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Found: Her Long-Lost Husband

Secrets We Keep

Jackie Braun

For my 10 sisters-in-law: Martha, Patti B. , Izumi,

Diana, Diane, Kathy, Barb, Judy, Patti H. and Holly.

How did I get so lucky?

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

EPILOGUE

PROLOGUE

CLAIRE MAYFIELD STEPPED off the connecting flight in Chicago’s O’Hare Airport on the last leg of her long journey home and breathed deeply. She’d been on airplanes and sitting in bustling terminals in various spots around the globe for the past twenty-some hours, having flown out of Hong Kong International Airport.

She was jet-lagged, hungry for real food and eager to soak away the grime of travel with a hot bath. She also needed to find a man.

Not just any man. Her ex-husband, Ethan Seaver.

Just thinking his name had the air backing up in her lungs. Nerves, she told herself, even as her body’s reaction suggested something else. Claire ignored it, as she always did, exhaling slowly. Her reason for needing to find him had nothing to do with renewing their relationship, even if that were a possibility, which it wasn’t. No, she didn’t want to go back. She wanted to move forward. To do that, the past needed to be settled first.

As she made her way through the crowd of passengers, she switched the heavy carry-on case to the other shoulder. She was petite, fine-boned and just a hair over five-two in her stockinged feet, but for the first time in her life she had actual muscles defining her calves and thighs, and sculpting her shoulders and upper arms.

She had been away from Chicago for not quite three weeks, during which time she had bicycled four hundred kilometers through the Himalayas to raise money and awareness for the plight of exploited children.

In many ways, though, it felt as if she’d been gone a lifetime. She was a changed woman—or at least a changing one. She felt stronger, more independent. She was determined to stand on her own two feet—this time for good.

In tackling the Himalayas on a twenty-one-speed bike, she’d begun another journey. This one was about self-discovery and, just as in the mountains, she had traveling companions for this trip too—Belle Davenport and Simone Gray. They made an unlikely trio—an American, a Brit and an Aussie who’d seemed to have little in common except for their gender and their obvious lack of athletic prowess. They were determined, though. Each had had something to prove—to themselves and to the people who looked at their seemingly cushy lives and sold them short.

They also had secrets. Secrets they had shared with no one until sitting in a tent high in the mountains, hands blistered, knees scraped, backs and behinds ridiculously sore, they’d exposed wounds far more damaging. Wounds that had festered for years.

In Belle’s case her seemingly perfect marriage was a sham, her well-heeled life a lovely façade intended to conceal an ugly childhood that had seen her and her young sister relegated to foster care and only one of them adopted. It hadn’t been Belle. She’d been forced to scrape and claw her way to adulthood on her own, where she’d become a successful morning television personality. Now Belle was determined to leave her husband and find her sister, Daisy.