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New
York Times: October 11, 1995

JEWELRY DESIGNER KILLS HUSBAND

By Gabriel McCail

Grace Leshansky Boudreau, the jewelry designer known professionally
as Grace L, shot and killed her husband Paul, Manhattan prosecutors
say, in the Hudson Street loft, which until last month the couple
had shared. Mr. Boudreau was a financial advisor and writer.

Police arrived on the scene at 1: 30 A.M. Tuesday in response to a
phone call from Grace Boudreau. At a brief press conference, NYPD
Lieutenant John Classon, in charge of the case, described Ms.
Boudreau as sounding calm on the phone.

When the officers arrived, Classon said, they found Ms. Boudreau
sitting on the couch staring at the victim who was lying on his
back on the floor maybe thirty feet in front of her. There had been
a single shot, the bullet fired from about fifteen feet. No sign of
a struggle.

"The victim would have died in minutes," Classon said. "The bullet
hit an inch under the heart. It was either a skillful shot or, as
his wife claims, 'dumb luck.'" Classon identified the weapon as a
Sig Sauer .38 caliber revolver, which Ms. Boudreau claimed to have
seen for the first time that night when her husband pulled it out
of his coat pocket. According to Classon, police investigation
shows no weapon registered to either Boudreau. He said, "Ms.
Boudreau has admitted to the shooting and is in custody."

Specific circumstances surrounding the shooting are unclear, but
the Boudreaus separated two weeks ago, according to friends, after
an incident at the Soho art gallery opening. Other guests at the
Huffman Gallery report that Grace Boudreau attacked her husband,
knocking him against a large canvas on exhibit, allegedly damaging
the painting and the one hanging beside it. The following day, he
moved from the couple's loft to the Chelsea Hotel. He was still
registered there when he died. The same day, Ms. Boudreau filed for
a court order of protection to bar her "abusive" husband from
entering the loft or otherwise coming within fifty feet of her. The
order had not yet been issued.

Sources close to the couple called the two-year marriage, "always
intense," and said that it had been "stretched to the snap point"
by a series of misfortunes beginning about seven months ago with
the disappearance of Ms. Boudreau's father under mysterious
circumstances, and peaking with sudden, dramatic reverses in her
business. The six-year-old Grace L Company produces Ms. Boudreau's
striking jewelry designs, often combining precious metals with
unlikely materials such as driftwood, bottle glass or industrial
nails. The enterprise had been from its inception a great success
but recent over-leveraging, over-commitment and late deliveries put
the company in jeopardy, according to business associates. On July
16, it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

Grace Boudreau's father, George Leshansky, an accountant said to be
a habitual gambler, disappeared last March. The story received
intense media coverage at the time, most of it speculative. It was
rumored that Leshansky had been slated to testify in the FBI's case
against Josh Pyatt, alleged boss of a Harlem-based mob involved in
loan-sharking, protection and other forms of racketeering. The FBI
declined comment. To date, neither Leshansky nor his body has been
found. He is presumed dead. Initial suspicion focused heavily on
the Pyatt family, specifically on Josh's son, Michael, but no
charges were brought.

Four days before his death, Paul Boudreau had turned 32. Grace
Boudreau is 33.

Chapter 1

October 3, 2002

I'd been charged with murder. The lawyers had pleaded it down to
manslaughter. Manslaughter. The slaughter of a man: the bloody
sound of it had seemed to me worse than murder, and still
does.

They'd pronounced me lucky, my lawyers had: lucky that it had been
Paul's gun; lucky I'd put in for the court order of protection
against him even if it hadn't had time to come through; lucky that
everyone knew about my monumental losses - my father, my business;
lucky I had behaved erratically in public. All of this supported
the claim that the killing was unpremeditated. After all, I hadn't
gone out and bought a gun, but simply been swept away, provoked in
my vulnerable state into the impulse to use a weapon ready at hand
- Paul's weapon.

Premeditated. Swept away. Provoked. Vulnerable. Impulse: the terms
with their self-important airs marched, heads high, masquerading as
hard facts. Like little soldiers they'd protected my flanks. Oh
yes, one lucky lady, that's me. But of course I was: five to
twelve, out in seven, as opposed to, say, seven to fifteen, six to
eighteen - life. That could be seen as luck.

