Threading the Needle by Marie Bostwick Read Free Book Online Page B

couture collections and a blank check to buy whatever caught my eye. Shoes, and bags, and furs, and jewels, and, and, and . . . Anything and everything I wanted was mine simply by signing those two little words, “Madelyn Baron,” on a check or credit card slip.
    Did it make me happy? For a time. Sterling understood the arrangement and so did I. Yes, I had to turn a blind eye to his infidelities to maintain my lifestyle, but in my shoes, who wouldn’t have done the same?
    And even if I’d suddenly woken up one morning and decided that I could not tolerate this shameful farce of a marriage anymore (and there were many mornings when I did), a brief reflection on the chain of events that would follow if I presented Sterling with divorce papers quickly convinced me to think about something else.
    Sterling is vindictive, and he hates to lose. If I tried to divorce him, I had no doubt he’d sic the legal wolves on me, with Gene Janders leading the pack, and wouldn’t call them off until they’d ripped me to shreds financially and personally. And Sterling was not the only one who strayed during our marriage. The frequency and intensity of my assignations were minuscule compared to Sterling’s and in every case my infidelity was a direct response to his. I don’t believe in romance and I’m not interested in sex. I haven’t been for a long time, if I ever was at all. I took lovers not for love, but to exact revenge on Sterling and, I suppose, to prove to myself that I was still desirable—to someone.
    If I had tried to divorce Sterling before the arrest, I had no doubts about the outcome. Sterling would come out smelling like a rose and I would be left with nothing but a shredded reputation and a pile of legal bills, and all at an age when the odds of staging a second act range from remote to impossible.
    Of course, that’s exactly what happened anyway. Don’t tell me that God has no sense of irony.
    And so, now that Sterling has been rendered powerless to harm me, at least in court, I’m too poor to be free of him. I have all the attorney’s bills I can handle at the moment. Divorcing Sterling will have to wait until I can beef up my bank account.
    And the best way to do that, the only way I can see, is to focus on sprucing up the cottage so it will sell quickly and I can leave New Bern, this time forever. I want no part of this place. I never did.
    But fortunately for me, other people feel differently. For some people, a quiet little village in New England is their dream location. Soft market or no, it couldn’t be that hard to sell the house. Gene said there was no chance of it, but lawyers are always pessimistic; imagining worst-case scenarios is part of the job. Gene might be a good attorney, but that didn’t make him an expert on Connecticut real estate, did it? Besides, he’d never even seen my grandmother’s house.
    Down market or no, as I drove in the direction of Oak Leaf Lane, I felt optimistic. Even in a bad economy, a beautiful house can always attract a buyer, and no matter the memories connected with it, Beecher Cottage was a truly beautiful old house.
    Once.
    Sitting behind the wheel of the new, very used Volvo wagon I’d purchased with eight thousand dollars from my fast-dwindling bank account, I drove up and down Oak Leaf Lane twice before pulling to the curb and realizing that the place with the broken fence posts, missing shingles, and overgrown hedges really was Grandma Edna’s old house—now mine.
    Dear God. What had happened?
    I climbed out of the car, took my suitcases out of the back, and stood looking at what had once been the prettiest house on the block.
    The grass hadn’t been cut in months; the flower beds were choked with weeds. Two windows were broken and the shutters were missing slats. One window was missing the shutters entirely. And the roof . . . the only thing that appeared to be holding the remaining