Présentation de l'éditeur
With her three children, beautiful home, and loving husband, Margaret Crane is a woman others would envy. Adam's job has cushioned them nicely over the years, and it should be a time of contentment, rewards, of new challenges together. But lately Adam has been working too late, too hard, at the office. Margaret is sure it's just the rumored takeover of his company—until she meets Randi, The Other Woman...
Meanwhile, Nina, the orphaned cousin the Cranes raised as their own daughter, is reveling in New York. She thinks she's found Mr. Right in Keith, a brilliant investment banker. But Keith has a secret he has not shared with Nina. All he asks for is time...and patience. And as Nina clings to stolen weekends with Keith, Margaret plays dutiful wife, trying to ignore warning signs of her own failing marriage. A rift has developed between the two women who have loved each other as mother, daughter, friends. Keith is not welcome in Margaret's home. And Nina herself is the other woman...
Extrait
"Turn," said Isabella, with pins between her lips.
In the pier glass, looking down, Margaret could watch careful fingers working over a cascade of white silk. Looking up, she saw her own disheveled, curly red head and her shoulders rising in unfamiliar nakedness over an intricately tucked and pleated frill.
Margaret's mother sighed. "I don't know how you do it, Isabella."
"Sewing is recreation for me, Jean. And to make a wedding dress for my own daughter-in-law, whom I knew before she was born—how many people can have a pleasure like that?"
Affection shone from Isabella's eyes. They were opalescent and wide set, like her son's. Like Adam she was erect and dignified. But where she was talkative, he was silent. His intelligent face with its even, symmetrical features was somber, a somber, romantic face. Mysterious. Heroic. Margaret had fallen in love with it when she was fifteen years old.
If Adam ever leaves me, she thought suddenly, I shall die.
He had last telephoned on Monday, just after she had come home for spring break. Before that he had not called since the previous Thursday. But they had always talked to each other every evening after eight. They would talk just under three minutes, yet it seemed, although two states lay between his university and her college, as if he had his arms around her.
When had it begun to change? Or had it really changed? After all, he was on the final stretch of the hard road toward his degree. So perhaps she was only imagining things. A word unspoken, a glance evaded, a telephone call missed—if you were looking for signs, you could find them, couldn't you? You could always force something out of nothing, merely because you were too sensitive. Yes, that was it. She was too sensitive.
And she looked around at the familiar room as if its very familiarity might reassure her. An extraordinary warmth was here. It came from the house itself, this solid Victorian, built by her great-grandfather and meant to last, complete with front porch and wooden gingerbread, on this broad midwestern street. It came from the two women, both plain, kind, and unexceptional, who had known widowhood since the Korean War, had each worked and reared a child alone. It came from the cheerful shrills of children playing in the yard below.
From where she was standing, Margaret could see the group playing some ancient circle-game, with Nina in the center, taking charge. At six she was the neighborhood leader. Such a delightful, demanding person she was, Jean's little orphaned niece!
Adam used to joke: "After we're married, people who don't know us well will think that she's really ours, that we'd had her hidden away."
"Are they all right down there?" Jean asked. "I always worry when she's out of my sight."
"You worry too much, Mom. Nina's going to make her way in the world. With that pert little face and all that energy, she's going to be a charmer and a win
