Love was the word for it. And with love’s entrance her belief that marriage was something she could well do without had made its exit. She could remember pitying Marianne the necessity to defer not just to Ralph, but to marriage itself, which had then seemed to her the proverbial ball-and-chain, serving to slow down the progress of an otherwise independent woman.

Only now was Laura able to see that sharing your life with someone who cared deeply for you, and you for him, was a good deal more fulfilling than the freedom she had valued.

She returned to the living room with the first aid box and the dustpan and brush, warmed by her thoughts, congratulating herself on her wise handling of her first family crisis. All would be well. She was still feeling her way with two kids she barely knew.

Come to that, what did she really know about Jake, other than that he’d been happily married for twenty years? Or he about her? A romance largely conducted over the phone, with the infrequent meetings its participants’ working lives had allowed, was not conducive to their boring each other with the details of a now defunct past.

But what had gone before didn’t matter. Only the present and future does, Laura said to herself. Jeremy and Janis sucking Bessie’s cut thumb was the nearest they would come to a blood tie, she thought with a smile. But the concern Jake’s kids had shown for Bessie augured well for the tie that Fate had imposed upon all three.

Laura’s great-grandmother would have told her that she was wrong in one respect: That what had gone before did matter. But Sarah Sandberg had learned that the hard way, and so it was to be for Laura.

Chapter Nine

As spring gave way to summer, Marianne’s working day extended into the evening, which she had not allowed to happen when Ralph was alive.

Now, there seemed little point in her not returning to her desk after eating a snack while she watched the Six o’clock News. Or was it that she was continuing to use her work as a therapy against loneliness? And how long could she go on not bothering to cook for one?

Though her mother and grandmother too were widowed in middle-age, and neither had remarried, both were of that sensible ilk of woman whom widowhood does not cause to neglect herself.

If they saw me in front of the TV set with a sandwich and calling it my dinner, the riot act would surely be read!

These were Marianne’s wry thoughts when she returned to her typewriter on a sultry July evening. The first draft of her new book was almost completed, and if she didn’t call a halt to her present regime the finished manuscript would be delivered long before deadline date.