The Woman in Suite 11

Power is the only thing worth having. It is the reason I have kept the Leidmann Group private all these years. I have never been a drug user, but the exercise of power… that is a very heady drug indeed, and one that is very hard to give up.

The castle itself was supposed to date back to the twelfth century, but very little of the original structure remained. Perhaps a turret or two in the far corner, if that. In the eighteenth century it had been heavily remodeled in the classical style and now it was a white stucco U-shaped building with a tall central section and two symmetrical side wings enclosing the cobbled courtyard where my chauffeur-driven car was sweeping to a halt.

For travel is a magic like no other. It brings us together. It creates memories.

But even with that precious US passport, I was still aware that if anything happened to Judah, I would be pretty screwed. Our life here, our health insurance, our mortgage payments, they all rested on his job. And I didn’t want that. And not just for me—I didn’t want it for Judah either. I didn’t want the whole burden of keeping our little family afloat to rest on his shoulders.

One of the things I had dreamed about obsessively, sweaty nightmares, back in the dark days of postnatal anxiety, had been my green card expiring and ICE coming to batter down the door.

You’re like Tigger, you are, no matter how hard you fall, you always bounce back.

no matter how often he tried to persuade me that month, day, year was the logical sequence, I would never get used to it. Who the hell went middle, small, large? It made no sense.

the world had changed a lot since Bruce Chatwin’s day. No one wanted to hear middle-aged white men wanging on about their spiritual voyages in developing nations,

again. I didn’t want to be one of those women who nitpicked every time their husbands did something slightly differently to the way they would have done it.

let out a shaky breath—yes, that one, the one I didn’t know I’d been holding