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

She looked gutted, and Charley found herself trapped in an impossible situation, forced to choose between the two people in the world she cared about most, and inevitably having to end up rejecting, and hurting, one of them. So, out of compassion rather than greed, Charley wondered if she could convert her predicament into a win-win – and take both offers.

‘That’d be fine by me,’ Pam assured her.

‘Me too,’ agreed Tara.

A huge smile slowly worked its way across Charley’s face, lighting it up completely. Suddenly the idea of running a business seemed much less frightening now that she had business partners. Although they weren’t necessarily the most obvious pair to put together, since Pam was cautious and wise, and Tara was smart, and… Charley sought for an alternative to ‘bossy’, and charitably came up with ‘decisive’. She just hoped to God the two of them were going to get on – it would be a bloody nightmare if they didn’t.

Chapter Twenty-seven

After Tara had left to pick up Monnie from school, Charley got out her phone. ‘I must thank Geoff,’ she told Pam.

‘Actually, the money’s just from me,’ said Pam, stopping her. ‘To be fair to him, he did want the money to come from both of us, he’s very fond of you, too,’ she added with a smile, ‘But I thought that might make things complicated in the future.’

Just a bit! thought Charley. Then another thought occurred to her. ‘It must have been incredibly difficult for you to go and talk to Geoff.’

Pam sighed. ‘Yes. Well. He was obviously rather keen on talking about other things.’ Then she caught Charley off balance by adding, a little too casually, ‘He’s offered to move in with Barbara, so that I can move back into the house.’

Bloody hell, that’s huge, thought Charley. Poor Pam. It was one thing to have an affair with someone, but to leave your wife for them, after forty years of marriage, that was in another league altogether. ‘Is that what you want?’ was all she felt it was safe to say.

Pam didn’t reply immediately, but looked away and gazed out of the window, as if she thought that somehow the answer to Charley’s question might be out there, somewhere. Clearly it wasn’t, but it seemed to have given her time to gather her thoughts, and after a moment she turned back to Charley, and shrugging lightly said, ‘I don’t know. If I’m honest, I don’t want him to move in with her.’ A position Charley could completely understand, but then Pam sighed heavily and continued, ‘But if I am going to move back home then I don’t want Geoff to be there as well. But having said that, I don’t want to rattle about an empty house all on my own, with nothing but memories to keep me company.’

Charley could remember drowning in the silence of the flat after Josh died, its emptiness echoing the bleak, pointlessness she had felt inside. The shock of losing him had been so sudden, so traumatic, that to begin with, remembering any moments of their life together had been unbearable. Gradually, over time, a few memories had slid under her guard, and eventually she’d learnt to welcome them back: Josh, doubled up and almost crying with laughter at something funny on TV; him teasing her as she blubbed her way through a rom-com; both of them sitting round the coffee table trying to eat a Thai takeaway with chopsticks for the first time.

‘Wait! I’ve got this!’ he’d said, and had promptly stabbed a large prawn with a single stick.

‘That’s cheating!’ she’d told him, laughing.

‘I’ll work up to two sticks next time!’ he’d promised, shoving the prawn in his mouth.

Then there was the time when he’d rescued her from an enormous spider in the bath and she’d discovered he was almost as scared of them as she was. He’d gently cupped the hairy beasty in his hands and was gingerly carrying it out of the bathroom when he’d suddenly squealed and started shaking his arms around, hysterically yelling, ‘It’s run up my arm!’

‘Memories aren’t necessarily bad company,’ she told Pam quietly.

A few days later, Zee suggested she and Pam head off to the coast for a walk in the autumn sunshine. They strolled idly along the beach, under a deep blue but cloudy sky, with the fresh, salty air mildly dampening their hair. The long sandy beaches that were crammed in the summer holidays were almost deserted now. They’d slipped off their shoes to walk barefoot over the cool damp sand in the kind of companionable, contemplative silence that only a long and close friendship allows.

‘Geoff says he’ll move in with Barbara if I want to move back home,’ said Pam eventually.

Zee snorted with a mixture of derision and anger. ‘That’s a bit bloody rich. He’s making it your decision then, is he, whether or not he moves in with her?’ When Pam didn’t answer, she softened her tone and asked, as Charley had, ‘Is that what you want?’

Sighing heavily, Pam shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Deep down I don’t want Geoff to leave me to move in with her. It’s so…’

‘Humiliating?’ offered Zee.

‘Yes! Bloody humiliating. But if I’m going to move back home, then I don’t want Geoff to be there.’ She shuddered involuntarily. ‘Then again, I don’t think I want to live there all alone in an empty house, reminding me that I’m not wanted or needed any more.’ She sighed heavily and thought for a moment. ‘Maybe I shouldn’t move back at all? Maybe I should just accept that life is all about phases. Sell the house and move on.’

It occurred to Pam that she had got into the habit of just thinking about her life as two periods. Before Josh died, and afterwards. But there had been other phases, she now reminded herself. There was the one before she’d even met Geoff, and the one when they were first married before