Read Butterfield Institute - 01 - The Halo Effect for Free Online

enough for all of them. Most of them would go back to their pimps, or their e-mail accounts, or worse, the streets. Yet, I kept at it. Hoping that some of them might get away.
    Some of them.
    She had asked for help and I had gone to see her. She had welcomed me for what was ahead of her. Had wanted to change the direction her life had been taking, to have me light a fire to help her melt the past. None of this would happen. Not ever. She was lost now. To everyone who had known her. To her potential. To her promise.
    She was one of
the lost girls
.
    Not the first one I had tried to save.
    Not the last one I would fail.

5
     
    I was back in my office twenty minutes later, sitting at my desk thinking about the still, pallid body, when Nina stuck her head in.
    “Morgan?”
    I turned, startled out of the moment.
    Dr. Nina Butterfield, the owner of the institute, my mentor, my godmother and my friend, stood in the doorway to my office.
    “You okay?” she asked.
    I nodded.
    “You look like you saw a ghost.”
    I saw ghosts all the time and she knew that. No answer was needed. And she knew that, too. She spoke to fill in the silence, so that we could move past it.
    As if I would ever be able to move past it
.
    “Did the paperwork come through?” she asked, referring, I knew, to the divorce.
    I nodded.
    “Well, weren’t we going to have lunch?” She was watching me carefully, as she always did. “You were hoping I’d forget. That doesn’t surprise me. You don’t want to talk about the divorce and you know I’m going to force you to.”
    We both laughed at that.
    When Nina laughed she looked much younger than her sixty-two years. She had shoulder-length, copper-colored hair, warm, caramel-colored skin and bright amber eyes that bored into you and dared you to look away. She had sculpted features that would seem masculine in a less sensual woman. Dressed in a honey suede jacket, black slacks and a rust silk shirt, she looked professional, but easygoing. And she was. The most fluid woman I’d ever met. With the biggest heart and the smartest head. She had swooped down and picked me up, opened her wings and sheltered me under them when I was too little to know how scared I was or how much I needed her.
    Now that I knew, I was grateful every day that she was in my life. She’d given me support and helped me find my way. And for her, I was as close to a daughter as she’d ever have. For someone so maternal, so caring, Nina had never had children. And because of me, and my daughter, she said she never regretted it. We were her family, she said.
    “Get your bag, we have a reservation,” she said.
    “A reservation?”
    Usually we walked during lunch. The point of going out together wasn’t necessarily to eat as much as it was for us to leave the institute. To spend time together. We walked Manhattan in every direction, often without any destination in mind: two pilgrims, not seeking a shrine, but the hour with each other. I’d grown up taking walks with Nina. She’d been my mother’s best friend—they’d met when they were both students at NYU and lived next door to each other in their Greenwich Village dorm.
    After my mother died, when I was eight, Nina had stepped in, not trying to replace my mother, because she knew no one could do that, but to at least be there for me, to offer a hand, a hug and a heart. Even after my father remarried, Nina remained the most important woman in my life.
    Grabbing my bag, I followed Nina into the hall. She stopped at the head of the staircase, put her arm around me and gave me a companionable hug. Her spicy, Oriental scent was familiar and, instead of smelling sexy, was reassuring in its constancy. Especially that day, I liked knowing that some things remained the same.
    “It’s actually easier than I thought it would be,” I said as we separated from the hug.
    “I’m glad.” Her voice told me she didn’t believe a word of what I was saying, but she was going to allow me the