The Sins of the Mother Read Online Free PDF Page B

game or a school play. He was as solid as a rock for all of them. He was someone she knew she could always depend on. He had never let her down, and she knew he never would.
    Olivia thought they had the perfect family. Three children were more than she had ever dreamed of. When Phillip was twelve, Liz ten, and John seven, and Olivia was thinking about opening a store in Australia, she was startled and none too pleased to discover that she was pregnant again. She was just too busy to have a baby, and couldn’t imagine how it had happened. But Joe was ecstatic when she told him, and he said he wanted another little girl. Olivia was thirty-six by then, and Maribelle was sixty-one, but said she was willing to take care of another baby. She was totally devoted to her grandchildren, and at times more of a mother to them than Olivia was herself. She was away so much of the time, and constantly visiting their stores.
    Cassandra was born seven months later. This time it was a difficult birth, she was born by cesarean section, and Olivia’s recovery took longer, and she chafed to get back to work. But the baby was exquisite and Joe was thrilled. Olivia had a harder time bonding with her than she had with the others. The pregnancy hadn’t been as easy, it had slowed her down more, and the birth had been much harder. Without even realizing it, she resented the time and energy it had taken from her dedication to her business. And she was no longer geared to having a baby. Her first three had been born within five years of each other and were all young together. Cassandra, or Cassie as they called her, had come along later in their lives and didn’t fit in as easily as the others. And right from the beginning, she was different. All three of the Grayson children were blonds, and looked like Olivia and Joe. Cassie had jet-black hair and big green eyes and looked like no one anyone could remember. And from the moment she could talk, her first word was “No!” Maribelle whispered to her son-in-law more than once that Cassie was just like her mother. Olivia had had her own ideas as a child too, but she had been much easier than Cassie, who became the family dissident.
    Cassie adored her father, and early on she always complained about how little time their mother spent with them. The others had noticed it too by then, but Olivia had an empire to run, she had to rely on Joe and her mother to do for the children whatever she didn’t have the time to do. She tried to be at important events, at school plays and ballet recitals, but it was hard to cover the day to day, and Joe was always better at it, and he never criticized Olivia for the time she didn’t spend with them. He understood perfectly what she was trying to do, and what she had done. He knew he could never have done it himself. And he filled in for her whenever, wherever, and however he could. Olivia always said he was a saint. She loved her children, but he was the perfect husband and father.
    It was a terrible blow for her when Joe died at sixty, and she was widowed at fifty-five. It was impossible for her to imagine her world without him in it, after thirty-two years together. And she found that the only thing that dulled the pain of the loss was work. She worked harder than ever then. Cassie was already in college, the others were grown and gone, and married, and Liz had children of her own. They didn’t need her as a daily presence anymore. And when Cass left for England, Maribelle moved into a senior residence. She was eighty years old and said that it was time. She had given Olivia a remarkable gift, which Olivia was well aware of. She had brought up her children for her, and had put in thirty years taking care of them so that Olivia could run the business that supported them all. Once Cass moved away, with her mother gone and the emptiness of her life without Joe, Olivia’s life became only about work. And the years flew by.
    It had been fourteen years since Joe’s