the flight, her grandmother said. Don’t bother him with your schoolwork.

      I’m not tired, he answered and turned back to the miserable little girl. I might have a better idea for how to make wings. Do you have a stapler?

      Over the course of the next hour, Elena watched Peter with near worship as he took a thin, almost transparent shirt out of his duffel bag and began slicing it up with a pair of sharp scissors. Her grandmother watched disapprovingly, not saying anything, but Elena couldn’t imagine being bold enough to actually cut up one’s own clothing.

      I never liked this shirt, Peter whispered to her and gave her a secret smile that nobody else could see. Bending the transparent material around a couple of sturdy loops he made out of wire coat hanger and stapling it in place, Peter magically produced a pair of such convincing wings that Elena was dumbstruck with admiration. He added a couple of ribbon-like straps to tie the wings to her shoulders, and she was speechless with gratitude. That night, she lay in her bed with the wings hung over her doorknob and stared out her window at the stars.

      Suddenly, a single thought thundered through her being. Peter. He had just flown in from far away. It was like the Peter Pan story, turning into real life in her very own house! And he had come to stay! Thrilled and breathless, the little girl gazed out at the night sky and fell asleep before she could decide which star was the second star to the right that he had flown in from.

      Chapter Two

      At ten years old, Elena knew she was a little

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