Free Bittersweet by Danielle Steel Page A

until he told her how unimportant love was in a marriage? She could hear the words again as though he had just said them to her …what you need is companionship …decency … respect …someone you can rely on to take care of the children. She wondered now if this was really all he wanted. It was so much less than she wanted from him. She turned away then to look at a photograph of her father. He had been tall and thin, and looked like Doug in a way, but there was laughter in his eyes as he looked at you, something happy and excited and amused about his entire demeanor. He had had a funny little tilt to his head when he talked to you, and she could imagine him being in love at any age. He had been so young when he died, only forty-two, and yet he seemed so much more alive in the photograph than Doug did. There had been something so vibrant about him. She knew her motherhad suffered from his absences, and their life had been difficult for her, but she also knew how much her mother had loved him, and how much he had loved her. And how angry her mother had been at him for dying. And India could remember as though it were yesterday how devastated she had been when her mother had told her what had happened. She couldn't imagine a world without her father in it somewhere. It was hard to believe he had been gone for twenty-eight years now, it seemed like an entire lifetime to her.
    There were her photographs framed on the walls of the darkroom too, and she looked them over carefully for a moment as she stood there. They were good, very good, and captured a feeling and emotion that was almost like looking into a painting. She saw the ravaged faces of hungry children there, and a child sitting alone on a rock holding a doll, crying, while an entire village in Kenya burned behind her. There were faces of old men, and injured soldiers, and a woman laughing with sheer joy as she held her newborn baby. India had helped deliver it, and she still remembered that moment. It had been in a tiny hut somewhere outside Quito when she was in the Peace Corps. They were fragments of her life, frozen in time, and framed, so she could look at them forever. It was still hard for her to believe that all of that was gone from her life now. It had been an exchange she had made, a fair trade she always thought, only now she wondered. Had she gotten enough in return for what she'd given up? She knew she had when she thought of her children. But beyond that, what did she have now? And once the childrenwere grown, what would she have then? Those were the questions she could no longer answer.
    She checked the chemicals and the equipment, and made some notes, and then quietly turned off the light and went back to her bedroom. She took off her clothes and put her nightgown on, and then got into bed and turned off the light, and lay there for a long time, listening to the ocean. It was a peaceful sound she forgot every year, and then remembered when she came back here. It lulled her to sleep at night, and she lay listening to it when she woke in the morning. She loved the solemnity of it, the comfort it offered her. It was one of the things she loved about being here. And as she closed her eyes and drifted off to sleep, she savored the fact that she was alone here this time, with only her children, her memories, and the ocean. For now at least, it was all she wanted.

Chapter 4
    T HE SUN was brilliant when she awoke the next day in Harwich, and the ocean was shimmering as though it were trimmed in silver. The kids were already up, and helping themselves to cereal when she walked in. She was wearing a T-shirt, shorts, and sandals, with her hair piled up on her head, held by two old tortoise-shell pins, and she was unaware of it, but she looked very pretty.
    “What's everybody doing today?” she asked as she put a pot of coffee on. It seemed silly to do it just for herself, but she loved sitting on the deck, with a cup of coffee and reading, glancing up