Chapter 1
Staring out at the summer rain, Sydney Wells felt as though she were swimming underwater. For the past eight days she had been in shock. Her husband of sixteen years, Andrew, had gone off to do an errand on his favorite motorcycle, on a back road with little traffic near their Connecticut home. He had a passion for fast cars and vintage motorcycles, and had been riding one of his best ones, a Ducati. He had promised to be back in minutes, but four hours later, he still wasn’t home. She imagined he had met up with a friend, or thought of other errands once he was out and enjoying the ride on the warm summer day. He hadn’t answered his cellphone when she called him. The highway patrol said later that he’d hit a wet spot on the road, and some gravel. He’d been wearing his helmet but the strap wasn’t fastened. He was going such a short distance. The bike had slid, his helmet had flown off. They told her he had been dead on impact. At fifty-six. And Sydney was a widow at forty-nine. Everything had an unreal quality to it. Nothing looked familiar, none of it seemed possible, and it seemed even less so once his lawyer came to see her. Andrew had been the head of the investment firm he’d inherited from his father and had been a responsible husband, the father of thirty-three-year-old twin daughters by his first marriage, and stepfather to Sydney’s two daughters, Sabrina and Sophie. They’d had what she considered the perfect marriage, and had expected to grow old together. Sixteen years seemed like but an instant now.
She had made it through the funeral with her daughters on either side of her. Her stepdaughters, Kyra and Kellie, were in a pew across the aisle with their mother, Marjorie, who had flown in from L.A., and Kellie’s husband, Geoff, shepherding them along. They lived nearby and had left their three- and five-year-old sons at home. Kyra lived in New York with her current boyfriend in the West Village brownstone her father had bought her at twenty-five. To keep things fair to both his daughters, he had purchased Kellie the house she wanted in Connecticut, near his own, at the same time. She’d been recently married at the time, wanted babies, and preferred a country life, but with the birth of their second child, the house was too small for them now, and they’d been talking about upgrading for a while, with her father’s help of course.
Their mother, Marjorie, Andrew’s first wife, had moved to L.A. after the divorce eighteen years before, a year before Andrew met Sydney. So Sydney had played no part in their separation, nor the dissolution of their marriage, nor the enormous settlement Andrew had given Marjorie. He was a generous man, even to the woman who remained bitter and angry for two decades after he left her. The marriage had simply died. She was an unhappy woman, eternally discontent, and took it out on everyone. Andrew had finally had enough.
Marjorie’s rage and jealousy had found an easy focus on Sydney, once she met Andrew, and she had successfully poisoned the twins against her. With no valid reason, except their mother’s venom, they had hated Sydney from the first. There had been no turning the tides. They’d been seventeen when their father married Sydney, a pretty blond divorced woman with two little girls, nine and eleven. She had done everything to win over Andrew’s daughters, but their viciousness to her and cruelty to her children finally discouraged her. With Marjorie’s fury to fuel their hatred of her, there was nothing Sydney could do, and she had finally given up. They had hardly spoken to her in the last week and acted as though she had killed their father, when she was grief-stricken, and so were Sophie and Sabrina.
Jesse Barclay, Andrew’s lawyer, had come to the house the day after the funeral. She had to know. Sixteen years had sped past them, and Andrew had never changed his will from the one he’d written before they met. Jesse had looked embarrassed when he told Sydney that he had reminded Andrew to update his will when they got married. He’d always intended to but somehow had neglected to do it, and he’d thought he had the luxury of time. He hadn’t expected to die in an accident, nor to get sick at his age. They had both signed a prenuptial agreement when they married, which kept whatever they had separate, and he intended to amend that too after they’d been married for a while. He was only forty when they married, Sydney had been the same age his daughters were now.
When he died, Andrew was vital and alive, at the top of his game, and a loving husband. He had never meant to leave Sydney in the situation she was in now and simply hadn’t gotten around to changing his will or their prenup. He was engaged in living, not dying. He would have been heartbroken if he’d known what she was facing. The last will and testament still in force when he died left everything to his two daughters. Since he’d written it before he knew her, there was no provision for his second wife.
The house they lived in belonged to his daughters upon his death, and as soon as they were apprised of the situation, on the same day Sydney was, their lawyer advised Jesse that they wanted her out of the house thirty days after their father died. She had twenty-two days left in their home. And in the same spirit, not having met Sydney or remarried when he wrote the will, Andrew had left all of his art, possessions, investments, the contents of the house, and his entire fortune to his two girls. And since the prenup precluded community property, whatever Andrew had bought or owned during their marriage remained his, and now belonged to his daughters. The only exception were gifts he had specifically made to Sydney, with confirmation in writing.
