that, for all that you’ve neglected me so abysmally for far too long, you’re still my favorite. Well, it doesn’t say much for you, Emily Jane, does it, that I had to be half crippled by a stroke before you could bring yourself to put aside your own feelings and give a thought to mine?”
“I’m sorry, Grand-mère.”
Emily didn’t for a moment expect that such an answer would be found acceptable, which was why she almost missed the cup into which she was pouring fragrant Lapsang Souchong tea when her grandmother said quite gently, “I know you are, child, and I know why you found coming back here so painful. It was that Flynn boy from next door.”
“I’m not sure I understand what you mean, Grand-mère.”
Monique’s sympathy vanished in a flash. “Give me credit for having some intelligence, for pity’s sake! I saw the way you languished, the last summer you spent here, dreaming the hours away in the belvedere, hoping he’d show up, coming alive only when he deigned to spare you a moment’s attention.”
“Puppy love,” Emily said, regaining enough poise to pass a cup of tea to her grandmother without spilling a drop in the saucer. “All girls go through it.”
“Not all girls sneak out of the house after dark and return long after other respectable souls are asleep in their beds. Not all girls shut themselves away from the people around them, preferring to spend their time in seclusion, nor do they mark off the days in their diaries with quite the assiduous care with which you marked off yours, the last few weeks of that summer.”
“You read my diary?” Appalled, Emily stared at her grandmother.
“Certainly I read your diary,” Monique said, with shameless relish. “How else was I supposed to discover what was troubling you so deeply? You allowed that ... that rogue to rob you of your innocence, and then you worried yourself into a near breakdown wondering if you’d been left with child.”
“Left with child”. Such an old-fashioned, genteel way to characterize the disgrace an illegitimate pregnancy would have brought to the family. Given that that was exactly the predicament in which Emily had found herself, how was it that ultimately being left without child had such a destitute ring to it?
“Fortunately you were spared that,” Monique went on, blithely ignorant of the aftermath of that summer, “though even had you not been it would not have changed my love for you. You were always my special child.”
Emily’s eyes burned again with unshed tears. “Oh, Grand-mère!”
“I saw your face the day he came lollygagging over here and announced his engagement to that woman. Had your grandfather been alive, he’d have horse-whipped him. As it is, Lucas Flynn got his just deserts when not all his fancy medical training could save his wife and he had to bury her in some heathen African country. The pity of it is that whatever killed her didn’t carry him off too. The world does not need men like him.”
“I understand he’s a very fine doctor.”
Her grandmother let out the closest to a snort that she’d ever permit herself. “Not any more he isn’t! His doctoring days are over. Seems he lost his taste for medicine, or else his nerve. These days he’s a recluse, emerging into view only when conscience drives him to earn his keep around the house as a general handyman.”
In the short time since she’d arrived at Belvoir, Emily had weathered a range of emotions. She’d experienced nostalgia, shame, sadness and shock. To that list she now added dread. “What house? The last I heard, Lucas Flynn was running a clinic somewhere in Central Africa.”
“Then your information is sadly out of date,” Monique declared flatly. “Lucas Flynn is living next door with his grandmother. The neighborhood, I fear, has gone to the dogs since you were last here, Emily Jane.”
Her worst nightmare—having to face him again—had come to pass! Practically stammering with dismay, Emily asked, “But how—why is he here?”
“Because he’s a failure! What possible other reason could he have for letting his medical license lapse? And why else would his benighted grandmother feel compelled to make excuses for him every time she opens her mouth?”
“Excuses?” Emily repeated faintly. “Lucas Flynn was never the type to hide behind excuses, Grand-mère.”
“He is now,” Monique said with a satisfied little nod. “Spends half his time shut up in some university lab, peering into a microscope, and the other half recording his findings—except, as I just mentioned, when he deigns to mow the lawn or otherwise make himself useful next door. A bit of a come-down, wouldn’t you say, compared to his former grandiose laying-on-of-healing-hands plans?”
“There isn’t a university in April Water,” Emily said, still groping for the magic key that would release her from a dream that threatened to become worse long before it grew any better. Wasn’t confronting the shocking reality of her grandmother’s declining health enough, without this added complication?
“There are plenty in the San Francisco area,” Monique replied, then spoilt the possibility of reprieve by adding, “Not that he spends every waking hour there, what with all the fancy computer equipment he’s rumored to have had installed at Roscommon House. But why are we wasting breath on a man like him when we have more important matters to discuss, such as your marriage?”
She took Emily’s ringless left hand in hers. “Don’t make me drag the details out of you a syllable at a time, Emily Jane. I never expected it would last, of course, but that doesn’t mean I’m not interested in knowing how it ended.”
“We grew apart.” Emily shrugged, at a loss to know how to explain the lack of passion that had characterized her relationship with George.
“You were never together. Ambition and career advancement lured him to the altar and penance drove you.”
“That’s not fair, Grand-mère. George tried hard to be the sort of husband he thought I wanted. We both tried, but if anyone’s to blame for it all ending in divorce I am.”
Monique’s black eyes focused shrewdly on Emily’s face. “Why? Because you were married to one man and pining for another?”
How could her grandmother have known? Emily wondered. Was it written all over her face, as plain to see as if she’d actually committed adultery? “If you’re talking about the business with Lucas Flynn, Grand-mère—”
“Of course I am.”
“That all ended three years before I got engaged.” But the memory had remained vivid, embroidered to an unlikely magic by the passage of time. Had George sensed it? Was that what eventually had driven him into another woman’s arms and bed?
“I’m leaving you, Emily,” he’d announced over eggs Benedict, one rainy Sunday morning nearly eighteen months ago. “There’s someone else.”
“Do I know her?” Emily had asked, as politely as if they’d been discussing a fourth for bridge. Because, of course, Lucas had always been the third member of the party, even if his name never crossed her lips.
“No.” George had nudged his coffee-cup closer for a refill. “Just as well, probably. Less awkward all round.”
What had shocked Emily had not been that her marriage
