With a sigh, Allison headed for the stairs. Those black silk sheets on the king-size bed would give Brianna one more reason to pass judgment on her stepmother. Now, while there was time to change them, the sheets would have to go.

By the time she’d stripped the bed and replaced the scandalous silk sheets with some pastel-flowered cottons, Allison’s long night and stressful day had caught up with her. This morning, just after reading Kate’s letter, she’d gotten the word from Cox Medical that Burke had signed the consent form and was on his way to the O.R. for spinal surgery to stabilize his broken vertebrae. Ten minutes later she’d been in the car, breaking speed limits to get back to the hospital, where she’d spent the rest of the day.

Tonight she was dead on her feet. All she wanted to do was fall across the bed and pass out. But then she remembered Kate’s letters. She had no memory of having put them back in the drawer.

Downstairs in Burke’s study, she saw the letters scattered on the desk, where she’d left them. They lay like a broken rainbow of spring colors—pinks, blues, greens, and yellows on the polished walnut surface, waiting for her to collect them and put them away.

Too tired to stand, she sank into Burke’s big leather chair. It was an old chair, so well used that the worn cushions had conformed to the shape of Burke’s body. She settled into its contours, seeking comfort but not finding it.

Kate had been sitting in this chair when she’d written to Burke about the discovery of her cancer. She’d been wearing his old flannel bathrobe—the one Allison had stuffed into a donation box after replacing it with a $350 cashmere robe from a high-end catalog. If Burke had missed the old robe, he’d never said a word.

The letter she’d read earlier lay open where she’d left it to answer the call from the hospital. Although she should’ve known better, Allison found herself rereading the first few lines, then the first page, then the second and third.

She could feel the tenderness in every line of Kate’s neatly rounded, schoolgirl script. She could feel the longing, the love, and the little intimacies of a shared twenty-year marriage. No wonder Burke still missed his first wife. And no wonder Brianna resented the younger woman who could never replace her mother.

Allison refolded the pages and slipped them back into their daffodil-colored envelope. What had possessed her to read that letter? Whatever she’d been looking for, she hadn’t found it. Those heartfelt lines had only shown her how poorly Burke’s second marriage compared to what he’d lost.