A Sudden Change of Heart Read Online Free PDF

back?”
    “I have appointments set up for the early part of next week, Doug, so I’ll probably leave for New York on Thursday or Friday.”
    “Great! You’ll be here next weekend, and so will I. This is probably going to be a quick trip to L.A. In and out.”
    “Where are you staying?”
    “Er, the Peninsula in Beverly Hills, as usual.”
    “Doug?”
    “Yes?”
    “I’ve really missed you this week.”
    “I’ve missed you too, darling. But we’ll make up for it, and you know what they say, absence makes the heart grow fonder.”
    She laughed. “I guess it does … the way I’m feeling right now, I wish you were here….” She laughed again, a light, infectious laugh.
    He laughed with her. “Got to go, sweetie.”
    “When are you leaving tomorrow?”
    “My flight’s at nine in the morning, and I’m going straight into meetings once I’ve dropped my luggage off. I’ll call you.”
    “Bye, darling.”
    “Bye, Laura. And a big kiss,” he said before hanging up.
    L aura sat soaking in the tub longer than usual. There had been no cabs on the street when she and Claire had left the museum earlier; they had walked all the way back to the hotel, where Claire had finally found a cab.
    The tub was helping Laura to thaw out and to relax, and she luxuriated in the hot bubble bath for a while, thinking of Doug. She had married Douglas Casson when she was twenty-five and he was twenty-seven. They were a perfect fit, compatible, attuned to each other in the best of ways. But lately he worked too hard. She smiled inwardly at this thought. Didn’t he say the same thing about her?
    To his way of thinking, they were both workaholics, and he seemed to relish announcing this. It was true, of course, but she didn’t like that particular word. It smacked of obsessiveness, and she was quite sure neither of them was that. Not exactly.
    Anyway, Claire had always said that the ability to work hard for long hours was the most important thing of all, and that this was what separated the women from the girls.
    But Laura thought that love was important too. Hadn’t Colette, her favorite author, once written that love and work were the only things of consequence in life? Certainlyshe believed this to be so. But Claire didn’t, at least, not the love part, not anymore. Claire had been burnt. “And they were third-degree burns at that,” Claire had said. Those burns had taken a long time to heal. “Now I have built a carapace around me, and I’ll never get burnt again. Or hurt in any way. My shell protects me. Nothing, no one, can ever inflict pain on me.”
    Laura loved Claire. She also had enormous compassion for her because of all the bad things that had happened to her. Laura was well aware that Claire was raw inside; still, she couldn’t help wishing her friend would open herself up to love again instead of retreating into her shell the way she did. There was something oddly sterile about a woman’s life if she did not have love in it, if she didn’t have a man to cherish.
    These days, whenever she broached this subject, Claire only laughed hollowly and responded swiftly, “I have Natasha, and she’s all that matters. She’s my life now, I don’t need a man around.”
    But a fourteen-year-old daughter wasn’t enough, was it? Laura wondered. Surely not for a loving, passionate, intelligent woman like Claire.
    Claire.
The dearest friend she had ever had. And still her
best
friend, the one she loved the most, even though they lived so far away from each other now. She and Claire went back a long way. Almost all of their lives, really.
    She had been five years old when Claire and her parents, Jack and Nancy Benson, had come to live in the apartment opposite theirs in the lovely old building on Park Avenue at Eighty-sixth Street. She had instantly fallen in love with her in the way a little girl of five falls inlove with a very grown-up ten-year-old. She had worshipped Claire from the first, had emulated her. Once their