Page 90 of Midnight Surrender to the Spaniard

‘What happens when you come to visit me in a few months and he’s seeing someone else?’ asked Emily.

‘I’ll expect that,’ Anna admitted. ‘And I’m not going to let it make things awkward for the two of us, I promise. Have you told Alejandro?’

‘What? That my usually sensible friend has gone completely crazy?’ She gave a smile and then shook her head. ‘No, I haven’t told him. I was hoping to talk you out of going to the funeral.’

‘Yet you found Dali?’

‘I did...’

‘Thank you.’

‘You’d better hurry and catch your train...’

‘How is Josefa?’ Sebastián asked his brother.

‘She is doing well.’

‘She’s a fighter.’

‘Yes.’

‘And Emily?’

‘She has to stay there.’

‘Of course.’

No question—Sebastián knew that.

He harboured no bitterness towards Anna for returning home. He knew, despite his first thoughts and that dreadful row, that she was a woman who was a mother first.

Unlike his.

And he admired her for it.

‘I can’t bear it...’ Maria was weeping and wavingaromáticasunder her nose—but had managed to be in full make-up and funeral regalia.

Her day of days, Sebastián thought darkly.

But then he looked closely at his mother, and at her hands that shook as she tried to open her fan. Who was he, after all, to sit as judge and jury on love?

A dreadful mother? Yes.

An absent wife? True.

Yet José Romero’s ending was the one his father would have chosen over any other, Sebastián knew.

‘Here.’ He handed his mother a small sherry and she nodded gratefully.

‘This could be last time I’ll see my photo on the bottle...’ She sighed. ‘You’ll have every trace of me removed.’

‘Let’s not do this today,’ Sebastián suggested firmly. ‘Carmen needs—’

‘Can everyone stop worrying about Carmen for a moment?Ihave just lost my husband.’

Dios, but he had to bite his tongue.

He looked at his sister, curled up in a chair, and truly wondered if she would make it through the day.

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