Free Where You Belong by Barbara Taylor Bradford Page B

part.”
    I bit my lip and thought for a moment before saying, “Well, I guess the best way, perhaps the only way, to get to the truth is to ask Fiona if she and Tony were divorced.”
    â€œYou wouldn’t do that!”
    â€œNo, I wouldn’t. But you could ask her, Jake.”
    â€œOh, no, not me. And certainly not today of all days.”
    I sat down on a chair and dropped my head into my hands. After a minute or two, I looked up at him intently. “Jake, I’m going to ask you a question, and I want you to answer it as truthfully as you can. It’s this: Do you really believe Tony and Fiona were divorced?”
    Jake lowered his long, lean frame into the other chair. “Yes, I do,” he answered after giving it some thought. And then he slowly shook his head. A doubtful expression flickered in his eyes. He said, “You know, Val, if I’m absolutely honest, I just don’t know whether they were divorced or not. On the other hand, why would he announce it to me as well as to you?” Jake lifted his hands in a helpless sort of gesture and shook his head again. “Why would he invent that? What was his purpose?”
    â€œI don’t know. But trust a woman’s instincts. The other woman’s instincts. They weren’t divorced.”
    II
    I wound up going with Jake to Fiona’s house in Hampstead.
    He wasn’t too happy about this because he was nervous at first, worried that I would verbally accost Fiona. But I promised I wouldn’t do that, and he knew I never broke a promise. Also, he understood very well that I would never create an embarrassing scene either.
    By the time Jake was leaving my room, I knew I had to go with him, there were no two ways about it. I had to get to the bottom of the situation, find out everything I could without actually asking any direct questions.
    It had occurred to me on the drive up to Hampstead with Jake that their home, whether Tony had vacated recently or not, would also tell me a great deal about their relationship. And then there were the children, eighteen-year-old Rory, and Moira, who was twenty. In my experience, children frequently said a lot about their parents, and without actually meaning to they invariably revealed a few secrets. I hoped this would be the case today.
    III
    Where was the monster? Where was the harridan? Where was the disturbed woman Tony had complained about so often?
    Certainly not present today, as far as I could ascertain, not unless Fiona was a superb actress or suffering from a split personality. Could she be a Dr. Jekyll and Mrs. Hyde? I was rather doubtful of that. In fact, she appeared to be a pleasant sort of woman who seemed perfectly normal to me.
    I knew she was forty, but she didn’t look her age at all. A pretty woman, it was her coloring that was the most striking thing about her, and her natural flame-colored hair and bright, dark eyes gave her a kind of vivid radiance. Of medium height and build, she had an innate gracefulness that was most apparent now as she moved around the room, tending to the needs of her guests. Including Fiona and her children, there were eleven of us altogether, since only Niall, his wife, Kate, and several really close friends and colleagues had been invited to the intimate buffet lunch.
    I sat on the sofa alone, facing the French doors that led to the garden. Jake was off in a corner, deep in conversation with Rory and Moira, and so I took this opportunity to catch my breath, to relax and review the past few hours. It had been a wild morning. Emotional. Disturbing. And in many ways more dismaying than I’d anticipated.
    Outside the windows the scene was pastoral, and I was enjoying sitting there looking at it, enjoying this moment of quietness and solitude in the midst of the gathering. Everyone was engaged in conversation, but this did not bother me; I was part of them, yet separate. I might easily have been in the depths of the country, and