She remembered the day she and Raoul and Monique had walked along the beach at Nice.
“It’s a beautiful day for a swim,” Raoul said.
“I’d love to go, but we can’t. Teresa doesn’t swim.”
“I don’t mind if you two go ahead. I’ll wait for you at the hotel.”
And she had been so pleased that Raoul and Monique were getting along so well together.
They were lunching at a small inn near Cagnes. The maître d’ said, “The lobster is particularly good today.”
“I’ll have it,” Monique said. “Poor Teresa can’t. Shellfish makes her break out in hives.”
St. Tropez. “I miss horseback riding. I used to ride every morning at home. Do you want to ride with me, Teresa?”
“I—I’m afraid I don’t ride, Raoul.”
“I wouldn’t mind going with you,” Monique said. “I love to ride.”
And they had been gone all morning.
There were a hundred clues, and she had missed all of them. She had been blind because she had wanted to be blind. The looks that Raoul and Monique had exchanged, the innocent touching of hands, the whispers and the laughter.
How could I have been so stupid?
At night when Teresa finally managed to doze off, she had dreams. It was always a different dream, but it was always the same dream.
Raoul and Monique were on a train, naked, making love, and the train was crossing a trestle high over a canyon, and the trestle collapsed and everyone on the train plunged to their deaths.
Raoul and Monique were in a hotel room, naked in bed. Raoul laid down a cigarette and the room exploded into flames, and the two of them were burned to death, and their screams awakened Teresa.
Raoul and Monique fell from a mountain, drowned in a river, died in an airplane crash.
It was always a different dream.
It was always the same dream.
Teresa’s mother and father were frantic. They watched then-daughter wasting away, and there was nothing they could do to help her. And then suddenly Teresa began to eat. She ate constantly. She could not seem to get enough food. She gained her weight back, and then kept gaining and gaining until her body was gross.
When her mother and father tried to talk to her about her pain, she said, “I’m fine now. Don’t worry about me.”
Teresa carried on her life as though nothing were wrong. She continued to go into town and shop and do all the errands she had always done. She joined her mother and father for dinner each evening and read or sewed. She had built an emotional fortress around herself, and she was determined that no one would ever breach it. No man will ever want to look at me. Never again.
Outwardly, Teresa seemed fine. Inside, she was sunk in an abyss of deep, desperate loneliness. Even when she was surrounded by people, she sat in a lonely chair in a lonely room, in a lonely house, in a lonely world.
A little over a year after Raoul had left Teresa, her father was packing to leave for Ávila.
“I have some business to transact there,” he told Teresa. “But after that, I’ll be free. Why don’t you come with me? Ávila is a fascinating town. It will do you good to get away from here for a while.”
“No, thank you, Father.”
He looked at his wife and sighed. “Very well.”
The butler walked into the drawing room.
“Excuse me, Miss De Fosse. This letter just arrived for you.”
Even before Teresa opened it, she was filled with a prescience of something terrible looming before her.
The letter read:
Teresa, my darling Teresa:
God knows I do not have a right to call you darling, after the terrible thing I have done, but I promise to make it up to you if it takes me a lifetime. I don’t know where to begin.
Monique has run off and left me with our two-month-old daughter. Frankly, I am relieved. I must confess that I have been in hell ever since the day I left you. I will never understand why I did what I did. I seem to have been caught up in some kind of magic spell of Monique’s, but I knew from the beginning that my marriage to her was a terrible mistake. It was you I always loved. I know now that the only place I can find my happiness is at your side. By the time you receive this letter, I will be on my way back to you.