Jewels by Danielle Steel Read Free Book Online Page B

stupid. Come home. You’re twenty-one years old. You can’t give up your life now. You have to start over.”
    “I don’t want to,” she said quietly, refusing to pay any attention to her sister’s baby.
    “Don’t be crazy.” Jane looked exasperated with the stubbornness of her younger sister.
    “What do you know, dammit? You have a husband who loves you, and two children. You’ve never been a burden, or an embarrassment or a disgrace to anyone. You’re the perfect wife, daughter, sister, mother. What do you know about my life? Absolutely nothing!” She looked furious, and she was, but not at Jane, and she knew it. She was furious at herself, and the fates … and at Freddie. And then she was instantly contrite as she looked at her sister sadly. “I’m sorry, I just want to be alone out here.” She couldn’t even really explain it.
    “Why?” Jane couldn’t understand it. She was young and beautiful, and she wasn’t the only woman alive to get divorced, but she acted as though she had been convicted of murder.
    “I don’t want to see anyone. Can’t you understand that?”
    “For how long?”
    “Maybe forever. All right? Is that long enough? Does that make it clear to you?” Sarah hated answering all her questions.
    “Sarah Thompson, you’re crazy.” Her father had arranged for her to take her own name back as soon as he filed for the separation.
    “I have a right to do what I want with my life. I can go be a nun if I want to,” she said stubbornly to her sister.
    “You’ll have to become a Catholic first.” Jane grinned, but Sarah didn’t find it amusing. They had been Episcopalians since birth. And Jane was beginning to think that Sarah was a little crazy. Or maybe she’d come out of it after a while. It was what they all hoped, but it no longer seemed certain.
    But Sarah remained firm in her refusal to move back to New York. Her mother had long since picked up her things from the apartment in New York and stored them all in boxes, which Sarah insisted she didn’t even want to see now. She went to her divorce hearing in November wearing a black suit and a funereal face. She looked beautiful and afraid and sat through it stoically until it was over. And as soon as it was, she drove herself back to Long Island.
    She went for long walks on the beach every day, even on the bitterest cold days, with the wind whipping her face until it felt as though it were bleeding. She read endlessly, and wrote letters to her mother and Jane and some of her oldest friends, but in truth she still had no desire to see them.
    They all celebrated Christmas in Southampton and Sarah hardly talked to anyone. The only time she mentioned the divorce was to her mother, when they heard a news story over the radio about the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. She felt an unhappy kinship with Wally Simpson. But her mother assured her again that she and the Simpson woman had nothing in common.
    When spring came, she looked better again finally, healthier, rested, she had gained back some weight, and her eyes were alive. But by then she was talking about finding a farmhouse on Long Island somewhere, in the remoter parts, and trying to rent it, or perhaps even buy one.
    “That’s ridiculous,” her father growled when she suggested it to him. “I can understand perfectly well that you were unhappy over what happened, and needed some time to recover here, but I’m not going to let you bury yourself on Long Island for the rest of your life, like a hermit. You can stay here until the summer, and in July, your mother and I are taking you to Europe.” He had decided it just the week before and his wife was thrilled, and even Jane thought it was a splendid idea, and just what Sarah needed.
    “I won’t go.” She looked at him stubbornly, but she looked healthy and strong and more beautiful than ever. It was time for her to go back out in the world again, whether she knew it or not. And if she wouldn’t go of her own accord, they