Jodi Picoult - Second Glance

PRAISE FOR JODI PICOULT

Picoult is a writer of high energy and conviction...
she forges a finely honed, commanding and cathartic drama.
Booklist

Picoult writes with a fine touch, a sharp eye for detail, and a firm
grasp of the delicacy and complexity of human relationships.
The Boston Globe

The novelist displays an almost uncanny ability to enter the
skins of her troubled young protagonists.
New York Times

Picoult has the true storytellers ability to evoke a world on the
page and pull the reader into it.
The Womens Review of Books

Engrossing... The Pact is compelling reading, right up to
the stunning courtroom conclusion.
People

[Keeping Faith] makes you wonder about God. And that is
a rare moment, indeed, in modern fiction.
USA Today

[Plain Truth] reads like a cross between the Harrison Ford
movie Witness and Scott Turows novel Presumed Innocent, with
a dose of televisions The Practice thrown in.
Arizona Republic

Part thriller, part courtroom drama and part family portrait,
Perfect Match is an intriguing what if .
Sydney Morning Herald

By Jodi Picoult

Songs of the Humpback Whale

Harvesting the Heart

Picture Perfect

Mercy

The Pact

Keeping Faith

Plain Truth

Salem Falls

Perfect Match

Second Glance

My Sisters Keeper

Vanishing Acts

The Tenth Circle

Nineteen Minutes

Change of Heart

Handle with Care

JODI
PICOULT
Second Glance

This edition first published in Australia and New Zealand by Allen & Unwin in 2009
First published in Australia in 2003
First published in the United States in 2003 by Atria Books, a division of Simon &
Schuster, Inc.

Copyright Jodi Picoult 2003

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

Allen & Unwin
83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australia
www.librariesaustralia.nla.gov.au

ISBN 978 1 74175 804 7

Printed in Australia by McPhersons Printing Group

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Sammy, who is both a reader and a writer.

I love you to the moon and back.

XOXO, Mom

What if you slept?

And what if in your sleep, you dreamed?

And what if in your dream, you went to heaven
and there plucked a strange and beautiful flower?

And what if, when you woke, you had the flower
in your hand?

Ah! What then?

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

Contents

PART ONE
2001

True love is like ghosts, which everybody
talks about and few have seen.

FRANOIS, DUC DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD, MAXIM 76

R oss Wakeman succeeded the first time he killed himself, but not the second or the third.

He fell asleep at the wheel and drove his car off a bridge into a lakethat was the second timeand was found on the shore by rescuers. When his half-sunken Honda was recovered, the doors were all locked, and the tempered glass windows were shattered like spider-webs, but still intact. No one could figure out how hed gotten out of the car in the first place, much less survived a crash without even a scratch.

The third time, Ross was mugged in New York City. The thief took his wallet and beat him up, and then shot him in the back and left him for dead. The bulletfired close enough to have shattered his scapula and punctured a lungdidnt. Instead it miraculously stopped at the bone, a small nugget of lead that Ross now used as a keychain.

The first time was years ago, when Ross had found himself in the middle of an electrical storm. The lightning, a beautiful blue charge, had staggered out of the sky and gone straight for his heart. The doctors told him that he had been legally dead for seven minutes. They reasoned that the current could not have struck Ross directly, because 50,000 amperes of current in his chest cavity would have boiled the moisture in his cells and quite literally made him explode. Instead, the lightning had hit nearby and created an induced current in his own body, one still strong enough to disturb his cardiac rhythm. The doctors said he was one hell of a lucky man.

They were wrong.

Now, as Ross walked up the pitched wet roof of the ODonnells Oswego home in the dark, he did not even bother with caution. The wind coming off Lake Ontario was cold even in August, and whipped his long hair into his eyes as he maneuvered around the gabled window. The rain bit at the back of his neck as he worked the clamps onto the flashing and positioned the waterproof video camera so that it was pointing into the attic.

His boots slipped, dislodging some of the old shingles. On the ground, beneath an umbrella, ODonnell squinted up at him. Be careful, the man called out. Ross also heard the words he did not say: Weve got enough ghosts.

But nothing would happen to him. He would not trip; he wouldnt fall. It was why he volunteered for the riskiest tasks; why he put himself into danger again and again. It was why hed tried bungee jumping and rock climbing and crack cocaine. He waved down to Mr. ODonnell, indicating that hed heard. But just as Ross knew that in eight hours, the sun would come upjust as he knew that hed have to go through the motions for another dayhe also knew he couldnt die, in spite of the fact that it was what he wanted, more than anything.

The baby woke Spencer Pike, and he struggled to a sitting position. In spite of the nightlights kept in every room at the Shady Pines Nursing Homenearly enough combined wattage, he imagined, to illuminate all of Burlington, VermontSpencer couldnt see past the foot of his bed. He couldnt see anything these days, thanks to the cataracts; although sometimes hed get up to take a leak, and in the mirror, as he passed by, he would catch a glimpse of someone watching himsomeone whose brow was not spotted and yellow; someone whose skin was not sighing off his bones. But then the young man Spencer had once been would disappear, leaving him to stare at the crumbs that were left of his life.

His ears, though, were sharp. Unlike the other sorry old morons in this place, Spencer had never needed a hearing aid. Hell, he heard things that he didnt even care to.

On cue, the baby cried again.

Spencers hand scrabbled over the covers to the call button beside his bed. A moment later, the night nurse came in. Mr. Pike, she said. Whats the matter?