The Senator's Wife (34 page)

“Mea culpa,” he had said after Delia left, and that was a great, generous gift to her. But he was smiling when he said it, and that was perhaps the greater gift.

Henry stirs beside her in the bed. “Blue,” he says, or something like it. She looks down at his sleeping face, restored to near-infancy in its utter relaxation. Carefully she slides her body off the bed, slowly she gets up. She crosses the room, steps into the hall and closes Henry's door behind her. She stands in the hallway, listening. Martin is going over one of his lines again in his room, repeating it, trying different emphases. Asa has music on low downstairs. She can hear the dining room chair creak as he shifts his weight in it. Henry is in his bed, Nathan is in his study. She has the sense of her life surrounding her, of being held in it. Of belonging here.

She thinks of the photo of Delia again, and she remembers her desperation trying to talk to her, trying to explain herself. And of course, there was probably nothing she could have said that would have changed anything then. She had done what she had done.

But what she would have told Delia if she had had the words then for what she has come to feel over the years, what she would have said—and she would swear that this is true—is that she did what she did with Tom that day for love. Out of love.

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sue Miller is the best-selling author of the novels
Lost in the Forest, The World Below, While I Was Gone, The Distinguished Guest, For Love, Family Pictures,
and
The Good Mother;
the story collection
Inventing the Abbotts;
and the memoir
The Story of My Father.
She lives in Boston, Massachusetts.

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright © 2008 by Sue Miller
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by
Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are
registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Miller, Sue [date]
The senator's wife / by Sue Miller.—1st ed.
p. cm.
“This is a Borzoi book”—T.p. verso.
1. Married people—Fiction. 2. Marriage—Fiction.
3. Female friendship—Fiction. 4. Middle class—Fiction.
5. New England—Fiction. 6. Domestic fiction. I. Title.
PS3563.I421444S46 2008
813'.54–dc22 2007014659

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the
product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance
to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

eISBN: 978-0-307-26872-3

v3.0