Now and Then Friends Read Online Free

to bathe you. She’s too grumpy.”
    â€œI’ll read you a story after tea tonight,” Rachel promised Nathan, who smiled hopefully in response. Meghan headed upstairs with Nathan, and Rachel listened, wincing, as the taps went on and the pipes screeched. She imagined the headline on the cover of
Fate & Fortune: Help, There’s a Banshee in My Water Pipes!
    She turned the sauce on to simmer and went into the sitting room; it was as much of a mess as the kitchen, with half-drunk cups of teamaking damp rings on the coffee table, along with a towering Play-Doh creation of Nathan’s and two Lottery scratch cards, a vice of her mother’s that Meghan happily enabled even though Rachel had forbidden it. They couldn’t afford to play the Lottery, and it was a waste of money. She’d tried to explain the ridiculous odds of winning to Meghan, and her sister had rolled her eyes.
    â€œYou don’t get it, do you, Rachel?” she’d said, to which Rachel had replied tartly, “I was just about to say the same to you.”
    Now, as she collected the mugs and worthless cards, Rachel wondered what Claire West was doing up at Four Gables. She pictured her in that endless gourmet kitchen with its Sub-Zero fridge and pristine Aga, cooking an elegant meal for one. If Claire was staying for months, she must have left her job in Portugal showing rich retirees newly built villas in the Algarve. What would she do in poky Hartley-by-the-Sea? Rachel was surprised she’d come here at all, instead of going to London to stay with her parents.
    Not that she cared what Claire did, or why. Rachel straightened, gazing around the little sitting room with its saggy sofa and warped coffee table, bits of hardened Play-Doh littering the carpet, despite Meghan’s hoovering. Upstairs Lily’s music blared with a relentless, pulsing beat, and from the dining room–turned-bedroom she heard the squeak of bedsprings as her mother shifted her weight. No, she had far too many people in her life to manage to waste a single brain cell wondering or worrying about Claire West.

2

Claire
    Claire listened to the door click shut behind Rachel, leaving the house empty and silent. She stood for a moment in the center of the sitting room, the cream carpet stretching out in every direction in a pristine sea, the still air smelling faintly of lemon polish and lavender potpourri. Home, even if it didn’t feel like it.
    After a moment she went to one of the huge overstuffed sofas and sat down gingerly, because even though her mother was three hundred miles away in London, Claire could imagine her hovering, clucking her tongue and plumping the pillows.
    She tucked her legs up and wrapped her arms around them, resting her chin on top. Her mother would screech in alarm to see her bare feet on the silk sofa cushions, and sitting like this felt like a tiny but important act of defiance.
    She savored the silence for a few minutes, because after four weeks at Lansdowne Hills, where the noise had been soft but persistent, the company constant, she was glad of a little solitary time. No one chirpily telling her it was time for the discussion group or counseling session or a massage. No supposedly soothing sound of water trickling over rocks playing incessantly in the background. Lansdowne Hills had been elegant and expensive, but it had still been a prison.
    Now that she’d escaped, she wasn’t entirely sure what to do withherself. She had no intention of going back to Portugal; Hugh hadn’t called her in the four weeks she’d been at Lansdowne Hills, and she didn’t particularly want him to call her now, although she supposed she’d have to have a conversation with him at some point. They were, technically at least, still engaged. The ostentatious diamond Hugh had bought her was in her toiletry bag; she’d taken it off on the plane from Portugal, after Hugh had staged his intervention.
    Grimacing,