The Ambassador's Wife

Also by Jennifer Steil

The Woman Who Fell from the Sky

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, 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.

Copyright © 2015 by Jennifer F. Steil

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.

www.doubleday.com

D
OUBLEDAY
and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published and unpublished material: Ernest Tubb Music, for permission to reprint lyrics from “Waltz Across Texas.”

eBook design adapted from printed book design by Maria Carella

Cover design by John Fontana

Cover images: woman © Wojciech Zwolinski/Trevillion Images; city © Nadeem Khawar/Moment/Getty Images

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Steil, Jennifer.

The ambassador's wife : a novel / Jennifer Steil. — First edition.

pages; cm

ISBN 978-0-385-53902-9 (hardcover) ISBN 978-0-385-53903-6 (eBook)

1. Ambassadors—Fiction. 2. Artists—Fiction. 3. Kidnapping—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3619.T4485A83 2015

813'.6—dc23

2014018579

eBook ISBN 9780385539036

v4.1

a

Prologue: September 17, 2010

Epilogue: September 17, 2013: Miranda

F
OR
T
IM AND
T
HEADORA, MY HOME

SEPTEMBER 17, 2010

As she curls herself around the wasted body of a stranger's child, cupping the tiny head in her hand, the remembered glow of a painting emerges unbidden from the gloom of Miranda's mind. A woman sleeps in a boat, reclined in her husband's arms and draped alongside the body of her sleeping child, bathed in a benediction of pale light. Around them are dark water and a darker shore. The woman's body is limp, trusting, abandoned to its fate. Opposite the slumbering family, Fortune plies the oars, with the assistance of a hopeful Cupid. Something about the image—the family's relinquishing of control over their destiny—fills Miranda with terror. They drift, serenely dreaming, into darkness
. Wake,
she wants to cry to them
. Wake up and take an oar.
Fortune and Cupid are unreliable guides. As the baby tugs at her breast, Miranda gazes down at her with dull eyes, trying to remember the name of the painting. What was it? The child whimpers as the nipple slips away from her mouth; she is too weak to suck for long
. The Dream of Happiness.
That was it. Constance Mayer's
Dream of Happiness.
She who had known so little of it in her own life. When Miranda thinks back on her brief life with Cressida and Finn, this is the image that keeps returning to her. A moment of blissful unconsciousness, and then black
.