Sapphire and Shadow (A Woman's Life) by Marie Ferrarella Read Free Book Online Page B

her as she walked away from Harry. Johanna wanted to cry, needed to cry, but no tears came to her eyes. She was utterly empty inside. There were no tears left for Harold and none for herself. Her marriage, if that was what it could be called, was beginning to make her feel physically ill as well as emotionally drained.
    She had to do something else in order to take her mind off this horrible situation. Her marriage had to be denigrated to an insignificant thing if she was going to preserve herself.
    She’d go to the Tate Gallery with Jocelyn. Yes, they’d make a day of it. Today. Johanna knew she was grasping at straws, but she had nothing else and maybe one of those straws would lead her out of this valley of despair.
    Lifting her chin, she felt a little better. She passed Tommy on her way to the exit and he smiled at her. There was no reason in the world why the smile of an almost perfect stranger should buoy her up and make her feel human again, but it certainly did. After being stripped down and mentally beaten by Harold, it felt good to have someone else look at her as a desirable woman. There was no mistaking the look in the prop carpenter’s eyes. She blessed him for it.
    “Hey!” someone yelled behind her. “Did you hear? Those goddamn terrorists did it again! They blew up another plane.”
    She had no idea why she knew, but she did. Instantly. Something went cold inside of her. Slowly, she turned around and looked at a square-jawed, tall man shouting the news to a friend of his up in the rafters.
    “What flight was it?” The words left her lips in slow motion.
    The man looked at her curiously. “Flight 59 out of London.”
    For a moment she stood frozen, wooden, and then the rapid beating of her heart overwhelmed everything and blacked it out. She felt hot. The world grew progressively smaller and then disappeared altogether.

    When she came to, she was laying on a hard leather couch in a crammed office. Something cold and wet was on her forehead. She looked up into Harold’s very annoyed face.
    “Are you pregnant?” he snapped out.
    When she had been carrying Jocelyn, there had been a period of time, early in the pregnancy, when she had fainted a lot. Other than that, she had always been sinfully healthy. She didn’t feel very healthy right now. She felt ill, desperately ill.
    “Paul,” she managed to get out.
    “I knew it.” Harry began to pace, raging at the betrayal, raging not because it was his wife, but because it was his friend who had been the one to do it, to misuse his trust. “I knew that rutting bastard was just hanging around to sniff at your skirts.”
    She shut her eyes tight as the tears she had been unable to shed earlier came, sliding through her lids, slipping down her cheeks to her temples. She couldn’t manage the strength to brush them aside.
    “No.” The single word was forced out through a throat that tears had managed to tightened. “Paul was—he was on that flight.”
    Harold blew out an impatient breath. “What flight, for Chrissakes? I’ve got a picture to film.”
    Shakily, she drew in air, forcing herself to pull her thoughts together. Everything in her mind felt like it was tangled with everything else. She couldn’t make sense of anything.
    “The one that was just blown up. Someone, someone on the set just came shouting that the terrorists blew up flight—Oh God, poor Denise.” She covered her mouth with her hands to keep a sob back. “Poor Paul.”
    She felt bereft, as if she had been irrevocably stripped of her last means of defense. Paul was the closest thing she had to a best friend and she knew that if she needed a word of support, of encouragement, or just a shoulder to lean on, he would be there. There was no need to say anything to him. He understood. The two of them had been there in the beginning with Harry and they shared that between them.
    And now he was dead.
    And so was she. It kept coming back to that. Always to that.
    She looked up at