The twins had looked victorious when they showed up at the house together the day they learned of the will and began inventorying the silver, art, antiques, and valuables. Kellie had already taken two valuable paintings and a sculpture to her own home, with her twin’s permission, of course. They said nothing to Sydney about it, and she found the empty spaces they had left when she got home from running an errand. She had sat down on the couch and gasped, realizing what would come next, and how they intended to handle it. Kellie and Kyra had already agreed that Kellie would move into the house since she was married and had children, and Kyra wanted to continue living in New York in the house she owned.
The four days since Sydney had discovered her legal situation as Andrew’s widow had left her dazed and in a state of panic, which she hadn’t shared yet with her girls. She didn’t want to worry them, and needed to figure out what she was going to do before she told them. Essentially, according to his will and reinforced by their prenuptial agreement, she now owned nothing that she and Andrew had shared for sixteen years. He had given her some jewelry, which she had a right to keep, along with a small painting of little value that he had bought her in Paris on their honeymoon. And on their tenth anniversary, he had given her a cozy apartment in Paris on the Left Bank and put it in her name. It was a one-bedroom walk-up, in a charming old building in the city they loved. But it had none of the pretensions of opulence that would have attracted the kind of buyers willing to pay a high price, if she needed to sell it now.
She had given up her career as a respected dress designer for a well-known firm when they married. It had been a hard decision for her, but Andrew had wanted her free to spend more time with him, and pressed her to give up the high-pressure job that had supported her and her daughters since her own divorce seven years before they met. The idea of no longer working was daunting but appealing, since she would not only be able to be with him, but with her daughters as well. She had finally succumbed to his entreaties and quit her job a month before they married. She hadn’t worked since, and stopped missing it after a while. Their life was full. They traveled and were together and with their respective children, and they went to their favorite city, Paris, for romantic trysts once or twice a year. They loved knowing they had the apartment there and could go anytime.
Other than that, Andrew had handled the disparity in their finances discreetly, with kindness and grace. He kept a joint checking account sufficiently funded so that she could pay the monthly household bills and buy whatever she wanted without asking him or feeling like a charity case. He never questioned what she bought, and she wasn’t an extravagant woman. She had worked hard for what she earned before they were married, and was grateful for the life of ease he gave her, and everything he did for her and her two girls. And although she had no income of her own once she stopped working, they had lived well on his generosity for sixteen years. And suddenly, overnight, her situation was dire. The only money she had was what was in their joint checking account, and after she paid their outstanding bills with it at the end of the month, there would be little left. He usually funded the account once a month, so there was almost no surplus in it at the moment, enough to live on for a short time if she was careful, but not for long, and not forever. Had he left her even a small portion of his fortune, she would have been set for life, although she never thought of it.
For four days she had lain awake all night, thinking about her situation and trying to figure out what to do next. She cried for him and the shocking loss she would have to learn to live with, of a husband she had loved profoundly. And in addition she had to find a way to support herself, and quickly. She needed a place to live and a way to pay the rent and eat after the money in their checking account ran out. Everything else belonged to Kellie and Kyra now. They had said she could keep her car and her clothes, and little else. They had finally won the war they had waged on her for so many years. The victory was theirs, and Andrew had played into their hands without meaning to, by never redoing his will once he remarried. If he’d had any inkling something like this could happen, he would never have left her at their mercy. He was well aware of how vicious they were to Sydney, and had complained about it to his daughters many times.
Both her daughters had good jobs and supported themselves, and enjoyed the occasional helping hand from their stepfather. But Sydney was entirely financially dependent on him, and had been ever since she gave up her job when they married. Her first husband had left her with nothing except her salary, and paid a pittance as support for the girls. He had met a wealthy woman and moved to her home in Dallas shortly after the divorce, rarely seeing his daughters. Two years later, he and his new wife were killed when their small private plane crashed while they were on safari in Zimbabwe. Andrew had acted as father to her girls ever since they’d been together, and had supported them too, once Sydney gave up her job, until the girls were employed and could live on what they made. He had put both her girls through college since she couldn’t. And he had always been wonderful to them and interested in everything they did. And now they had lost him too.
Sydney’s genuine grief over losing Andrew was compounded by her terror over what was going to happen to her, and what she would do when her checking account was empty, which would be very soon. From a life of stability, security, and luxury, she had been cast into uncertainty. And she had been out of the job market and the design world for too many years to find employment easily, especially in her old field. She wasn’t even up on the computer techniques designers used to draw today. She still sketched the traditional, old-fashioned way. She was behind the times and virtually unemployable after sixteen years out of the business. It was her worst nightmare come true. She had lost Andrew, and after years of depending on him, she could no longer support herself, except by waiting on tables or selling shoes. There was nothing else she could do. She couldn’t even get a job as an assistant or secretary without knowledge of current computer programs. Her only talent was design, but her skills and contacts were obsolete.
