The Other Half of My Heart Read Online Free

luxury and she wants to do all she can to make sure that, if money is tight, hers is the luxury people keep rather than the one they do without.
    The tasting is from 10.30 to 11.15. Bettina will sit at the table and talk, and encourage people to toast and taste, and by the time the event is finishing the coffee crowd will be arriving in earnest, and she will leave out the leftovers for them to try. The talking, the being on show, is not a comfortable thing for her to do. She isn’t really comfortable anywhere out of the kitchen, although behind the counter she feels protected. As soon as she steps away, she feels nervousness creep out of her bones where it’s been hiding and surround her, a clammy cloud of wishing she was somewhere that no one would speak to her. But she knows that this isn’t the way to live, and so she perseveres.
    At her beautiful scrubbed-pine table, surrounded by a hotchpotch collection of wooden chairs – all bought from an auction house and costing more to transport and have re-sanded and varnished than to buy – Bettina is exposed. She’s not good at small talk; she never has been, even in her teens before her life veered off the road. One of the things she likes about Rufus is his ability to make conversation smooth and simple, whereas what comes out of her mouth often seems awkward, or off-key. Even last night, when she had turfed him out although she’d known he was unwilling to go, he’d managed to be polite and make it less awkward than it might have been. He had called in on the pretext of dropping off a takeaway menu for the Indian restaurant near his office, and she’d invited him to stay for a drink.
    Although, now she comes to think of it, he hasn’t been in this morning. He often pops in to get a sandwich to take to work, or half a dozen croissants to drop off for his daughter and granddaughter. Bettina’s mind and memory are suddenly full of her mother’s voice, ticking Sam off for giving a classmate a Valentine’s card when the girl he had intended it for gave him the brush-off. Don’t start something that you can’t finish, Sam, she said. It’s not good manners. You’ve been brought up better than that. For all her playfulness, Alice had standards, and rules. You did as you were told, in her house. Bettina suspected that her advice about Rufus would be the same, were she in a position to give it.
    Bettina drags her mind back to the here and nearly-now of today’s tasting. It’s an effort. Part of the reason she tries to stop herself from thinking about the distant past is that, given the choice, she would rather stay there than be here, most of the time. Of course, her memory is selective, and the memories – especially the ones that wake her screaming – aren’t all good. She takes a breath. There’s a rosemary cake baking, and it smells so good that she could cry. But she doesn’t because, she reminds herself, this is business.
    She knows that she has to promote her products and that, for now at least, the best person to carry out that promotion is herself, so she just gets on with it. People buy people first, her father used to say, and she has worked in enough bakeries and boulangeries to understand how important a face for the business is. For her first tasting, she’d prepared a series of prompt cards for each section and she’d learned by heart what she was going to say, delivering it in a voice that seemed brittle even to her own ears. Now she’s learned that if she can only get through the chat before everyone settles down to the tasting, she can manage the rest, because when she’s talking about baking she’s on safe ground. Last time, she had sixteen tasters, four of them new customers; with the exception of one person, they’d all bought something, and she’s pretty sure that all of them have been back at least once. Angie will look after the shop and the