The Broken Read Online Free Page A

buzzed her in and by the time she’d slid open both bolts and unchained the door that led from their flat into the communal lobby, Sasha was already there. She fell into Hannah’s arms, her wraith-like body shaking violently under her thin denim jacket.
    ‘Oh my God, Hannah,’ she said in that same choked, un-Sasha-like voice.
    Hannah held her friend tight. ‘Come on, Sash,’ she murmured, aware that they were still standing in the open doorway, letting a cool draught into the flat. ‘Let’s go into the living room, hey?’
    Sasha allowed herself to be led through the door at the far end of the hallway, where Hannah deposited her on the sofa.
    ‘I’ll make us some tea, shall I?’
    If Sasha wondered why Hannah wasn’t quizzing her about what had brought her to their door in the middle of the night, she didn’t say. Instead she merely nodded. Her normally elfin features had puffed up so that her slanted hazel eyes, with their thick black lashes, were practically swollen shut.
    Waiting for the kettle to boil, Hannah leaned her forehead against the cool fridge door, trying not to hear the gulping sobs coming from the next room. She felt guilty now for the times over the last few years when she’d wished Sasha ill. No, not ill, just for something in Sasha’s Sunday-supplement life not to go to plan for once, just something to make her life slightly less shiny and bring it more in line with Hannah’s own.
    She’d never had a friend like Sasha before. If their babies hadn’t brought them together she probably still wouldn’t have a friend like Sasha. The two women led such different lives they’d never normally have crossed paths, like a Venn diagram where the two circles bobbed about completely independently with no point of intersection. Unlike Hannah, Sasha hadn’t gone to university but had had a series of glamorous temporary jobs instead in small boutique galleries and country-house retreats in exotic locations. She always seemed to know someone who could fix her up with something, and if not, the trust set up by her wealthy father could usually be relied on to come to her aid. After she met Dan, she’d stopped working altogether, even long before September came along, and, here’s the thing, she never felt guilty about it. She spent her time on ‘projects’ to do with the house (a simple bathroom refit could easily turn into a four-month full-time job involving mood boards and teams of designers and builders) or arranging holidays or, after September was born, taking her daughter to art and music classes, even French classes, where young women with chunky, brightly coloured jewellery sat cross-legged on the floor and showed fractious toddlers pictures of smiley faces or suns or books and made exaggerated movements with their mouths as they pronounced each syllable. Hannah knew other women who didn’t work, but none had that same sense of entitlement that Sasha did. ‘Just till the kids start school,’ they’d say, these other apologetic mothers. ‘Childcare costs are so astronomical.’ But Sasha would look at Hannah like a sleek Siamese cat and say, ‘Why would I work if I don’t have to?’ And it would be Hannah who felt short-changed, as if something was lacking.
    Hannah, on the other hand, was all about the guilt. Sometimes she wondered if it would be such an integral part of her if it hadn’t been for what happened as a teenager, but at other times she felt that guilt was just woven into the thread of her DNA. She felt bad for the decisions she made, and the ones she didn’t – for all the people she imagined she’d let down. An ambitious girl from a largely unambitious background, she’d worked hard to get to university in London, switching from French to Journalism in her second year when her sister Gemma finally convinced her it was OK to do a subject she liked, rather than one she thought might be useful, and had worked harder still to gain her first staff job on a magazine for