Night after night after the funeral, she sat awake in her bedroom with the lights on and a legal pad in hand, listing what she could sell and trying to guess what it might bring her. The jewelry Andrew had given her was handsome and she loved it, but he had never bought her important jewelry, and she hadn’t wanted him to. He had spent far more on his art collection, which was of greater value and which they had selected carefully together, and now every piece belonged to his girls, since he had paid for it and had never designated it specifically to her. She owned the apartment in Paris, and she wanted to sell it quickly. She would need the money to live on. No matter how much she loved it, she had to put it on the market now. Her clothes had no major value if she sold them. And she couldn’t think of anything else. Everything that she thought of came under the heading of “contents of the house” and was part of his estate and belonged to Kellie and Kyra, according to his will.
Only Andrew’s attorney knew how drastic her situation was, and she had sworn him to secrecy. She didn’t want to frighten Sophie and Sabrina, they were coping with their own sadness over losing Andrew. Expressing her rising sense of panic to them wouldn’t change anything or help her.
A little over a week after the accident, she went into the city without telling anyone. She met with a realtor she had found online who advertised short-term temporary furnished apartments. She had to be out of her home in Connecticut in three weeks. She was trying to think clearly and make a plan, because she knew the twins wouldn’t let her stay even an extra day. After seeing five truly grim apartments on the far Upper East Side in depressing, poorly maintained buildings, she found a small one-bedroom apartment, with a tiny second room they said could be used as a closet, an office, or a nursery. She could put whatever boxes she had in there. The price was reasonable, the building ugly, there was no air-conditioning, and the small kitchen was part of the living room. The furniture was from IKEA and most of it was new, with a few items from thrift shops. The realtor said the owner was studying abroad for a year and was willing to rent it month to month. Sydney knew that her daughters would be shocked when they saw it, and she didn’t intend to tell them about it immediately. They didn’t need to know about her circumstances yet. Hopefully once the apartment in Paris sold, the money would sustain her until she could find a job. She kept reminding herself that at forty-nine, she was still young enough to start a new life, but her heart felt like a rock in her chest when she signed the papers for the furnished apartment. They had to check her credit references, but the realtor assured her that everything would be in order by the time she needed the apartment. Hearing that made Sydney’s heart race. She felt dizzy at the thought of giving up the home where she’d lived for all these years.
She started packing for Paris that night when she got back to Connecticut. Sydney had sent an email to a Paris realtor that afternoon, and they were meeting at the apartment in two days. She hadn’t been encouraging about putting it up for sale. Sydney was still deciding what clothes to take and was distracted when the doorbell rang. She was startled to see a woman there whom she had known for years but never been close to. She had noticed her at the funeral and was surprised to see her there too. They had met when their children went to school together, and ran into each other occasionally now at the grocery store, and she was standing at the door with a cake box in her hands, which she held out to Sydney.
“I was on my way home, and thought I’d see how you’re doing. Did you eat today?” Veronica asked with genuine concern, as though they were close friends. She was a few years older than Sydney and had been divorced for several years. She was a good-looking woman, played tennis a lot, and stayed in shape, but she talked too much, and Sydney didn’t have the energy or desire to deal with her after looking at apartments in New York all day. Selecting her new home that was the size of a closet had been depressing to contemplate, compared to where she lived. And she couldn’t even imagine what the girls would say when they saw it.
“I’m okay,” Sydney said, looking tired and standing in the doorway. She didn’t want to seem ungrateful but didn’t want to invite her in. “I was in the city all day. I had some things to do there. And I was just packing. I got home a little while ago.” The house looked dark behind her, but Veronica wouldn’t take the hint. She seemed determined to reach out to Sydney, who had no desire to see anyone, let alone a woman she hadn’t spent time with in years, and had never been close to.
“Are you going somewhere? Are you going to stay with the girls in the city? I can spend the night anytime you want, if you don’t want to be alone.” It was the last thing Sydney wanted. Although she was sure the offer was well intentioned, it felt intrusive.
“No, I’m fine. I’m going to Paris, to deal with our apartment there.”
“Are you moving there?” Veronica looked curious as they continued to stand in the doorway. Veronica wondered suddenly if Sydney was going to sell the house she and Andrew had lived in. It was a spectacular home with extensive grounds and beautiful gardens, although it took a lot of time, people, and money to maintain, but it would be harder for her without Andrew to run things, since she was alone.
“No, I’m not moving to Paris,” Sydney said with a sigh, her defenses down, and stepped back so Veronica could come in, which she did immediately and followed her to the kitchen. Sydney offered her iced tea and they sat at the black granite counter for a few minutes. Veronica questioned her about the apartment in Paris, while Sydney put the quiche she’d brought into the fridge. “I can’t imagine using the apartment again without Andrew. It was our special place.” She looked devastated as she said it. “I’m going to sell it.”