Here I stood now in a changing room for just-released prisoners,
peering at myself full-length: charcoal pants, black turtleneck
sweater, shiny black shoes with small silver buckles and, unseen in
the mirror but a definite presence, silken underwear - every item
expensive; every item brand new. I was unused to looking into
mirrors and the experience jarred. It seemed like the reflection
had dimension, life, was ready to walk away, while I was flat and
without substance, a figment of my own imagination.

I'm half an inch shy of six feet. My build used to be generous like
an Olympic swimmer's, skin taut over a layer of insulating flesh.
But seven years in prison lost me the habit of eating much,
developed the habit of exercise, lots of it, which had leaned my
body out. The eyes that looked back at me were still my eyes: the
color of Russian amber, yellow flecked with dark bits - tiny
prehistoric fossils maybe. They are set wide, shaped by the high
cheekbones beneath them into crescent moons, suggesting a smile no
matter what. My nose is straight and emphatic; the chin, though
small, has a jut to it, and my long, mobile mouth belongs on a
comedian. The features were there, intact, but my face had changed
anyway: it reminded me of a slum store shuttered for the
night.

And then there was my hair. During the first two years up here in
Bedford Hills, its Indian black began a leaching to white - all but
a wide, off-center skunk streak that held stubbornly onto darkness.
The hair hung in a fat braid to my waist. Funny, I'd always
wondered whether there was Indian blood in me - hoped there
was.

I glanced down at the stylish, witchy points on my shoes. The new
leather felt stiff on toes used to spreading themselves in
sneakers. Sheilah Donlan had arrived here early this morning her
arms filled with tissue-plumped Bergdorf shopping bags. Sheilah and
I went back as far third grade together - the only person on the
outside I knew anymore. For the past half an hour she'd been
bustling around me like a mother dressing her child for the first
day at a new school, handing over the outfit piece by piece,
talking up the provenance of each item, its particular claim to
wonderfulness. Sheilah's mirror reflection stood behind mine,
holding out a hand now, offering "A little blush?"

I turned to the actual Sheilah and said, "I don't know a fancier
way to say thanks, but if I did I would." Sheilah said, "I'm your
friend. It's what friends do. You'd do it for me. You've
done it for me." True, I'd seen Sheilah through a booze and
pills crack-up, checked her into Four Winds Hospital not so many
miles from here, collected her two months later, clean and sober.
But that was then. Now I seriously doubted whether I had the
emotional horsepower to fuel the complicated demands of a civilian
friendship, particularly one with Sheilah who gives too much and
wants too much back.

I thought of Toukie and Wanda and Mercedes, lifelines during the
years that are about to become the past - friendships rooted in
impermanence, stripped of demands, vigorous maybe for just those
reasons. Chiefly, I pictured Toukie's smart black eyes and the gold
tooth that twinkles when she laughs. We'd had a special bond: two
women who had killed their men.

"Thanks, Sheil. I'll just leave it at thanks for now," I said
taking the blush compact and brush, turning back to the mirror to
apply it. The luxurious fabrics felt illicit against my skin as I
moved, taunting in a way that I thought for a moment might make me
cry. Actually, I'd love to cry. A big, long jag of wet sobs would
be as satisfying as… a comparison doesn't spring to mind
immediately, then it does: as satisfying as a good come. The
homecoming queen, Paul used to call me. But that was then,
too.

In these seven years I had schooled the riskier emotions with a
hard hand, dressage discipline of dangerously frisky horses -
something like that. I could laugh within bounds but produce not a
tear; rushes of anger sparked and quickly fizzled like wet
firecrackers: mad, sad, glad - all three were there but powerless.
Sex? The ex-homecoming queen's urges were frozen or dried to dust -
one way or another, so out of commission that going gay for the
stay, as they put it up here, had not been even vaguely
tempting.

Yet… Yet, as I stood before that mirror, Sheilah watching
expectantly, my insides asked for the buzz of strong feeling, the
kind that bucks in the gut, races the pulses. A first day of
freedom should be marked, shouldn't it, if only to prove you're
alive? But no luck. I could tap no feeling other than the craving
for feeling, a feeling in the second degree. Maybe this was how it
would be now: a life in the second degree to pay for a death in the
second degree. Laid on the line that way, it seemed only
fair.

"Do you feel remorse?" they had asked. I'd said,
"Yes," knowing it was the answer they - the judge, the
police, the psychiatrist, the parole board - needed. The parole
board didn't buy it at the first hearing, the five-year mark; they
almost never did, I'd been warned, in a case like this. They'd hit
me for two more years. At the second hearing the same simple
"yes" rang truer to them.

