The Shadow Wife - Diane Chamberlain [101]
Gabriel had become almost fanatical about wanting to take a vacation in Mendocino. He’d been talking about it ever since Alan and Carlynn honeymooned there after their wedding nearly two years earlier. They’d raved about the peace and quiet and the natural beauty of the location, saying how perfect it was for a romantic getaway. It would be different for her and Gabriel, though, Lisbeth knew. Whenever they stayed in a hotel, they had to get two separate rooms. Someday, Gabriel promised her, they would be married. She now wore a spectacular diamond and sapphire ring on her left hand, but they had not yet set a date. She trusted their relationship, its depth and its love, but she knew Gabe still harbored the fear that marriage to him would cost her more than he was worth.
She’d certainly thought about the price she was paying for being with Gabriel. She had not visited Cypress Point since Carlynn’s wedding, and she missed the mansion and the view from the terrace in a way that could cause her actual physical pain. Sometimes at night, she yearned for her old bedroom, where the open windows let in the sound of the waves slapping against the rocky shore.
She thought, too, about the financial cost a marriage to Gabriel would mean for her. She would lose a fortune if she was cut out of her mother’s will. That only meant, she tried to reason with herself, that she and Gabriel would live like most couples, dependent on only themselves and their own resources to get by. They would never be rich, but between her small salary and Gabriel’s larger one, they would be in better shape than many people they knew. She should need nothing more than that.
It was not fair, though. Not fair that Carlynn, who had gotten the best of everything as a child, should still receive it now, as an adult. It was a struggle for Lisbeth not to shift the anger she felt toward her mother onto her sister’s shoulders. When Carlynn would return from a visit to the mansion, Lisbeth could barely look her in the eye, she was so jealous. She knew that her twin fought with Delora to allow Lisbeth to visit Cypress Point, but there was no way she could win that battle. Delora had all the power.
Although Lisbeth hadn’t set foot in the mansion in two years, Carlynn made regular trips to see their mother, whose eyesight was worsening and who was developing other aches and pains as well, even though she was only in her fifties. Carlynn would be upset after those visits, because although she possessed the ability to heal total strangers, she seemed unable to rid her mother of her ailments.
Carlynn was upset over other matters, as well, Lisbeth knew. After two years of marriage, she was still not pregnant, and Lisbeth heard the frustration in her sister’s voice every month when she’d call to announce she had, once again, gotten her period.
Lisbeth, though, had decided she didn’t want children, and she thought Gabriel seemed relieved by that decision. He still worried about how their half-white, half-Negro children might fit into the world, but Lisbeth’s reasoning went even deeper than that. Her own childhood had been so unhappy, and her memories of herself as a little girl so excruciating, that she couldn’t bear the thought of watching a child of her own endure anything that might be hurtful. She still used a diaphragm to keep from getting pregnant, but Carlynn had told her that within a year or two, birth control pills would be on the market. Lisbeth had kept her joy over that news to herself out of sensitivity to her sister, who might never need a pill to avoid getting pregnant.
Little Richard was singing about Miss Molly when Lloyd and Gabriel surprised her by returning to the office. Lloyd wore a look of defeat on his face, but Lisbeth knew him well enough to see the smile behind it.
“Your boyfriend drives a hard