special age.”
Risa put down her coffee cup, recognizing the perfect moment to broach the subject that had been on her mind for days. “I have an idea,” she said.
“Oh?” Conrad’s brows rose with curiosity. “I was thinking a car.”
“Which I’m sure she’d love, but I’m not sure I’d love her having, at least for another year. But there’s something I think she would rather have but is too shy to tell you about.”
Conrad frowned. “What?”
Risa saw no point trying to be delicate. “Breast implants.”
“Really?” Conrad smiled. “So you, too, have noticed a curiously quick expansion in her bra size?”
“How could I miss it?” Risa countered.
“Well, it’s a very easy fix,” Conrad replied. “Implants are nothing anymore.”
“
“Okay, not nothing,” Conrad agreed. “But with Alison I’d do a transaxillary incision.” When Risa only looked blank, he chuckled wryly. “That’s a small incision in her armpit. Then I create a channel, go in with an endoscope, and position a bladder exactly where I want it. Once it’s in place, I fill it with the amount of saline required, and that’s it. A little pain of course, but only a tiny scar hidden under the arm.” He glanced at the date on the morning paper folded next to his breakfast plate. “In fact, if we move reasonably quickly, she’d be pretty much healed up by the time of her party.”
Risa’s eyes widened in surprise. “That quickly?”
“Shouldn’t be a problem,” he assured her with a shrug. “Want me to put her on the schedule?”
Risa shifted uneasily in her chair. “It’s sort of a touchy subject.”
“What is?” Conrad frowned, then reached over to cover Risa’s hand with his. “Tell me.”
“Well, you’re her stepfather, and she’s — well, she’s feeling a little shy about having you see her breasts.”
Conrad chuckled.
“No, really,” Risa said. “I’m not kidding. So what would you think of someone else doing the procedure?”
“I’d think that’s not going to happen at all,” he said flatly. “Do you really think I’d trust anyone else with Alison’s surgery?” When Risa said nothing, he patted her hand reassuringly. “Don’t worry about it,” he told her. “Believe me, over the years, I’ve become as good at talking to teenage girls as I have at working on them. I’ll talk to Alison — maybe even tonight.”
Wondering why it had taken her three days to work up the courage to have what turned out to be a simple conversation with her husband, Risa leaned over and gave him a long, slow kiss full of what she hoped he would perceive as a promise of more to come at the end of the day.
“Maybe,” he whispered, still close enough that she could feel his warm breath on her lips, “I should make Alison’s breasts look just like yours.”
She remembered, then, what Lynette and Marjorie had said a few days earlier. “Or maybe you ought to do a little work on mine, too.”
Conrad chuckled for the second time that morning. “Work on you?” he asked. “Why? Let’s just make Alison perfect, okay?”
Though Risa said nothing, his comment stung, and kept stinging for the rest of the day.
CORINNE DUNN KNOCKED softly on her brother’s office door, then turned the knob and entered.
Conrad was quietly dictating surgery notes into a handheld microphone, so she sat on the brocade sofa next to his desk, a file folder on her lap, and waited for him to finish.
Eventually, he put down the microphone, clicked off the machine, and turned to smile at her. “And a very good morning to you,” he said. “Sorry about that — just had to finish before I lost my train of thought.”
“Like you’ve ever lost a thought in your life,” Corinne teased. She held up the folder. “The foundation’s gotten a request to fix a facial mutilation on a young woman from Bakersfield.”
Conrad’s brow rose skeptically. “Bakersfield? Since when did Bakersfield become a center of birth defects?”
“Okay, so it isn’t as heart-tugging as a cleft palate from Honduras,” she agreed, “but it’s still an interesting case. The girl is only eighteen.” She placed the file on his desk.
“What’s the nature of the mutilation?” Conrad asked, leaving the file where Corinne had placed it.
“She was attacked while jogging. Whoever attacked her slit her throat and — if you can believe this — sliced off her eyebrows.”
“Her eyebrows?” he echoed. “Now that is truly weird.” He removed the before-and-after photographs of the girl from the file, set them on his desktop, and studied them. She’d been almost beautiful at one time, with shiny black hair and perfectly arched, beautifully proportioned eyebrows that he was sure had never seen so much as a tweezer, let alone any cosmetics.
“Something happened in the middle of the attack,” Corinne explained. “Apparently, another jogger came along, and the attacker took off before he’d killed her. Neither the girl nor the other jogger got a good description, and they never caught the guy.”
Conrad studied both pictures as she spoke. While the first was obviously a high school photo, the second one had been taken by a police photographer. It showed not only the bloody mess that had been her forehead, but the gash on her neck as well. A third photograph showed the girl with poorly done, uneven ellipses of skin grafts where her eyebrows had once been. “Good God,” he muttered. “Who did this to the poor girl?”
“I told you — they never caught him.”
“I meant the surgeon — if you can call him that — who tried to repair the damage? He’d have done better just to sew her up and let someone else do the real fix later.”
“The name’s probably in the file,” Corinne replied. “The point is, can you repair the damage?” She stood and moved around behind her brother, to gaze over his shoulder at the girl’s high school picture. “And there’s something else — I’m not sure what it is.” Leaning over, she traced the girl’s brows with her forefinger. “There’s something about her that looks sort of familiar, but I can’t think what it is.”
“Let me read what her mother wrote,” Conrad said, taking the letter out of the folder and laying it over the photographs.
Corinne straightened as he began to read, and found herself looking straight into the eyes of Margot Dunn, who gazed out at her from the framed blow-up of a
“My God,” she said. “That’s it! Her eyebrows are exactly like Margot’s.”
“What?” Conrad said, looking up at her.
Corinne pulled the school photograph from under the mother’s letter and held it up. “See? Her brows are exactly like Margot’s, before her accident.”
Conrad scowled. “I hardly think—”
“Look,” Corinne insisted, walking over to the photograph on the wall and holding the five-by-seven school photo next to it.
Conrad shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not,” he finally said. “But there are only so many variations on eyebrows.”
“And these are an exact match,” Corinne declared. She moved back to Conrad and set the photograph down on the open file. “What do you think?” she asked, her voice suddenly gentle. “Maybe you can do for this girl what you didn’t have time to do for Margot?”
Conrad leaned back in his chair, his eyes fixed on the photograph of his former wife. “You’re right,” he finally said. “I can certainly help with the botched grafts.” He turned his gaze away from the image of Margot and looked up at his sister. “But I can’t give her back those eyebrows. I can build fairly good ones, but they won’t be like Margot’s. Besides, even if they were, the girl’s bone structure isn’t right — it’s not just the shape of the features that matters, but what’s under them. And those perfect bones don’t come along more than once — or maybe twice — in a lifetime.”
“Whatever you can do has to be better than this,” Corinne said, gazing at the picture again.
She put the photos and the letter back in the file, closed it, and left her brother’s office, already composing a press release in her head. Now all she had to do was put it on paper and give Jillian Oglesby and her mother the