Did it ring true to me? Does it now? Well, it was true that at the
crack of the shot, the kick of the gun in my hand, Paul's body
jerking back, I had hollered "No." I remembered clearly my
finger tightening on the trigger, knowing that it was; the terrific
jolt to my own body - then, his slow wilting collapse, the sounds
from him, except for the very last one, drowned out by my scream. I
remembered also the preceding hour, every bit of it, every word,
every move, though I said I did not.

"Yes:" a clear answer to their clear questions. But how
could I seriously claim remorse when I knew that given the final
moments to relive exactly as they'd gone, I might do exactly what
I'd done?

"You feeling bad?" Sheilah asked moving toward me. "You look a
little shaky."

"No," I lied, fooling neither of us. "No, I'm good - just ready to
get the hell out of here."

###

"The owner's a dancer on tour with some Andrew Lloyd Webber show,"
Sheilah said. It was maybe half an hour later and we were driving
down the Hutch, The Bedford Hills Women's Correctional Facility a
good five miles behind us. "Look, don't expect anything grand. It's
kind of a skinny building scrunched in between two better ones - no
doorman, but you said you didn't care. I signed a nine-month lease
for you. That's when he'll be back."

"Sounds perfect." I said, trying to be positive despite a sense of
dread beginning to rise like a fog around my heart. So this was
freedom: a vast, shapeless space said to be filled with
possibilities - but I could see only pieces of possibilities and
even those felt beyond my reach.

"Ninety-third Street, you said, Sheil?"

"Ninety-fourth, just east of Amsterdam, remember?"

"Oh, right, you told me that. And I do care about the
doorman. I'm God damned relieved there isn't one. I've had enough
hall monitors to last me awhile."

"Ah, Sweets. It's going to take you time to get over this." Like a
cold or a car accident or a divorce. After years spent thickening
my skin, I found myself suddenly skinless, too ready to be chafed
by a brush against anything, even a friend's sympathy.

"How much money do I have left from the loft sale and all?" I
asked. "I know you told me that, too, but…"

"God, for someone who's made a lot of it, you're really hopeless
about money."

Paul: "Back in Century One B.C. some smart Roman said, 'Money
alone sets all the world in motion.' Ergo, the one who runs the
money spins the earth... I'm pretty good at it."

Grace: "I'm not. I seem to know how to make it and how to save
it. Want to feed my nest egg some growth hormones? Just tell me
where to sign."

Paul: "Hmm. Let me think about that. You're my wife, may be a
bad idea."

Paul had been nothing if not subtle. No rush… I reminded
myself that replays like this one were hot coals, to be handled
with tongs - imagery picked up in the stress management therapy
group, Tuesdays and Thursdays at four.

"Hopeless about sums it up," I said, back with Sheilah. "So what's
the bad news?"

Her nose wrinkled with the arithmetic of my finances. "After
brokers, lawyers and all, just over twenty-three thousand, except
for the paintings and sculptures you wanted to keep." Just a few of
the many I'd owned - mostly by artists who'd been friends of
mine.

"I'd have to be flat out broke to sell those, not that they'd be
worth all that much in the world of dealers and collectors."

"Probably not. But look, you're not flat out. You'll have
the salary from me, at least for the short range."

We'd known each other at close range for thirty years - long enough
for us both to recognize it would be no walk on the beach, me
working for her. But we both recognized also that for a paroled
convict a solid job in waiting was worth almost any walk required,
plus a kiss on the ground beneath her feet.

"I still suspect you didn't exactly need another mouth to feed," I
said. "I really will try to be useful. Hey, thanks to you I am - in
discharge manual lingo - an employed woman with a domicile and bank
account - a good bet to re-enter society as a responsible
citizen."

"Bet your ass you are! And I didn't invent the job. Swear.
I've taken on another recruiter and a full-time research guy -
who's fabulous, by the way, and I pay him a fortune. I admit it's
scary, the extra expense, but I had to do it. The search business
is way more complicated than it was - much more work, and thank God
the work's coming to me. Used to be that our mandate was finding
and wooing the best candidates. Now we practically have to
do an FBI check to make sure they've been good boys and girls as
well as good executives. Not all

of them have, which means more recruits, more meetings. So I'm
there some nights till ten, phoning and emailing my little heart
out. What I'm saying is I need to be nicer to myself. I mean what's
the good of making it if all you get is the chance to work
harder?"

