After the One by Cass Lester (e book reader free .TXT) 📕

herself, lying to herself. Because, deep down, she knew that she did want more. But what was the point of wanting something when you knew you weren’t going to get it? Even if you did get that something or someone you wanted –

wanted with all your heart and soul – they could so easily be taken away, breaking you and crushing your hopes and dreams. Wanting was dangerous, it exposed you. It was much safer to deny you wanted anything, then you couldn’t be disappointed if you didn’t get them. Or if you lost them.

Over the next couple of days Tara must have texted and called Charley a dozen times to apologise, and when Charley didn’t respond, her friend resorted to sending a card. It showed a hand-drawn illustration of two young women sitting back to back, leaning against each other, supportively. Charley had thought it was very nearly something Angie might have painted, but not quite as good. The caption on the front of the card read: ‘I’m so lucky to have a friend like you.’

Inside the card Tara had written:

Charley—

Please don’t let us fall out over this.

I value our friendship too much.

Love,

Tara x

Charley read it. Twice. She wilfully allowed the words to reignite her anger.

‘Bloody typical, Tara. Couldn’t even bloody admit to being in the wrong or bring yourself to say “sorry”,’ she muttered, stuffing the offending card into the kitchen bin and allowing herself to seethe for a good while afterwards.

When an enormous bouquet of flowers arrived for her the following day, with a card entreating her to please call Tara, Charley took a leaf out of Pam’s book. She nipped up the steps to the street, shoved the flowers into the dustbin and slammed down the lid with enormous satisfaction, and then she’d gone back to helping Pam paint the garden fence, a task she didn’t particularly want to do, but felt duty bound to.

Pam, on the other hand, was gleefully slapping sage green paint onto the bare timber. ‘It was good of Baz to do this for you,’ she said, either inadvertently rubbing salt into a wound or obliquely reminding Charley that life was too damn short to bear a grudge against your best mate. Probably the latter, assessed Charley.

‘Yes,’ she replied, picking up the paintbrush and trying to ignore the stabs of guilt prodding her, since it was good of him and he hadn’t even sent her an invoice. Half of her wanted to text Tara telling her to remind him, but she knew she’d be doing that for the wrong reason, either out of pettiness or to stop her feeling beholden to her. Either way, it didn’t make her feel particularly proud of herself and she took her irritation out on the fence, savagely dobbing blobs of paint into the joints and all but trashing the brush.

‘Is Tara coming round soon?’ Pam asked lightly.

Charley glanced over at her, suspecting her question was more loaded than it appeared. ‘No,’ she replied, deliberately matching Pam’s light tone.

‘You should get her round and show her. When we’ve finished painting it, I mean.’

‘It’s a fence,’ replied Charley caustically, now totally convinced her mother-in-law was trying to get her to patch things up with Tara. Then, feeling remorseful, she tried to soften her sharp retort by adding jokily, ‘I think she’s seen one before!’ She went on, ‘And anyhow, it’s nearly the school holidays. She’s always out of bounds in the holidays, doing stuff with Monnie.’

Which, to be fair, was true, but in reality, Charley was avoiding Tara. And both she and Pam knew it. Cluttering up the work-surface in the kitchen were a hundred pamper bags Charley was due to deliver to the Avalon but, perhaps cowardly, she’d decided to wait until the holidays and avoid a potentially difficult conversation with Tara in Reception. Charley told herself she was only being professional and not letting a conflict in her personal life affect her business relationships.

Uncomfortable as it was to admit it, Charley’s decision to turn the shop down had impacted on all her friendships. Perhaps this shouldn’t have surprised her, given how much time and enthusiasm her friends had invested in helping her – especially Nisha. While Tara had been angry, Nisha had been disappointed, and Charley wasn’t sure which was the harder to cope with.

To her deep shame, Charley hadn’t had the courage to call Nisha herself. But of course, Tara had tipped Nisha off, and so Nisha had phoned her.

‘What happened?’ she asked, the disappointment all too evident in her voice.

Assuming that Tara had given Nisha very much her own interpretation of events, no doubt telling her that Charley had bottled it, Charley found herself already on the defensive.

‘You said yourself I wasn’t to rush into anything, and the agent was pressuring me to make a decision there and then, on the spot, and I just wasn’t one hundred per cent sure, so I turned it down.’

‘But you’re still looking for somewhere, right?’ demanded Nisha. ‘You’ve not given up the idea?’

Charley made a very noncommittal response, but Nisha wasn’t prepared to let it go that easily.

‘Charley, listen. It’s a good idea for a shop, and you have a solid business plan, and the assets to make it work – and I don’t just mean financially. So, give it a go! Give yourself a chance. I think you’ll regret it if you don’t.’

Feeling beleaguered, not to mention a little bruised from the knowledge that Pam, Nisha and Tara all clearly felt she was making a mistake, Charley turned to someone she thought would agree with her, and pitched up at Angie’s.

The boys were engaged in some serious construction work in the garden involving Eliot’s ride-on dumper truck, some plastic buckets, a small blue wheelbarrow and an impressive amount of mud.

‘They’re building a fort,’ Angie informed her, carrying out a tray of cold drinks and oat cookies, which immediately got the construction workers downing tools and rushing over.

‘Hands,’ said Angie, and the boys reluctantly trooped indoors to