Chapter 199

• What was her problem—and why was she feeling so dissatisfied of late? It wasn’t as if she hadn’t known what she’d been getting herself into when she’d married Ariston. She’d known he was a workaholic and he’d never promised her his heart. He’d been honest from the start—some might say brutally so—by telling her he could never love her. And she had accepted that. He was giving as much of himself as he was capable of giving—that was what she told herself over and over. She closed her eyes and sighed. It wasn’t his fault if her feelings for him were changing…if suddenly she found herself wanting more than he was prepared to give. And allowing those feelings to accelerate was fruitless; she told herself that too. She would be setting herself up for disappointment if she kept on yearning for what she could never have, instead of just making the most of what she did have.
• So she ate the delicious breakfast prepared by Ariston’s cook and told his driver that she didn’t need him that day. She thought the chauffeur seemed almost disappointed to be dismissed and, not for the first time, she wondered if Ariston had asked him to keep an eye on her. No. She picked up her handbag and checked she had her mobile phone. She mustn’t start thinking that way. That really was being paranoid.
• She thought about going to look at the autumn leaves in Hyde Park, but something made her take the train to New Malden instead. Was it nostalgia which made her want to go back to where she used to live? To stare at the world she’d left behind and try to remember the person she had been before Ariston had blazed into her life and changed it beyond recognition? She found herself walking down familiar streets until at last she reached her old bedsit, and as she stood and looked up at the window she wondered if she was imagining the surreptitious glances of the passers-by. Did she look out of place with her quietly expensive clothes and extortionately priced handbag as she chased the ghosts of her past?