"Right." A shrink's question and Sheilah, always the student with
her hand raised highest, had the right answer. But the answer in
her case came with a footnote: her fingers would never really come
off those details, not if she had a dozen schedulers. "Email," I
said, "you'll have to teach me that. The Internet got big just
about the time I went in. We weren't allowed to mouse around in
cyberspace up there."

"You'll learn it in half a second. But look, you know and I know
this isn't the kind of work you're used to, or ought to be doing in
the long run." No use in recapping what I was currently used to, or
in pointing out that the long run was territory as remote to me as
the afterlife. "By the time the dancer gets back and wants his
apartment, Gracie, you'll be…"

Sheilah kept talking but I didn't hear the rest. My thoughts had
cut and run down a private path after "Gracie." She called me that
only occasionally, a kind of reminder of how long we went back
together. With George gone, she was the only one who did. I'd been
Gracie; he'd been George, never been Dad or Daddy. He was George
from the time I could talk. It suited the way we were with each
other. Now say Jawge. Atta girl. I could hear his charred
voice, with its Noo Yawk dips and swells. And you're Gracie.
Gray-see. What else would a Jawge name his girl?

Especially this George: when I saw George Burns on
television re-runs and later in the movies, the fox-faced, dapper
look, as well as the hoarse vaudeville sound of him, were uncannily
like my father - well, like George Leshansky might have been, given
the luck and swagger to be a winner.

Burns and Allen were our household mascots, a scratchy record of
their stage and radio skits on the priority list of stuff that came
along each time we moved: George, the faintly gruff, exasperated
but protective leader; Gracie, the adorably child-voiced dumb-bell
always trumping his ace, far wiser in her innocence than he. I said
mascots, not models - I was no more adorable than George was
protective, and wisdom was scarce in our household.

How to explain about George and me… We were a team, just us
two. Originally, there must have been a third team member, but she
was gone before my memories began. George never mentioned her, and
during my earliest years there seemed nothing strange about that.
By the time my curiosity began to put out shoots, George's
elusiveness about anything to do with family ties was normal too.
Asking became a kind of half-hearted game

"So who was my mom? Come on George, did she run away or die or
what?"

"Who do you want her to be?"

"A Indian warrior princess."

"You got it, kid."

"No, tell me, really."

"A seven-foot Indian warrior princess with very long legs. That's
how come she could run so fast and not trip on her bow and arrows.
Look, I'm going out for a coupla hours. You be okay?"

"Sure. Bring back ice cream. Chocolate."

"Say goodnight, Gracie."

I can tell you what my first retrievable memory is:

I am sitting in a corner of an unfamiliar room, one eye shut, the
other pressed against the peephole of a kaleidoscope, fixed on the
stained glass patterns inside that change at the slightest move of
my hand, loving the look of them, frustrated that I can't save the
ones I like best, keep them forever, because if I could, I would be
safe - safe from what I don't really know; I have no recollection
of feeling scared. At a table in the center of the room, men are
smoking and dealing out cards, slap, slap, slap. They give and take
red, white and blue discs from each other; that makes a louder
sound. They don't talk much, except to repeat words like "raise"
and "call." From time to time some of them look really mad at each
other or like their stomachs hurt bad. One of them is George. My
age would be five - that's my best guess.

When I recall that little girl I begin to feel sorry for her, and
then I bring myself up short and stop it. George was a singleton in
his heart, a gambler in his blood and bone, a man unsuited in his
nature to be a parent, yet his daughter never went cold or hungry
or threadbare, nor was she abandoned or afraid she might be - never
hit, never threatened, never made to feel boring or
burdensome.

Quite the contrary, my father tended to me (for if not, who did
change those diapers, fill those bottles with milk?) until I was
old enough to begin some tending of him. And how heady is that: to
be necessary when you're too young to have earned anyone's
confidence, too young to deserve such importance! I was cherished,
if not in the orthodox way a parent cherishes a child, then in
another way. George depended on me, and I depended on that. You
could say ours was a house of cards in more ways than one, a house
where laughs and music punctuated the states of emergency - or the
other way around. Nevertheless, it was ours…

A tap at my shoulder: Sheilah's forefinger, insistent in its touch.
As I turned, I saw the gleam of gold and copper, a ring I'd made
her fifteen years ago. "Earth to Gracie. This is too much stuff for
you, right? I'm overloading you with information. Here's the thing,
though: You'll live in that little apartment for now and you'll
work for me, but in what - a few months? - you'll be designing
again, and then..."

