The Lost Wife Read Free Page A

car beside him … He’d promised in their marriage vows to love and protect her always and that cruel December night he
hadn’t …
He hadn’t. He just thanked God that Saskia had been staying with his parents at the time and hadn’t been in the car with them. It didn’t bear thinking about that his child might have been hurt as badly as her mother.
    He must be a masochist,
he reflected. Why had he come here to tell Ailsa himself that Saskia was prolonging her stay with his mother? He could so easily have got his chauffeur Alain to do the deed. Wasn’t that what he’d done for the past four years, so he wouldn’t have to come face to face with the woman he’d once loved beyond imagining? Wasn’t it a situation he’d willingly engineered so he wouldn’t have to discuss the deeper issues that had wrenched them apart perhaps even more than the accident?
    Sighing, he tunnelled his fingers through his hair. He was only staying the night while he was snowbound. As soon as the roads were passable again he would drive to the airport and return to Copenhagen. After spending a precious day or two with his daughter and mother he would get back to the palatial head offices of Larsen and Son, international property developers, and resume his work.
    ‘I’ve got an overnight bag in the car. I brought it just in case. I’ll go and bring it in.’ When he reached the doorhe glanced back at the slim, silent woman sitting on the couch and shrugged his shoulders. ‘Don’t worry … I promise not to outstay my welcome. As soon as the roads are cleared I’ll be on my way.’
Not waiting to hear her reply, Jake stepped out into the hallway.
    As hard as she bit down on her lip, Ailsa couldn’t prevent her eyes from filling up with tears. ‘Why?’ she muttered forlornly. ‘Why come here now and shake everything up again? I’m doing all right without you … I am!’
    Frustrated by the unremitting sorrow that rose inside her whenever Jake or the accident were mentioned, let alone having him near, she stoically put aside any further thoughts on the matter and instead made her way up to the spare bedroom to put clean sheets on the bed for her ex-husband’s unexpected overnight stay.
    On the way there she pushed open her daughter’s bedroom door and glanced in. The pretty pink walls were covered in posters, from the latest Barbie doll to instantly recognisable children’s programme characters. But amongst them were two large posters of the latest male teen movie idol, and Ailsa shook her head in wonder and near disbelief that her daughter was growing up so fast …
too
fast, in her book.
Would it be easier if Saskia had both her parents taking care of her together instead of separately?
    In the time-honoured habit of caring parents everywhere, she wondered yet again if she was a good enough mother—if she was perhaps
failing
her child in some fundamental unconscious way? Was she wrong in wanting a career of her own? To stand on her own feet at last and not feel as if she was depending on her ex-husband? At the thought of Jake she wondered if she hadn’t been utterly selfish in pushing him away emotionally
and
physically, and finally driving him into asking for a divorce. Sheshould have talked to him more, but she hadn’t. Relations between them had deteriorated so badly that they’d barely been able to look at each other, she remembered sadly.
    Hearing the front door open, then slam shut again, she quickly crossed the landing to the spare room. The pretty double bed with its old-fashioned iron bedstead was strewn with all manner of knitting and materials from her craft business, and she scooped them up and quickly heaped them on top of the neat little writing desk in the corner. She wouldn’t stop to sort them all out right now. Tomorrow she would venture out to the purpose-built heated office in the garden, where she created her designs and stored her materials, and she would store the colourful paraphernalia away