At First Sight Hannah Sunderland (free e books to read online txt) 📖

rushed over and took care of business and as I made my way over to the sink, I noticed the sound of quiet breathing coming from somewhere in the room.

I looked around, puzzled, trying to find the serial killer lurking in the corner, ready for me to catch a spooky glance of him in the mirror behind me, but didn’t find him. Instead, my eyes travelled to the bathtub, where I peeled back the shower curtain a little way, to find Charlie, sleeping peacefully amongst a mass of blankets and towels. He clearly must have been more drunk than I’d thought to end up sleeping there, rather than the perfectly fine bed in the next room.

I made my way out quietly and closed the door behind me, wondering what I was meant to do now. Did I just hang around until he woke up or sneak out quickly? No, this wasn’t a sleazy one-night stand; I would stay and be waiting with a soothing cup of coffee when he woke. That’s if I could find the coffee amongst the mess.

I walked over to the kitchen and started looking around for any form of coffee. Finding a jar of Nescafé in the cupboard and then moving on to the next obstacle that lay between me and caffeine. Mugs.

I moved over to the sink and washed up two mugs, running away with myself a little and ending up doing the whole lot and scouring the apartment for elusive cups on tables and behind curtains.

The cat jumped up on the counter and watched every move I made as if it was learning for future use.

I took my phone from my pocket and saw a couple of text messages on my screen, both from Ned, both from last night. One asked me if I planned on coming home and the second one extended his hopes that I was safe and wasn’t lying in a shallow grave in open farmland. He’d be up for work by now and so I texted him back, apologising for ignoring him and assuring him that I was, in fact, still living, even if it didn’t feel like it. I made myself a coffee in the giant Sports Direct mug, and drank it down, feeling the caffeine chipping away at my hangover, and when I felt a little less like I was about to keel over, I turned my attention to the rest of the flat. Seeing as I was here with nothing to do, I might as well make myself useful.

I straightened the piles of books, watered the Swiss cheese plant – which I imagined sighed in relief at finally getting some liquid – and cleaned down the coffee table, clicking on the kettle for further caffeine fuel, before I turned my attention to the pile of letters behind the door. I sat down on the mat, sorting them into levels of scariness with the brown ones from the tax office at the top and the flyers from takeaways on the bottom. I made a separate pile of the handwritten envelopes, of which there were many. Some in plain envelopes with blue airmail stickers on them and others in those envelopes with red and blue stripes around the edge. The handwriting looked the same on all of them and so I stacked them all together and put them on the counter by the empty bread bin. The handwriting was sloppy and untidy, but legible, and up in the top left-hand corner of every envelope sat a return address and a name, Carrick Stone.

Charlie’s uncle – the one he’d concocted a story about when he first me. Why would Carrick be writing actual letters to his nephew and not texts or emails, let alone in such volume? There had to be around ten, all from Carrick, all unopened, and I’d seen more of them when I was tidying, thrust into a drawer in the kitchen. I opened the drawer again and pulled out a further four letters from amongst the detritus of the drawer.

At the bottom, peeping out from under what looked like a less than pleasant letter from the landlord, was a photograph, glossy-surfaced and dog-eared at the corners. I reached in and pulled it from between the papers, holding it gently by the edges as I’d always been told to and looking at the image of Charlie and a woman who must have been Abi. In the photo they sat together in a booth at what looked like a bar. They were both wearing everyday clothes, except for the cheap-looking veil affixed to a plastic headband that sat atop Abi’s hair and the sash that she wore across her chest that read Just Married. Charlie was looking at her like he couldn’t believe he’d got her, his arms around her tiny waist. Abi stared at the camera, her tongue sticking out and her right eye scrunched up in a wink like young girls do in pictures. She was slender and tall, with pale skin to match Charlie’s and auburn-coloured freckles that dusted the bridge of her nose and the undersides of her eyes. Her hair was long and straight, parted in the middle and the colour of fallen autumn leaves. She was dainty and ethereal-looking, like she wouldn’t look out of place dancing around a pixie’s fire with clothes made from petals.

Okay, Nancy Drew, snoop time’s over. The suddenness of the thought that I almost heard, made me jump.

There she was again, like she had been last night, only now I had a face to put to the voice of my conscience disguised as Abi. I could just imagine her, full of sass leaning against the counter with her long arms crossed over her chest. I pushed the picture back under the letters and closed the drawer. I went back to my trusty Sports Direct mug, spooned in three teaspoons of granules before pouring boiling water up to the halfway point.

Someone’s making herself at home, isn’t she? Even