Love-40 Read Online Free Page A

people’s voices. But some internal spectator told her, to be strong you must remember, deal with, resolve. And so Estelle would often stand here at the bridge, gripping this blue parapet with white knuckles, staring down at the River Pride. Like a madwoman, she thought.
    She was almost forty. At least half her life had gone and what did she have? A career that had only just stuttered into being. No children, maybe no man, certainly no mother. Perhaps she was wrong to come here to the bridge. Perhaps she should have moved away years ago. Why hadn’t she?
    The water was hypnotic and Estelle swayed slightly. Liam, she thought. Liam was the answer to that, just as he was the answer to most things. Except contentment, she reminded herself, watching a family of sleek, caramel and green ducks as they scooted along the surface of the water, each staring straight ahead, as focused on their journey as Estelle herself was not.
    How could you be contented, living with a man who at any moment might move on to … she frowned, to something more interesting? A man you could never feel secure with.
    Estelle released her hold of the parapet, flexing her fingers with some surprise at their stiffness. She and Liam had always fought. They pitted their strengths against each other rather than combining them; it was one of the things, she knew, that had kept them together so long. That and … she trailed her hand along the railing … the fact that they had always seemed to belong together. That there had never been – for either of them – another.
    Apart, of course, from Suzi, Estelle thought wryly as she gathered up her rucksack and finally crossed to the other side of the river. Suzi was always there, had always been there, had been there even before Liam, when they had first become friends.
    Estelle’s steps quickened as she thought of those days, a tentative friendship begun by a teacher at her new school. ‘Suzi will look after you. She’s very kind.’ The sympathy in the teacher’s eyes, in all their eyes.
    â€˜You can come back to my house for tea,’ Suzi had told her that first day. ‘If your auntie will let you.’
    And Estelle had shrugged, knowing that Auntie Mo, immersed in the romantic short stories she wrote for women’s magazines, kind but never in a million years maternal, would probably not even notice she’d gone. ‘Won’t your mum mind?’ she had asked Suzi.
    â€˜Course not.’ Suzi was clear on this point. ‘We do what we want, Liam and me. Mum never minds.’
    And it had been easy, Estelle reflected now, to slip into the routine that was so far from what she had always understood to be routine, at the Nichols’. Liam and Suzi’s father had died years before, which gave them some common ground, and their mother – though clearly loving her children with intensity – still seemed somewhat lost without him.
    Liam and Suzi, Estelle soon realised, had taken advantage of this fact, taken advantage of the independence their mother had inadvertently offered them. Liam, though (who had seemed to Estelle at the time to be scarily sure of himself), had taken a while to accept her. Only Suzi’s stubborn insistence that Estelle be included in every game, every outing, every treat and as time went by, every secret, had made him tolerate her.
    They had fought even then, she recalled, as she opened the church gate and slipped through to the graveyard. Once Estelle had found her feet. Fought and then loved and fought some more.
    Once, near their beginning, they had planned to move away from here – away from the ties of childhood, teenage secrets, Estelle’s vague memory of her mother’s death. And yes … she passed by the flint walls of the church, glancing up at the stained-glass window depicting Jesus and the twelve disciples. Away even from Suzi too.
    But they never had. Slowly, she left the graveyard