Her Own Rules by Barbara Taylor Bradford

Jack’s death, but the light had gone out for her. She just gave up in the end, and I’ve always thought she died of a broken heart, if that’s possible.”
    “Oh I think it is, Meredith. I believe my mother did…she went so quickly after my father passed away.
    I’ve always thought she just lost all interest in living once he was gone. In fact, I found out from my aunt, after Mummy had died, that she was al-Her Own Rules / 105
    ways saying, ‘I want to go to Winston,’ and she stopped eating, well, she ate very little. It was as if she lost her appetite…for everything, including life. I do think she’d made up her mind to die.”
    “Amelia was a bit like that too, although she did live for a year after Jack’s death. Not surprising really, when you think about it. People who have been together for a long time are so dependent on each other, and when one of them is suddenly alone, it’s traumatic.”
    “They’re lonely, and loneliness is a pretty unbearable state to be in.”
    “Amelia once said the same thing. Actually, she said loneliness was another kind of death. She loved me and she loved Cat, but Jack was the light of her life.
    Without him she seemed to lose her purpose, her raison d’être. Did I ever tell you that they’d known each other since their childhood?”
    “No, you never did. And did they grow up together?”
    “Part of the time, yes. Her parents had a summer home in Cornwall Bridge, not far from Silver Lake, and they were friends of the Silvers. Jack and Amelia met when they were children. Amelia was fourteen and Jack ten. They became best friends. They were both only children, you see, only children of only children, so there were no brothers and sisters or cousins. ‘I’m going to marry you when I grow up,’ Jack was forever telling her, and she’d laugh and say she couldn’t possibly marry a younger man. But they did marry when they were
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    in their early twenties. And then Amelia had the riding accident…how different their lives would have been if she hadn’t been thrown by her horse. But that was her destiny…at least, that’s what she used to say to me.”
    “What did she mean?”
    “Exactly that, Patsy. She said that none of us could tamper with fate. Or avert it. Ché serà serà she would constantly murmur, what will be will be . That was her motto in a way, and her philosophy too. She said it was fate that brought me to Silver Lake that day in May of 1969. She said I was simply living out my destiny, just as she was doing, and Jack too. ‘I’m meant to be in this chair, Meri, I don’t know why, but I am,’
    she would tell me over and over again.” Meredith paused, looked at Patsy through the corner of her eye.
    “According to Amelia, fate brought me to them. And as I’ve told you many times before, they changed my life, just as I changed theirs, and in so many different ways. For the better…for all of us. They gave me love and warmth and understanding, and the only real home I’d ever known until then. And I gave them something they’d always wanted, always missed…”
    “You were like a sister to them, the sister neither of them ever had.”
    “Yes, I was a sibling, in a sense. But what I meant was that I gave them Cat. My baby was like their child as well as mine. And how much they loved her.”
    “I know, and just think how happy they’d be if Her Own Rules / 107
    they could see her today. She’s really grown up to be such a fine young woman. Do you think she will get engaged to Keith?”
    “I do, and it’ll be soon. Catherine has very good instincts, and she wouldn’t have said anything to me the other night if she hadn’t felt Keith was on the verge of proposing.”
    “I hope I get an invitation to the wedding.”
    “Don’t be so silly, of course you will. Cat loves you, and she’s never forgotten how marvelous you were to her the year she lived with you in London. And neither have I, for that matter.