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

She’d made her new beginning. She could almost believe now that it was going to be alright.
    She put back her head and laughed, opening her mouth and swallowing big lungfuls of the chilly air.
    ‘Mum! What are you doing?’ Ella was looking at her self-consciously.
    ‘Breathing it in, carina . Breathing it all in…’
    Ella laughed, her eyes losing their worried expression, her cheeks flushing. For a moment, Fabbia thought she might join her, throw back her head too, take gulps of air.
    Instead Ella seemed to check herself, glancing around her nervously, pushing her hands deeper into her jeans pockets. But she looked at Fabbia and smiled, in the indulgent way you might smile at a small child playing.
    She feels it too, thought Fabbia. She’s relaxing a bit. She’s going to be happy here.
    Because, above all, Fabbia wanted Ella to be happy.
    All these first weeks, she’d busied herself, unpacking boxes for the shop and the flat, finding furniture, hanging curtains, cleaning and painting and tweaking.
    She’d discovered that she could sand the old varnish from a table and paint it in smooth creamy strokes of duck-egg blue or grey. She could glue the broken spindles of a chair or improvise a headboard from a piece of wood and a length of flowered fabric.
    But she wished she could do more, spin a circle around them both, keep the happiness in and any badness out.
    She watched Ella carefully those first weeks, feeling relief on the days when she lost that far-off look, when she smiled or laughed or even put aside the book she’d buried herself in to help with painting a wall or emptying a box.
    And when Billy appeared in the shop, tagging along in Ella’s wake, his face split in that wide smile, Fabbia felt her heart lift. Ella would make friends now. Nice young people like Billy. And this friendly woman in the grocers, was she old enough to have a daughter? Someone around Ella’s age?
    She’d begun to believe that they were safe here. People were kind.
    Stupid, Fabbia. So naïve. To trust. To relax in this way.
    Because then, when her guard was down, that awful man had come sniffing around, with his black coat, all grubby at the hem, and his eyes, tiny eyes, too deep-set in his face - and never trust a man with too-small eyes, Madaar-Bozorg always said - looking into everything, picking up a handkerchief or a hat with the tips of his long white fingers, replacing each item with a look of distaste as if it were contaminated.
    She’d felt her hand in her skirt pocket itching to leap out and grab his hands, to make those horrible probing fingers go still and quiet.
    She’d had an almost overwhelming urge to pick up an embroidered cushion or a silk scarf and place it firmly over his thin, hard mouth so that she wouldn’t have to look at that expression on his face for one minute longer.
    But instead she’d smiled and smiled and laid her hand gently on his arm – he’d certainly liked that, hadn’t he? – and she’d gestured towards the doorway gently, carefully, so that he wouldn’t feel pressured, so that he wouldn’t know, even for a second, that she was ushering him away, across the floor and out of the door.  Away. Please. Leave us now. Watching as the last flick of his black coat disappeared around the corner like a rat’s tail.
    Fabbia Moreno knew how to make a shop. She knew how to make a high waist and a concealed seam, how to drape a neckline or cut on the bias, how to sew stretch jersey, remove the scuff marks from a 1920s evening slipper or restore the nap of a blush-pink leather glove.
    But she didn’t know how to keep Ella safe, how to shield her from the prying fingers, the hard faces, the questions and looks, the words half-whispered behind the back of a hand or tossed over a shoulder, words made to cut you or hook you in.
    And wherever they went, there was no getting away from those words, it seemed.
    Foreigner. Dirty Arab. Osama Bin Laden. Terrorist cell. Excuse me, madam, may I see your