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that often she would get up just to kiss. In their year of courtship—seduction, she always called it, making him laugh—and their eight years of marriage, she had never tired of making love with her husband.
    â€œYou know why I look this good?” she would ask, curled up next to him in bed at night, or very often in the afternoons, because making love was what she said a Spanish siesta was really for. “It’s because I’m a woman who gets fucked a lot.” His snort of outraged laughter made her laugh too. “Well, what else can I call it?” she asked, licking his mouth that still tasted of her. “People can tell, you know. I have that kind of glow about me.”
    He sat up and looked at her. “That you do,” he said solemnly. “I don’t know if I can keep up with you.”
    â€œDon’t worry, I’ll help you,” Lorenza remembered saying, making him laugh again.
    â€œI always was a sexy bitch,” she’d added, and Juan Pedro had put his hand over her mouth to stop her. “Don’t tell me,” he’d begged. “I don’t want to know about the others.”
    So she had told him nothing about her past, other than her childhood on the Iberian island of Majorca, and of being sent to a strict convent school in Brussels at the age of thirteen, and then breaking all the rules in a glorious few years of newfound freedom at university, in Florida.
    Now, alone, she walked into their library, their “special” place, and took her usual seat on the big pale yellow wing chair opposite Juan Pedro’s sofa. She’d had the walls painted when she moved in, a pale azure, hand-rubbed to a smudgy softness. She’d always liked the way her yellow chair looked against them. The sofa, though, was amber linen, indented on the side where Juan Pedro always sat. The cashmere sweater he had thrown over his shoulders the night he died lay where she had left it across the back of the sofa, neutral color, soft, the sleeves neatly folded together.
    â€œI wonder,” Lorenza said softly, to herself, “I wonder if I can really ever come back here.”
    â€œYour room is ready, Señora,” Buena said from the doorway. “And the children will be here soon. Better hurry. You know how impatient they always are.”
    Lorenza sighed. Didn’t she just?

 
    Chapter 6
    Lorenza walked upstairs and into the large sun-filled bedroom she had shared with her husband. She stood for a moment, sniffing the air; she could swear she still smelled him, and if she closed her eyes she knew she would see him, lying on the bed waiting for her, the gray silk coverlet thrown back, naked but for his shorts and with a sheaf of papers in his hand because Juan Pedro never wasted a moment, he was always working.
    Sighing, she gathered herself together. She put her handbag down on the ottoman at the foot of the bed, a habit that always annoyed her husband—he said it got in the way of his feet. He was very tall but even so, Lorenza told him that was just plain ridiculous. He simply liked everything to be put away in its rightful place and not scattered around “his” room. It’s our room, she would remind him.
    She went and stood by the window, arms folded over her chest, gazing down at the quiet courtyard, thinking about the past, and then about the future. About what was to come.
    There was no love lost between Lorenza and Juan Pedro’s children. They’d resented her from day one and they resented her even more when their father left her the controlling shares in the Ravel sherry business, along with the estates and the other vineyards and houses that went with it. Of course they had all been amply taken care of, earlier, with handsome trust funds as well as shares in the business, even though none of them had even the remotest interest in the family wineries. Things had changed, though, since Lorenza was in charge.
    Expected