The Woman on the Orient Express

by Lindsay Jayne Ashford

How is it, she thought, that one can create a character who is more intelligent, more observant, more perceptive than oneself?

She no longer felt at home in churches. She had stopped taking communion. It wasn’t that she no longer believed in God, more a case of him not believing in her. In divorcing Archie, she felt she had let God down, broken a sacred promise. Although she still went to church occasionally, she felt like an unwelcome guest.

If there is a God, she thought, music must be his language.

That was my fault. I didn’t forbid her to see her father’s new family, but I made it perfectly clear how hurt I would be if she did. And so she saw Archie on his own in London, never with his wife and son. And by the time she finally got to meet her half brother, he was thirty-two years old. I know how hard she has found it to forgive me for those wasted years.