The Dress (Everyday Magic Trilogy: Book 1) Read Online Free

her were somewhere else, somewhere far away and completely unreachable.
    Fabbia Moreno felt, and not for the first time, a stab of fear for her daughter. She wished that she would giggle and shriek and fidget and get impatient, even stamp her feet and complain and make unreasonable demands, in the way that she saw other young girls doing.
    There was always a part of Ella that seemed unreachable somehow, even to Fabbia. You never knew quite what she was thinking. And always with her nose in a book.
    And then, of course, there was the other thing, all the signs that Fabbia knew to watch for in a daughter. The Signals. The gift that all the women of her family had been born with, in one way or another.
    Seeing things, hearing things, feeling things. Knowing who was arriving at the door before they were even there. Feeling your way into another’s thoughts. Ella had this, she knew. But she wondered if Ella herself was aware of it yet.
    Now she looked down at the top of Ella’s head, her hair a wiry halo that blazed in the sunlight.
    ‘You are holding on to this ladder, aren’t you, carina ?’ she said, preparing to balance on one leg and reach her arms above her head to drive the last screw into the ceiling fixture.
    Ella turned from gazing out of the window and grasped the stepladder with new determination.
    ‘I didn’t know you could do all this stuff, mum,’ she said.
    ‘Neither did I.’ Fabbia laughed as the chandelier in her hands bounced rainbows over the white walls. ‘But what is it they say here. That funny thing. Don’t tell me. Let me remember… Sink… or swim ?’
    Even now, almost sixteen years after arriving in England, she was still grappling with the language. She missed things out, forgot the correct sequence of the words. The vowels never seemed to feel quite right in her mouth somehow. And here in the North, she felt even clumsier. People here spoke in such a different way. Sometimes her head ached from concentrating so hard just to keep up with what they were saying.
    It was so frustrating. She was an educated person, an intelligent person and yet she couldn’t always make herself understood.
    ‘We need a new dress shop, something a bit different.’ The pink-cheeked girl at Braithwaite’s Fruit & Veg had smiled. She reminded Fabbia of a ripe fruit herself, her bosom looking as if it might burst the stiff sheath of her overalls at any moment.
    ‘Vintage, you say? I like all that old stuff. It’s in all the magazines now, innit? I might have to pop in and ‘ave a look.’
    She’d slipped an extra peach into the brown paper bag and winked at Ella.
    Fabbia liked the hum and lilt of her talk, the ease of her body under the tight green cotton as she reached up to drop apples onto the scales suspended from the beam above her head, sending the silver dish bobbing and swaying.
    ‘I make some of the dresses too,’ said Fabbia, ‘and little alterations. Because, well, perhaps you know that vintage is very hard to size. And we have shoes, handbags, scarves, perfume…’
    She stopped and felt herself blush at the sales pitch tripping out of her mouth so freely. ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to… Please. Come. Have a look…’
    She tried to hide her embarrassment, burrowing to the bottom of her plastic shopper, fishing out a flyer from the pile and propping it against a pineapple. ‘We have little opening party. Glass of wine, yes? And… how do you say it here? Canapés …’
    ‘Oooo. Very nice,’ said the girl, her cheeks dimpling again. ‘Cana-what’s its. Those snacky things, innit? Want to give me a few of your leaflets, then, lovey? I’ll put ‘em on the counter.’
    And as she left the shop, a trail of the coloured flyers fluttering behind her, Fabbia had felt a kind of fizz and crackle returning to her body after all the months and years of sadness. It was like throwing off a heavy blanket after a long illness and stretching her arms wide.
    She’d done it. She was here.