Kissed a Sad Goodbye

realizing that perhaps, at least for the time being, it was. “What’s this?” he added, noticing the piano primer standing open on the music rack.
    Gemma poised her hands over the keys, then tentatively touched middle C. “I’ve started lessons.”
    “Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked, surprised. “I’d no idea you wanted to play.”
    “I thought you might laugh. And... I know it’s silly, but I wanted something in my life that was just mine.”
    “I don’t understand,” he said, baffled.
    “I know.” Gemma turned to him. “I’ve been thinking about Annabelle Hammond.”
    “What has Annabelle to do with this?”
    “She lived by other people’s expectations—because she was so beautiful, everyone in her life had their idea of who she was, what they wanted her to be. And what seems tragic to me is that she finally made different choices, her own choices, about what mattered to her—but she never got to see where they might have led. Or who she might have become.”
    Kincaid still didn’t understand, but he saw the fear that had been hovering at the back of his mind for what it was. “Gemma, if this is about Gordon Finch—if you want—”
    “No. This isn’t about Gordon... or only a little bit. It’s me. I don’t know what I want.... I only know that I’m in the process of becoming, and I want to see where it takes me, who I might be. I love you, Duncan. I do know that.”
    “Well, that’s something, anyway,” he said, trying to make light of the chasm yawning before him.
    But Gemma regarded him with perfect gravity. “It’s all we ever have, really. Isn’t it?” she said.
     
    LEWIS SAT FACING IRENE IN THE rusting iron chairs of the cottage’s rose garden. Their knees touched, and she held his hand in both of hers lightly.
    It had been John Pebbles’s cottage once, and John had tended these fragrant roses with as much care as Irene evidently did now. It was fitting, Lewis thought, that Irene should be here, and that he had come back at last.
    He had told her everything, and she had listened without comment. Now she looked up at him, and in the clear afternoon light he could see the tracing of fine lines in her fair skin. Her eyes were as blue as he remembered, and she looked the way he’d imagined she would, as if she’d grown into herself.
    “Why didn’t you tell me, Lewis?”
    “I couldn’t. I suppose I was just as guilty as William in that sense. I couldn’t bear you knowing I wasn’t what you thought.”
    “How were you to know what I thought?” she said sharply. “Or what we might have made of our lives if you had told me? Who were you to decide that it was better for me to spend my life alone than to share the burden of your guilt?”
    “Never mind,” Irene said with a sigh. “We are who we are now, and that path’s not worth following. But it seems to me that Freddie Haliburton has ruined enough lives. And that you underestimated my capacity for forgiveness. Let it go now, Lewis. It’s time.”
    He met her eyes, and he knew he had found the only absolution that mattered.
     

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
     
    Winner of the Macavity for Best Novel of 1997 for Dreaming of the Bones, Deborah Crombie received international acclaim for her first four mysteries, as well as nominations for the Edgar and the Agatha Awards. She grew up in Dallas, Texas, and later lived in Edinburgh and in Chester, England. She travels to Great Britain yearly to research her books. She now lives in a small north Texas town with her husband, daughter, cocker spaniel, and four cats, and is at work on the seventh book in the Duncan Kincaid/Gemma James series, which includes All Shall Be Well, A Share in Death, Leave the Grave Green, Mourn Not Your Dead, and the award-winning Dreaming of the Bones.