The Widow Read Free

a little Limoges dish beside the marble counter she used for working with dough, and she could see the huge canary-yellow diamond Pompasse had given her when he’d married her. She had been barely seventeen. He had been sixty.
    He’d been everything to her. A father, a protector, someone who worshipped her, someone who needed her. He gave her a home and stability after years of trailing around after her rootless mother, and he’d used his legendary charm with devastating effect. And she’d loved him.
    Knead, push, pull. Turn, slap, punch. The newspapers would start calling again. She kept changing her number—they didn’t have her most recent one, but she knew it wouldn’t be long before they tracked her down. They’d be lying in wait outside her restaurant, with film crews shoving microphones in her face and lights blinding her. The world’s most famous living artist was now dead. What did his former wife think of it all?
    She didn’t want to think at all. She was strong, a survivor, and she’d learned to put the pain into separate compartments in her brain so she could concentrate on the job at hand. Denial was an underrated tool for coping, and she used it well. Turn, slap, punch. The dough was developing a nice elastic sheen—the kneading was almost finished. She didn’t want to stop. Didn’t want to put it in a bowl to rise on the back of her six-burner stove, didn’t want to wash the flour and butter from her hands and put the canary diamond back on her slender finger.
    She’d tried to give it back to him when she’d left him, but he had refused to take it. He had insisted it was only hers, it matched her mysterious yellow eyes, and in the end she couldn’t say no to him. So she’d worn it for him, even though she never saw him. In fact, she hadn’t seen him once in the five years since she had left him. And she’d wear it today, in his memory.
    The shrill ring of the telephone made her jump, and she grabbed it, holding on to her self-control by a thread. It was her mother.
    â€œYou’ve heard?” Olivia said abruptly, her voice cool and controlled on the transatlantic phone call.
    â€œI’ve heard.” Charlie could be equally cool. She’d learned long ago that it was the only way to survive her overwhelming mother.
    â€œI’m coming to New York. You’ll be needing me.”
    â€œI don’t see why.” Fat lot of good needing her mother had ever done her, Charlie thought as a shiver of emotion sliced through her icy calm. Olivia wasn’t the type to be around when the going got tough. Charlie was certain she’d never understood or forgiven her daughter for realizing how empty her life was and walking away from Pompasse. Or for walking off with him in the first place.
    â€œFor the memorial service, Charlie,” Olivia said with veiled patience. “There’ll be tributes in Manhattan, and then he’ll be buried in Tuscany. At La Colombala. You’ll want to be there.”
    The memory of the farmhouse swept over her with blinding clarity—the clear light, the smell of the vineyards, the warmth of the sun. Filling her with both dread and longing. “I don’t think so,” she said.
    â€œBaby,” Olivia drawled, “you’re still his executrix, not to mention one of his heirs. The lawyers haven’t tracked you down yet, but they got in touch with me. He never changed his will.”
    â€œShit.”
    Olivia’s amused snort carried across the Atlantic Ocean. “I’m glad money means so little to you, darling. Trust your mother—there’s no such thing as too thin or too rich.”
    Trust your mother. Charlie had made any number of mistakes in her thirty years, including marrying an old man, but that wasn’t one of them. She had learned early whom she could trust in this life, and Olivia Thomas wasn’t one of them.
    Charlie took a