Kissed a Sad Goodbye

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked, surprised. “I’d no idea you wanted to play.”

“I thought you might laugh. And … I know it’s silly, but I wanted something in my life that was just mine.”

“I don’t understand,” he said, baffled.

“I know.” Gemma turned to him. “I’ve been thinking about Annabelle Hammond.”

“What has Annabelle to do with this?”

“She lived by other people’s expectations—because she was so beautiful, everyone in her life had their idea of who she was, what they wanted her to be. And what seems tragic to me is that she finally made different choices, her own choices, about what mattered to her—but she never got to see where they might have led. Or who she might have become.”

Kincaid still didn’t understand, but he saw the fear that had been hovering at the back of his mind for what it was. “Gemma, if this is about Gordon Finch—if you want—”

“No. This isn’t about Gordon … or only a little bit. It’s me. I don’t know what I want.… I only know that I’m in the process of becoming, and I want to see where it takes me, who I might be. I love you, Duncan. I do know that.”

“Well, that’s something, anyway,” he said, trying to make light of the chasm yawning before him.

But Gemma regarded him with perfect gravity. “It’s all we ever have, really. Isn’t it?” she said.

LEWIS SAT FACING IRENE IN THE rusting iron chairs of the cottage’s rose garden. Their knees touched, and she held his hand in both of hers lightly.

It had been John Pebbles’s cottage once, and John had tended these fragrant roses with as much care as Irene evidently did now. It was fitting, Lewis thought, that Irene should be here, and that he had come back at last.

He had told her everything, and she had listened without comment. Now she looked up at him, and in the clear afternoon light he could see the tracing of fine lines in her fair skin. Her eyes were as blue as he remembered, and she looked the way he’d imagined she would, as if she’d grown into herself.

“Why didn’t you tell me, Lewis?”

“I couldn’t. I suppose I was just as guilty as William in that sense. I couldn’t bear you knowing I wasn’t what you thought.”

“How were you to know what I thought?” she said sharply. “Or what we might have made of our lives if you had told me? Who were you to decide that it was better for me to spend my life alone than to share the burden of your guilt?”

“I—”

“Never mind,” Irene said with a sigh. “We are who we are now, and that path’s not worth following. But it seems to me that Freddie Haliburton has ruined enough lives. And that you underestimated my capacity for forgiveness. Let it go now, Lewis. It’s time.”

He met her eyes, and he knew he had found the only absolution that mattered.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Winner of the Macavity for Best Novel of 1997 for Dreaming of the Bones, Deborah Crombie received international acclaim for her first four mysteries, as well as nominations for the Edgar and the Agatha Awards. She grew up in Dallas, Texas, and later lived in Edinburgh and in Chester, England. She travels to Great Britain yearly to research her books. She now lives in a small north Texas town with her husband, daughter, cocker spaniel, and four cats, and is at work on the seventh book in the Duncan Kincaid/Gemma James series, which includes All Shall Be Well, A Share in Death, Leave the Grave Green, Mourn Not Your Dead, and the award-winning Dreaming of the Bones.

If you enjoyed Deborah Crombie’s Kissed a Sad Goodbye, the sixth in the Duncan Kincaid/Gemma James series, you won’t want to miss any of her superb novels. Look for them at your favorite bookseller.

And turn the page for an exciting preview of Deborah Crombie’s next novel, A Finer End, available in hardcover from Bantam Books.

A

FINER

END

BY

DEBORAH CROMBIE

CHAPTER 1

The shadows crept into Jack Montfort’s small office, filling the corners with a comfortable dimness. He’d come to look forward to his time alone at the day’s end—he told himself he got more done without phones ringing and the occasional client calling in, but perhaps, he thought wryly, it was merely that he had little enough reason to go home.

Standing at his window, he gazed down at the pedestrians hurrying down either side of Magdalene Street, and wondered idly where they were all scurrying off to so urgently on a Wednesday evening. Across the street, the Abbey gates had shut at five, and as he watched, the guard let the last few stragglers out from the grounds. The March day had been bright with a biting wind, and Jack imagined that anyone who’d been enticed by the sun into wandering round the Abbot’s fish pond would be chilled to the bone. Now the remaining buttresses of the great church would be silhouetted against the clear rose of the eastern sky, a fitting reward for those who had braved the cold.

He’d counted himself lucky to get the two-room office suite with its first-floor view over the Market Square and the Abbey gate. It was a prime spot, and the restrictions involved in renovating a listed building hadn’t daunted him. His years in London had given him experience enough in working round constraints, and he’d managed to update the rooms to his satisfaction without going over his budget. He’d hired a secretary to preside over his new reception area, and begun the slow task of building an architectural practice.

And if a small voice still occasionally whispered, “Why bother?” he did his best to ignore it and get on with things the best way he knew how, although he’d learned in the last few years that plans were ephemeral blueprints. Even as a child, he’d had his life mapped out: university with first class honors, a successful career as an architect … wife … family. What he hadn’t bargained for was life’s refusal to cooperate. Now they were all gone— him mum, his dad … Emily. At forty, he was back in Glastonbury. It was a move he’d have found inconceivable twenty years earlier, but here he was, alone in his parents’ old house on Ashwell Lane, besieged by memories.