Selena Alternate Ending

Richard remembered when he first met Selena and thought her to be an unmannered spoiled brat. The daughter of a millionaire widower, she sat across the table from him lighting a cigarette at the table, acting bored. She offered him one, looking right into his eyes. Selena was a lovely girl, with unruly dark hair that fell in waves over her face and high cheekbones that caught the light. Her fierce curled lips, dark eyes and the intensity of her gaze saved her from being pretty, but she was a girl you saw once and never forgot. Not a soft woman, Richard thought. He thought of her as the athletic type of who spent a lot of time playing golf and tennis. At the age of twenty nine, Selena was already an heiress to a gold mining venture in
No, it’s time we stopped seeing each other, we must.

She feared his old beliefs in God and sin would come back to haunt him. She knew it had made it difficult for him from the beginning. Instead, his face actually cleared. He said no, no, but there was doubt in his voice. Then she knew that it would be all right. Once she realized he was going to accept this, she was able to speak calmly again.

He remembered that there was something else the letter had said. “The money has to be paid in cash,” he said. That was fine with Selena. She didn’t want her name implicated by having to write a check.
“All right, then,” she said. “It’s not an outrageous sum anyway, and if I don’t do it, it would be the end of you for me.” A postal box was to be taken in Alexandra’s name. The bills placed in an envelope slipped into Richard’s pocket surreptitiously. He would address and post the envelope. The relationship returned to be a satisfactory
After the luncheon, she was ecstatic with relief. It was over! It wasn’t the money really.
“It had been a surprising that we’d never heard from Alexandra again, even when there were months when I didn’t include the full amount of the money. If Richard were here now, we could celebrate our new freedom without the guilt hanging over our heads. Alexandra was the constant reminder of his guilt.” She wanted to write him a letter that night, immediately. She took the paper to her desk, and wrote, ‘The days of the Blackmail are over. The sound of the chirping birds are heard in the land again.” She never realized how much it had weighed on her. Now she could see it. Not the money as he well knew, she didn’t care about the money, and anyway the amount had become smaller lately, and Alexandra had never complained. It was the queasy feeling, the never quite safeness of it, but the burden on their love had made her unhappy.

Selena went to sleep without writing the letter. In the morning when she woke up, she knew something. She had found it in her sleep. There was no news to give Richard. No news, because there never had been any blackmail from