At First Sight by Hannah Sunderland (latest novels to read TXT) 📕

of his stew. When the woman finally appeared at the threshold of the room and stood in the doorway, I heard myself breathe a quiet gasp. For a few terrifying moments, I thought that it was Abi, standing there with a face like thunder. But the longer I looked at her and her film-star-perfect face, her mass of russet corkscrew curls that dwarfed her in size, I realised that this must be Abi’s sister, Kenna.

She scanned the room, eyes seething, as each of us stared with quiet fear. She was tiny. Almost a foot smaller than I was and yet, she commanded the room like a giant. Her eyes travelled over each of us, lingering on me for a few seconds more than was comfortable, before moving on to Charlie. I guessed that Charlie had been who she was looking for, because the moment she saw him, she calmly pushed off with her tiny, child-sized feet and made her way to his side.

Charlie, by this point, looked like a baby rabbit when faced with the snarly, saliva-moistened jaws of a fox, his chest rising and falling quickly with rapid breaths.

She came to a stop facing Charlie side on, her back to Ava who reached up an affectionate hand and patted Kenna’s shoulder.

‘Hi, Ken,’ Charlie said, his voice fragile and afraid. ‘How’ve yer bee—’ His sentence was cut short by the dainty palm that was brought with surprising speed and strength across his cheek. The sound of it sang around the room, like the final ring of a bell, the connection of palm to face so exquisitely placed that I had no doubt it would leave a mark.

Kenna sighed, looked up at me, smiled and extended a hand across Charlie as if he wasn’t there.

‘Kenna Murphy, nice t’meet yer.’

‘You too,’ I said, fearfully shaking her hand. ‘Name is Nell. My! My name is Nell.’

Kenna smiled genuinely and then walked around to the empty space, spooning herself some stew before sitting down, her incredible amount of hair moving a moment or two after she did, as if it was a separate entity that travelled around with her. She brought her hands together in front of her, said grace unceremoniously, and brought a large spoonful to her mouth.

‘Mmmm, great stew,’ she mumbled through her still-full mouth.

I turned to look at Charlie, who remained frozen, his eyes staring forward at Kenna as if she might leap across the table and assault him again at a moment’s notice.

‘So,’ she said in a cheerful voice, as if nothing at all had happened, ‘how’s everyone been?’

Chapter Nineteen

Siting in Ava Stone’s garden, in what passed for the early afternoon sun in Westport, I held my phone in my hand, dew seeping into the fabric of my leggings.

During the lunch that had proved to be one of the least comfortable of my whole life, I’d felt my phone buzz from where I’d pushed it between my skin and my waistband. I’d waited until everyone had finished their stew and Charlie had stopped telling tall tales about the current state of his life to duck outside and read it. Charlie had failed to tell them that he’d quit his job, but then, they hadn’t ever known he’d taken a job at Aldi in the first place, and so there was little point. As far as they knew, Charlie was still working in the theatres of Birmingham, his career and his life, still completely on track. I took comfort in the fact that I wasn’t the only one here who knew that he was lying. Carrick had seen what state Abi’s death had left him in and yet we’d let Charlie have his tall tales, his fabricated life of work fulfilment and contentment that couldn’t be further from the truth of what he actually had.

I looked down at the screen of my phone as the sound of Kenna’s angry Irish tones drifted across the garden from where she was ‘talking’ with Charlie, her arms folded neatly across her generous chest, which looked rather too round to be natural, but I didn’t want to be one to make sweeping statements. The text that had come through was from Joel, a sequel to the text I’d got yesterday but had ignored. It had simply read:

So, I guess that the ridiculously attractive guy at yours the other night means you’re not interested in talking?

This text was just as to-the-point, short and less than sweet.

You can kid yourself that we’re over, Nell. You can prance around with that guy and flaunt him in front of me cruelly, but you know as well as I do, that we are always going to come back to each other. We still love each other and we are meant to be together. xxx

Prance? Flaunt? As far as I could remember, I had done neither of those things. Yes, okay. Maybe I had been slightly cruel in leading him on, in making him think that this relationship was salvageable, but I hadn’t been cruel about Charlie; I hadn’t even been the one to open the door the night that Joel had shown up. Joel was wrong. We weren’t meant to be together. We weren’t always destined to return to each other and I did not still love him, not in the way he wanted me to. I flinched at my own thoughts. Something clicked inside my brain and suddenly I felt something like an iron band release around my chest. My lungs felt as if they could expand further, the air entering them, cleaner. I did not love Joel anymore and this wasn’t just me being positive and vocalising my wishes. I really, truly, categorically, most certainly did not love him.

I pressed the little phone icon at the top of our chat, wincing at one of my not so subtle booty call texts that I could see, half hidden at the top of the screen as if it too was embarrassed by my past actions. Three rings and