After the Lie: A gripping novel about love, loss and family secrets Read Online Free

watching the Great British Bake Off ? With my mother’s barometer stuck on stormy for all these years, I had no way of working out an accurate public disapproval forecast. Mark would know. But of course, he didn’t know .
    ‘Lydia. Lydia!’ Melanie’s sharp voice cut into my fear.
    I dragged my eyes up to meet her questioning glance, feeling the beginning of a migraine.
    She said, ‘You’d better have a separate meeting with Sean, to discuss pricing and publicity. It’s going to be a real money-spinner for us. I’ve seen his pictures; he’s an excellent photographer.’
    Photographer.
    The word bounced off the walls at me.
    ‘I’m sure he is.’
    I gathered every last bit of strength, imagined my thigh muscles connecting to my knees and contracting to force myself into a standing position. I grabbed my handbag.
    Sean smiled, a man used to a warm welcome wherever he went. ‘I’ll give you a ring, Lydia, and we can come up with a strategy.’
    If he hadn’t recognised me, it was just a matter of time. My voice sounded thick, as though I was speaking underwater. ‘Okay. Sorry, I have a meeting now, I have to go.’
    I raced out into the street, gulping in the urban air of exhaust, Chinese takeaway and fresh bread. I just managed to dash into an alleyway before I lost the battle with the porridge.

4
    O n days like today , I wished we’d stayed in our little village in Norfolk and let everybody gossip their arses off until they’d found someone else to talk about. I fantasised about telling my mother that I wouldn’t go along with her charade any more. That I didn’t care that she arranged the flowers at St Joseph’s, that Dad had had his application accepted to join the golf club, that she loved telling everyone that her grandchildren went to Eastington House. I just wanted to be who I was, imperfect bloody me, who messed up.
    But most of all, I wished I’d told Mark – some of it at least – the first day I met him after he rescued me when my stall collapsed at a wedding show. I wished I’d never allowed the secret to grow, rolling down the generations like a toffee under a sofa, collecting dust, hair and grit as it went.
    ‘I’ve led a very dull existence,’ I said when people asked me about my past. I’d been in Surrey long enough to lose my Norfolk accent, except for the occasional word. Mark knew we’d lived there but I blocked all suggestions about going back to show him where I grew up.
    ‘It’s so flat and boring.’
    ‘You’d hate all that seaside town nonsense, amusement arcades and silly souvenir shops.’
    ‘I’m a townie now. All those marshes depress me. It’s so bleak.’
    In reality, I longed to be under those big open skies again. Yearned to walk for miles and miles on those sandy beaches, picking up razor shells or crabbing ankle- deep in freezing water. I craved the sea air, with its taint of dead seal and seaweed. I wanted to burst through the front door, cheeks whipped by blasts of sand and winter wind. I’d even run squealing into the Wash in April, just as we used to, disdainful of the out-of-towners who stood shivering on the shore, wrapped in their puffy anoraks and suburban attitudes.
    Even my mother, who was a great one for snuffing out any source of fun, never batted an eyelid about me being gone for hours, as long as I didn’t commit the cardinal sins of getting home after dark and letting my dinner go cold. That freedom seemed laughable now when I thought of my own kids and their constant texting about where they were and what time they needed picking up.
    And now I’d missed my moment to come clean. Perhaps if I hadn’t been so grateful that someone could see the good in me, I might have trusted Mark. I could have flopped against him, maybe heard him say, ‘Poor you. You were so young.’ Sometimes I struggled to remember how this Bazooka bubble gum of a lie had burst and engulfed us all.
    I hardly ever cried. It was as though I didn’t have the same amount