He was intrigued by the letters he and Kezzie had found and wondered if his mother could shed more light on them. ‘I’ve never seen any of this before,’ his mother said, as she read through them. ‘But Connie always kept things close to her chest. I had no idea she’d hidden all this stuff away. I p...
She was waiting for Mark and his rep to arrive and then she was going to hand it to them, but she must have missed them, because the session seemed to have started already. The Sunday papers had been full of Gemma's accident, and Mark's extraordinary statement about not wanting to sue. She could ...
The hall at Hopesay Manor was thronged with people sipping champagne and eating canapés. By the staircase stood the most massive Christmas tree Marianne had ever seen, sparkling with white lights that segued through the colours of the rainbow and back to white in a way that would have looked tack...
There were so many people suffering, so many people worse off than her. Knowing she was helping them was the only way she kept going. She blinked back tears as the interview ended and she put the phone down and stared at the kitchen, once the heart and soul of her home. She and Dan had spent so m...
I shout as I come down the stairs, my little girl squirming in my arms. She’s clinging to me, and holding on determinedly to Bunny, a scrubby rabbit, she insists on sleeping with. I can never get it away from her to put in the wash, so poor Bunny is quite filthy. I love the feeling of her against...
I sat in the church throughout most of Caz’s mum’s funeral in a state of abject terror, imagining how it would be for Daz, for my mum, for Woody, if I weren’t around any more. It also brought back memories of Dad’s funeral. I hadn’t really known Caz’s mum, and hadn’t liked what I had seen of her....
‘We’re pretty busy,’ the girl on the other end sounded both bored and vague. ‘I’ll ring you if there’s a cancellation.’ ‘You do that,’ said Tatiana crisply, and tried to turn her phone off. It promptly came back to life. Damned thing. She swore her new mobile required more fingers than she had. T...
‘You’d better come in,’ Saffron told him, thinking it was the last thing she wanted, but Gerry had a nasty graze on his leg from where the pot had broken and a piece had scraped it. ‘Sit down,’ she said, ‘I’ll get something to patch up the war wound.’ Ten minutes later, Sa...