The Marriage K.L. Slater (classic romance novels TXT) 📖

when, as a child of only seven or eight, Gran would let me sit next to the bookshelf and run my fingertips across their spines. I’d take one out at a time to leaf gently through the illustrations.

Despite Robert’s disapproval, I’d folded down the box lid and carefully taped it up again. ‘If I take nothing else, I want these.’

When I fell pregnant with Tom, I attended a night school course on book repair, intending to restore Gran’s books to their former glory and display them. Time passed and I’d begun the lengthy process when Robert took over my reading room. One day I came back from work to find he’d packed up all my books without asking, including the Dickens set, and dumped them in a dusty corner of the garage.

When I complained, he looked at me with an astonished expression. ‘It’s a few old books, for goodness’ sake! I’ll cart them all back in again when you can find a good place for storage,’ he’d said from behind his newspaper. ‘Preferably somewhere I won’t be tripping over them.’

He’d never got around to hauling the books back out again and when Tom went to prison, I forgot about them all together.

‘Why are you scowling?’ Robert said curtly, bringing my tea over. ‘Let me guess. Your precious son upsets you and yours truly is about to take the rap for it.’

‘I’m thinking back. Seeing things in a different light,’ I said in a tone that made it clear I wouldn’t be sharing my thoughts.

I pushed thoughts of the books out of my mind and opened up Facebook on my phone, searching for Bridget’s profile page. I’d viewed it many times over the past few years, but she had a high privacy setting so there had been nothing new to see in terms of public posts for ages.

‘Oh no,’ I whispered as the page opened up.

‘What is it?’ Robert said, straining to see. ‘What’s wrong?’

I held my phone screen up to show him Bridget’s new profile picture. A full-length photo of her and Tom captured as they walked down a makeshift aisle scattered with rose petals. Bridget looked elegant and youthfully slim in a cream silk sheath, clutching a neat bouquet. They were both smiling, gazing into each other’s eyes as they moved. They looked extraordinarily happy.

Robert huffed. ‘There’s no surprise there, is there? You already know they’re married.’

I glanced at the photograph. Posted an hour ago. ‘She obviously waited until Tom had told us, then immediately posted it for everyone to see.’

Robert shrugged. ‘That’s Facebook for you. I don’t know why you bother torturing yourself. I’ve got some work to do in the office.’

Robert detested social media, partly because he had to deal with the fallout when it went wrong for the students he counselled. ‘I’ve seen too many young lives ruined by Facebook and Twitter and worst of all, Instagram,’ he’d always claimed.

‘I’ve texted Audrey and she’s on her way over,’ I said as he headed into the hallway.

He threw his hands up in the air. ‘Why are you involving Audrey in this? The whole of Mansfield will know about it once she gets all the gory details. I don’t want her here.’

‘That’s not fair.’ I pulled him up. ‘Audrey’s a good friend to me and that’s what matters. Not the fact that you can’t stand her. Besides, now Bridget has pasted their business all over Facebook, everyone’s going to know about it anyway.’

Robert mumbled something I didn’t quite catch and headed out of the kitchen door. There’d never been much love lost between him and Audrey, he seemed to sense she had a low opinion of him. In recent years, the animosity had somehow seemed to flourish in Tom’s absence. Audrey could be scathing about the way Robert ran me down all the time, adamant I’d be better off without him. Robert called Audrey ‘an interfering battleaxe who hasn’t got a life of her own so sticks her nose into other people’s’. Which was completely groundless, of course.

I drank my tea and stared at the wedding picture, then took a screenshot of it in case Bridget applied a higher security setting to her account. I’d already scrolled down her profile page, but there was nothing new on there.

She looked good in the photograph, even though it pained me to admit it. You could tell she was older than him, but you’d have said there was a lot less than twenty years between them.

Bridget had always been skilled at making the best of herself, but ten years ago I remembered she’d looked drawn. Crow’s feet around her eyes and tiny lines radiating out from the corners of her mouth. She’d come over to the house in the months after Tom had received his sentencing and gone to prison. It was an episode I’d rather forget. She had been desperate, seemed almost on the edge of madness, and I’d sent her away. Closed the front door in her face. Although I’d felt she deserved it, it hadn’t been my finest hour, but then I’d also been suffering. When I looked in the mirror, I knew that I’d aged because I’d been grieving the loss of my son, too.

Now, Bridget looked like she’d been through a time tunnel. She appeared much younger. There was a telltale frozen quality around her eyes, and her strangely puffed-up cheeks were probably due to a syringe full of filler. With freshly highlighted hair and understated make-up, her dress style was classy but contemporary.

This was a woman who’d done a lot of work on herself both mentally and physically. I’d felt about a hundred years old next to her, frumpy and definitely past my best.

Mansfield was a big town, and living in different areas as we did, there was never any danger we’d bump into each other. In all these years I hadn’t seen her out once, though that was probably on account of me barely going into the main shopping area. I shopped online or