The Broken Read Online Free

promised.’
    Dan’s face, normally so open and placid, was dark with rage, but Hannah pretended not to notice.
    ‘Look, Dan. I want to ask you, beg you, to think again. Look at everything you have to lose. Sasha, September. You’ll break their hearts. And for what? For a fling.’
    ‘It’s not a fling.’ Hannah had never heard Dan sound so hard, despite the whispering. He was always so charming, so ready to see everyone else’s point of view. ‘Listen, I know how you feel, but you don’t have a clue about how things are at home between me and Sash. And now I’ve met someone who makes me feel good about myself for the first time in years. And I’d be grateful if you and Josh would just butt out.’
    ‘Dan!’ Sasha’s voice came wafting from the next room. ‘Bring another bottle of red in, would you?’
    Dan glared at Hannah before snatching up the bottle they’d brought round, still wrapped in its off-licence tissue paper, and stalking out.
    ‘Coming, my little lush!’
    Alone in the kitchen, Hannah leaned back against the cooker and put her head in her hands. She and Sasha had had their moments over the four years they’d been friends. She could remember a handful of times when they’d snapped at each other over one thing or another (although, if she remembered rightly, she was pretty sure most of the snapping had come from Sasha), but she’d never once had a cross word with Dan. He was always the laid-back one. Always the one to smooth out tensions with a joke or a well-placed compliment.
    For the first time, Hannah allowed herself to picture how life might be dividing their time between a separated Sasha and Dan.
    It didn’t bear thinking about.
    ‘G’way!’
    Hannah had been dreaming about that night again for the first time in ages. Battling into consciousness, her heart racing, her mind still filled with images of Gemma’s battered head and her mum’s twisted, angry mouth, her airways as always stoppered up with dread, it took her a while to calm down enough to translate the indistinct noise Josh had made into proper words.
    ‘Go away,’ he said again, more distinctly this time.
    Both of them raised themselves on to their elbows and listened as the doorbell of their ground-floor flat sounded a second time, prompting a half-hearted bark from the vicinity of Toby’s basket in the hall.
    Hannah staggered to her feet.
    She had always been better at getting up than Josh. Even before her skills in that area were honed by months and years of night feeds and bad dreams and brutal dawn risings, she’d never struggled like him with that middle dimension between sleep and wakefulness. She liked to be up and getting on with things. Lying awake in that dead early morning was when you had time to think, and there were things that Hannah really didn’t like to think about. Anyway, life was already so short. Why wouldn’t you make the most of what time you had?
    Dragging on her old purple towelling dressing gown, and regretting as she always did that she’d not yet got around to replacing it, she made her way into the hallway. At least living in such a compact space meant you were never very far from the front door if you needed to open it.
    ‘All right already,’ she muttered as the bell rang a third time, a long desperate buzz.
    ‘Mummy?’ Lily’s voice from her little bedroom across the hall was still soaked in sleep. With any luck she wouldn’t wake up properly.
    ‘It’s all right, Lil. Go back to sleep.’
    Up until this point, Hannah had been too focused on getting up and making sure Lily wasn’t disturbed to think about what a ring on the door in the middle of the night might mean. But in the split second when she pressed the buzzer on the intercom, she remembered what had happened the previous day.
    ‘It’s me. Sasha.’ If Hannah hadn’t already known who to expect, she’d never have recognized the voice that crackled through the intercom, deep and croaky and full of lumps.
    Hannah