“You need to slow down,” Veronica said seriously. “You know what they say, don’t make big decisions like that for a year after you lose someone. You’ll regret it later. You might want to start spending time there, or in New York with Sophie and Sabrina. I wouldn’t make any fast moves if I were you.” Sydney hesitated for a long moment before she answered. She didn’t want to give her all the gory details and confide in her, but she’d find out some of it anyway.
“It’s more complicated than that. The twins have inherited this house. I’m moving out at the end of the month. Kellie and her family are moving in. I’m trying to figure out the rest.” Veronica looked stunned, as Sydney tried to make it sound commonplace and not like the blow it had been. But Veronica pounced on the news like a cat on a mouse.
“You’re moving out? In three weeks? Can’t you stay here for six months or a year?” She was shocked to hear that Andrew’s daughters, and not his wife, had inherited the house. But no more so than Sydney was. She tried to sound calm and at ease with it when she answered, as though she’d expected it. It was too embarrassing to do otherwise, and expose how upset she was. Out of respect for Andrew, she tried to put a good face on it to Veronica, who seemed hungry for information Sydney didn’t want to give. But she was in Sydney’s kitchen and clearly didn’t want to leave. She had traded a quiche for inside information. And Sydney remembered what a gossip she was.
“If I’m going to move, I might as well do it now,” she said bravely. “And I need to get things squared away in Paris.”
“Did they inherit that too?” Veronica looked horrified, wanting every detail.
“No, he gave me Paris as a gift. But this house is theirs, and everything in it.” Veronica was quiet for a long time as they looked at each other, and Sydney wished she’d leave.
“At least you’ll have fun buying a new house or apartment and shopping for it.” She tried to sound positive. Sydney didn’t comment on what she said, but she wasn’t going to be doing any shopping of any kind, if she intended to eat as well. “When are you going to Paris?”
“I’m taking the red-eye tomorrow night. I’ll be back in a few days.” She stood up then, hoping to encourage Veronica to go. The conversation had depressed her even more, and Veronica finally took the hint as they walked toward the front door.
“Call me. We can have lunch, or I can help you pack up the house or something.” Sydney had no desire for an audience while she tore her life apart in honor of the twins. Dealing with them in and out of the house to check the silver, crystal, and art was bad enough. She wanted to spend her last days in her home alone, mourning her lost life in peace. She had not only lost the man she loved unexpectedly, but her lifestyle, her home, her status as a married woman, and even her sense of herself. Who was she now without Andrew? She had suddenly become a pauper, previously married to a very wealthy man. She felt as though she’d fallen off a cliff into an abyss.
Veronica hugged her and then left, and Sydney went back upstairs to finish packing, feeling worse than before her visit. She emailed her daughters and told them that she was going to Paris for a few days, and then lay awake in the clutches of anxiety all night.
Veronica called her in the morning and told her again how sorry she was about the house. “I didn’t sleep a wink all night, worrying about you,” she said, and Sydney didn’t add that she hadn’t either. There was no point. And she didn’t want Veronica to know how upset she was about the house and why. It was none of her business.
After that, her younger daughter, Sophie, called, concerned about her. “Why are you going to Paris now, Mom? What’s the rush?”
“I just want to get everything organized, and it’s too sad being here alone. A couple of days in Paris might be good for me.” She tried to sound cheerful about it, and she promised to call her as soon as she got back.
Her older daughter, Sabrina, texted her between meetings, and told her to take care and be careful traveling alone. Both her daughters were worried about her, which was new for all of them. They’d never had to be concerned about her before, and she didn’t like being the object of their pity. They didn’t even know about the house yet. They knew that Andrew hadn’t left them anything, but they would be horrified when they learned that he had left his wife nothing either. It all went to the twins, whether they deserved it or not. And Sydney and her daughters knew they didn’t, not by any means.
She took a shuttle to the airport in time to make the ten P.M. flight on Air France. She was traveling business class, although Andrew had preferred flying first, but those days were over for her now. She had used air miles to pay for the business class ticket, as a last moment of luxury and comfort. And she wanted to sleep on the plane.
They offered a full meal on the flight, which she declined. She hadn’t eaten but wasn’t hungry, and didn’t want a five-course meal at that hour. She reclined her seat and closed her eyes, remembering the last time she and Andrew had gone to Paris six months before, for New Year’s Eve. It brought tears to her eyes as she thought about it, and the tears squeezed through her lashes and down her cheeks as she tried to sleep. Finally the soothing noise of the airplane lulled her to sleep, and she woke up as they were preparing to land at Charles de Gaulle and a flight attendant asked her to raise her seat. The sun was shining over Paris, the landing was smooth, and moments later, she was standing at baggage claim waiting for her bag. She wasn’t traveling as a VIP, as she had done with Andrew. She was just a woman alone, going to Paris to sell the apartment she loved.
She tried not to think about it or how much fun their last trip there had been as she got into the cab and gave the driver the address, possibly for the last time.