"No, I won't," I cut in. She had touched a nerve and the pain was
sharp.

"You won't? But that's crazy. You design jewelry, that's what you
do, who you are. How you make your living. Since we were
kids it's always been…"

"Look, I said won't; I mean can't. My hands are not steady, okay?
Satisfied now?" It came out like the sudden snarl of an
animal stroked the wrong way. "Christ, I'm sorry," I said. I looked
at her hurt face and remembered that she'd gone through her own
hell and bounced back. The animal I felt like was a swine. "Sorry,
really," I said. "Give me half a minute to catch my breath,
Sheil."

"Don't you be sorry, Sweets, I'm sorry. I was moving
in on you - occupational hazard. I'm a headhunter - that's what
they pay me for," she added with a small, determined laugh. "But
look, your hands will be fine once you… settle back in, and
even if… Well, you wouldn't have to actually make the
pieces any more, just design them. Oops, there I go again." She
shook her head, the glossy deep red of it a match for the darkest
of the autumn leaves. Like all her gestures, it was big enough to
draw attention to itself.

"I had an offer a few months ago to just design," I said. "Gun
motifs with my name attached to them. Some outfit wanted to sell
them on cable TV. Outlaw chic was what they called it in their
letter."

"I'm not even going to ask if you're kidding, I'm sure you're not.
But you know that kind of sleaze isn't what I'm talking about. My
GraceL pieces are the ones I always reach for - just like everybody
who owns them. You've got a gift. Of course you need to keep
using it."

"I'm not a sketch artist, okay? I'm a jeweler. Was. I was a jeweler
who made things and then had some of them reproduced and marketed
very profitably. However, a jeweler who can't hold a welding torch
steady or set a stone right is no jeweler. So, that's it."

"But…" The sharp twang of rebuttal made my teeth grind. She
might apologize but she never, ever gave up.

"Sheilah. No. "

She held up one hand, palm out. "Peace. You know me, the
single-minded striver, universal care-taker." She gave a little heh
heh of a laugh. "Prototypical only child of an alcoholic."

I pictured a pale, willowy blond - two drops of Mayflower blood in
her veins and lots of attitude about it; drinking vodka, pretending
it was ice water. She called herself, grandly for the run-down
Washington Heights tenement where we all lived, Mrs.
Carpenter-Donlan: the Carpenter to mark the blue blood she claimed,
the Donlan to prove someone had married her once.

"Remember how she used to keep at me?" Sheilah asked with the
rueful tone mention of her mother usually triggered, "my pan face,
pug nose - and God how she hated my freckles."

"All of those are long gone, Gorgeous. Actually, I always thought
your freckles were kind of cute. So, has Mrs. C-D softened with age
in the last seven years?"

"Oh right! She keeps the booze in better check, at least around me
because she's just a little scared I might cut her off otherwise
but she's still the killer she always was and …" Her eyes
flicked away from the road ahead to give me a stricken
glance.

"What're you gonna do, censor every word you say in front of me?
You know, up there we'd use the word about ourselves, some of us
would. Maybe saying it is just easier than not saying it." I didn't
add that others of us would not talk that talk ever, and anyone who
dared it in their presence could end up with a cracked rib or
burned arm as a penalty for bad judgment.

The set of Sheilah's face still telegraphed discomfort. And why
shouldn't she be uneasy? Why would any civilian be at ease with one
of us?

"Come on, finish what you started to say about your mother."

"Oh, same old same old: I don't tell her to go to hell. She lives
like a rich lady, sips her Smirnoff in a fancy glass a block away
from me in Murray Hill. I pick up the tab and buy her extras tied
up with ribbons, and I still can't catch a break with her."

But she kept on with the minuet anyway, courting, wanting, hoping.
Hell, she'd named her firm Carpenter-Donlan Associates, brooking no
argument from shrink or friend.

In a fast turnabout, which took me by surprise she said, "Paul was
such a bastard, such a beautiful bastard - that voice, like a TV
evangelist. He could sell you salvation, or the Holland Tunnel ten
minutes after you found out he didn't own the Brooklyn Bridge you
just bought."

