After another long moment she asks, “But . . . but you shared a bed with James?”

“That wasn’t love, either. The man you know as James doesn’t love me. I don’t love him. It isn’t love.”

I can see how troubled she is by the fact that she had been spellbound by Martin’s affections and I hadn’t.

“Martin doesn’t care for me, not in that way, Belinda. He never wanted me to love him. He must have behaved differently with you.” I can’t help but look down at her stomach.

“Yes,” Belinda says, and I see pain etching itself in a sad half smile as she touches her swollen belly.

“Tell me how you met him.”

She lifts her gaze and turns her head slowly to again stare out the window, as though she can see her past in the glass. “He came to the inn a few months after my father died. He arrived in an automobile, something I hardly ever see. I’d been in my garden and I had dirt on the hem of my skirt and under my fingernails, and there he stood, the most beautiful person I had ever seen.”

I nod even though Belinda is not looking at me. I know the awe she is speaking of. I felt it, too, the moment I opened the envelope containing Martin’s response to my letter and saw his photograph peeking out from underneath a one-way train ticket.

“He said his name was James Bigelow and that he needed a room for the next several nights, as he had business in the area. He told me he was a land surveyor and that San Rafaela and all the other nearby towns were being considered by wealthy investors for commercial development. The Loralei was central to all the places he needed to see. I gave him a room. My nicest one.”

“How long did he stay?”

“Four nights.”

“And how did he seem around your other guests?”

“I didn’t have other guests. He was polite to me. Kind. He fixed a wobbly door hinge that I had been meaning to tell Elliot about without my even asking. And he was so easy to talk to. When I served James his supper I would sit with him. He said he enjoyed having someone to talk to while he ate. I enjoyed it, too. He asked me how long I had lived there and I told him that I’d been born at the Loralei, that my mother had died of an illness when I was still a baby and I’d only recently lost my father. He kept asking questions that no one ever asks me anymore, because everyone in San Rafaela knows all the answers. I . . . I thought he was genuinely wanting to get to know me.”

She pauses a moment and I find myself baffled that the way in which Martin snared Belinda is so very different from the way he snared me. He’d never seemed interested in knowing me better. Not for a moment. It is as if Belinda is describing a different man altogether. A chameleon. But then again, Martin hadn’t needed to woo me. He hadn’t needed anything from me other than my willingness to marry him, and that had been so easily attained. Stunningly easy. “What other kinds of questions did he ask you?” I say.