Stranded Read Online Free Page B

anxious. The e-mail was short and sour.
    Dear Sarah, Rachel and I have decided we want to try to resolve our difficulties. It’ll come as no surprise to you that my marriage is my number one priority. So I think it best if we don’t communicate further. Sorry if this seems cold, but there’s no other way to say it. Sam.
    I was stunned. This wasn’t cold, it was brutal. A hard jab below the ribs, designed to take my breath away and deflect any possible comeback. I felt the physical shock in the pit of my stomach.
    Of course, I blamed myself for my stupidity, my eagerness to believe that a man as charismatic as Sam could fall for me. Good old reliable Sarah, the safe pair of hands who secondguessed authors’ needs before they could even voice them. I felt such a fool. A bruised, exploited fool.
    Time passed, but there was still a raw place deep inside me. Sam Uttley had taken more from me than a few nights of sexual pleasure; he’d taken away my trust in my judgement. I told nobody about my humiliation. It would have been one pain too many.
    Then Lindsay McConnell arrived. An award-winning dramatist, she’d come to give a series of workshops on radio adaptation. She was impeccably professional, no trouble to take care of. And we hit it off straightaway. On her last night, I took her to my favourite Moscow eating place, a traditional Georgian restaurant tucked away in a courtyard in the Armenian quarter. As the wine slipped down, we gossiped and giggled. Then, in the course of some anecdote, she mentioned Sam Uttley. Just hearing his name made my guts clench. ‘You know Sam?’ I asked, struggling not to sound too interested.
    â€˜Oh God, yes. I was at university with Rachel, his wife. Of course, you had Sam out here last year, didn’t you? He said he’d had a really interesting time.’
    I bet he did, I thought bitterly. ‘How are they now? Sam and Rachel?’ I asked with the true masochist’s desire for the twist of the knife.
    Lindsay looked puzzled. ‘What do you mean, how are they now?’
    â€˜When Sam was here, Rachel had just left him.’
    She frowned. ‘Are you sure you’re not confusing him with someone else? They’re solid as a rock, Sam and Rachel. God knows, if he was mine I’d have murdered him years ago, but Rachel thinks the sun shines out of his arse.’
    It was my turn to frown. ‘He told me she’d just walked out on him. He was really depressed about it.’
    Lindsay shook her head. ‘God, how very Sam. He hates touring, you know. He’ll do anything to squeeze out a bit of sympathy, make sure he gets premier-league treatment. He just likes to have everyone running around after him, Sarah. I’m telling you, Rachel has never left him. Now I think about it, that week he was in Russia, I went round there for dinner. Me and Rachel and a couple of her colleagues. You know, from Material Girl . The magazine she works for. I think if they’d split up, she might have mentioned it, don’t you?’
    I hoped I wasn’t looking as stunned as I felt. I’d never thought of myself as stupid, but that calculating bastard had spun me a line and reeled me in open-mouthed like the dumbest fish in the pond. But of course, because I’m a woman and that’s how we’re trained to think, I was still blaming myself more than him. I’d clearly been sending out the signals of needy gullibility and he’d just come up with the right line to exploit them.
    A few weeks later, I was still smarting from what I saw as my self-inflicted wound at the Edinburgh Book Festival, where us British Council types gather like bees to pollen. But at least I’d finally have the chance to share my idiocy with Camilla, my opposite number in Jerusalem. We’d worked together years before in Paris, and we’d become bosom buddies. The only reason I hadn’t told her about Sam previously was that every