This was not new territory for us. She wanted to talk about Paul,
about the rest of it, trawling maybe for some way to see into my
head, to truly understand. "The voice was a lot better than any TV
evangelist," I said evenly, "but please, I don't want to go
there."

"You're going to have to go there sometime." I went often,
not with any company though. She knew as much as she knew; lawyers
and shrinks knew what I'd told them. Sheilah continued like a
stream running where it always ran, "Grace, you could have pleaded
innocent: self defense, temporary insanity. Better lawyers
would've done it, I told you that. You'd applied for the
restraining order…"

"It was not self-defense," I said for not the first or the
twentieth time, "not the way the law means that. And if you think I
was nuts you've got ample reason, but again, not legal reason."
From a standing start, my heart began to pound like something
needing to get out.

"The man stole from you, wrecked your business. I swear if
anyone did that to me, I'd…"

"You don't know what you'd do," I said through gritted teeth.
"Could… could we just not talk for awhile?"

We drove on, quiet except for the white sound of good tires on good
pavement, until Sheilah turned on the radio to the lulling beat of
some easy listening station. After some Joni and Beatles and
Bonnie, I was the one who broke the silence. "Seeing any new men,
lately?" It was an olive branch - better for us both than a lame
explanation or another apology.

"Uh huh." She always was. "Briefly." That too. "Well, not
that briefly, about five months. I didn't mention him when I
came up because… I don't know, maybe I thought he'd be
something and I didn't want to jinx it. Anyway, he's a sports
agent: tall, cute, nice sense of humor - very high powered. But
he'd have these headaches at the end of an evening, so I after a
while I began to figure there might be someone else on his screen.
And of course there was. Not some cute little actress or model,
though. Guess what, my competition was the second-string goalie for
the New York Rangers. Can you imagine?"

Her lips stretched into something halfway between smile and
grimace. She was trying to entertain me and I could've kissed her
for the effort. Then she grinned for real and the taut, ivory face
relaxed. For a moment she resembled Sheilah Donlan of twenty-five
years ago, before her features had been chiseled, laminated, peeled
and implanted up to her standards, or her mother's - Sheilah
Donlan, from a time when we were sure we'd grow up invincible
because we were quick, talented and tough-willed.

"Love you," I said.

"You even love my big mouth?"

"Even that," I said. "Hey, who else would've schlepped up there
almost every week for seven years to spend half an hour with a
cranky felon in baggy green pants?"

"Can I say something? Promise you won't get mad."

I took a very deep breath. "Shoot," I said.

"A couple of your friends called me - Danton Redondo, Jan Simone.
They want to see you, Gracie, but they don't want to... you know.
Your new number's unlisted. I said… well, you'd call
them."

There are two kinds of prisoners, the kind who live for visits and
the kind who barely live through them. The first are mostly people
with families, the prospect of overnights in a prison trailer with
husband or kids their searchlight in the fog. I'd been the second
kind: no family, only the fog. And thirty minutes of stilted small
talk with someone who can go home only made the fog thicker. One by
one, I'd turned them away or turned them off. Except for Sheilah
who had just kept coming and, don't ask me why, but she would
stride into that visitors' room her hair a flaming rebuttal to the
gray-gray sterility and I'd be glad to see her. Most of the time I
would be.

"I will," I said. "I just couldn't handle it when people would come
up there. I was awful. I'm surprised Danton or Jan or anyone wants
to bother with me. I'll call them - but maybe not right away. I
need some time to kind of learn… how to be."

"Of course." Half a beat. "Just one more thing?"

"I may be thinged out, Sheil."

"The hair. It makes you look like Joan Baez playing Pocohontas's
mother. I mean, a long, white braid? You're forty years old!"

My laugh was pure relief. "Pocohontas's mother was probably dead by
the time she was forty. But I get your point."

"Good, because I've booked you with William at Garren tomorrow at
two thirty. Garren, the hair place at Bendel's? He's a genius;
he'll have you looking like you again. Even better now that you've
lost - how many pounds?"

"I don't know how many pounds, but you have to know I'm not
me again - and a haircut won't change that. I'll tell you what,
I'll let the genius lop the braid off because I don't want to
embarrass you in your office, but the gray hairs stay gray. I've
earned them and I own them."

Excerpted from A FRACTURED TRUTH © Copyright 2003 by
Caroline Slate. Reprinted with permission by Atria Books. All
rights reserved.

 

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