The Other Half of My Heart Read Online Free Page A

rest of the café, and in the kitchen Simon will keep the hungry ovens fed. And so this morning, all is well at Adventures in Bread.
    There’s a mellow ring from the cluster of brass bells that hangs on the back of the door, and Bettina looks up. She recognizes the newcomer from her photo-byline in the local newspaper, and the world tilts.
    Oh, hell.
    She has forgotten – well, not so much forgotten as pushed to the side of her mind, into the area labelled ‘things to think about later when I am feeling up to them’ – that this is happening today. Verity Ross of the
Throckton Warbler
is here, right on cue, to do the interview that Bettina has been trying to ignore. She looks at her hands and they’re shaking. It’s one thing to cope with feeling exposed, sitting in your own café; quite another to be written about in the local newspaper, where anyone and everyone can read about you, and judge you, or recognize you. Bettina swallows. She tastes bile at the back of her throat, burning the skin and leaving a sourness that will linger all day.
    â€˜Morning,’ Bettina says, feeling her customer-smile make its way to her face, and willing her voice to sound brave. It shakes, a little, but it manages to hold. ‘You must be Verity.’
    â€˜Bettina? Yes, I am. Hello.’ The journalist is a neat, smart woman, dressed in a tweed jacket over a white blouse and a black skirt. A deep pink silk scarf is knotted at her neck; her smiling lipstick matches it. She might be fifty or she might be seventy, and she probably won’t change at all in those two decades. Bettina feels herself shrink inside. She wishes she had inherited her mother’s talent for acting: then she could play the successful, confident bread-shop owner. Right now there’s a good chance that she will clam up and be able to squeeze out only yes or no answers. She feels as she used to feel when she was plagued by panic attacks: she’s waiting for the feeling of time stopping, the air closing around her and suffocating her. But she comes out from behind the counter, and she keeps smiling because she doesn’t know what will happen if she stops. She shakes Verity’s hand, her own suddenly cold, and says, ‘Welcome to Adventures in Bread.’
    Her leg aches. The old injury is the place where her tiredness and stress always make themselves known. It’s an outward manifestation of a pain that’s as familiar and constant as birdsong in the dawn. She shifts her weight and remembers what her father used to say about how the hardest part of anything is to begin. ‘Shall we get some coffee and cake and go upstairs to the flat, where we won’t be disturbed?’
    â€˜That sounds lovely,’ Verity says, her glance roving along the baskets of breads, the trays of cake. She lets out a little sigh. ‘I wish I hadn’t had breakfast.’
    Angie, Bettina’s assistant in everything except breadmaking, laughs and says, ‘We hear that a lot.’ Once the drinks are made and the cakes chosen, Bettina leads Verity upstairs, trying to remember what state she left the place in this morning, focusing on the flat as a way of suppressing her emotions, which she is managing to punch down like dough after a first proving. They’ll rise again, she knows, but she needs to be able to put off dealing with them until later.
    â€˜Your nomination for the Heart of Throckton New Business Awards is proving very popular,’ Verity says with a smile when they are settled on two small sofas, facing each other across a coffee table cluttered with recipe books, notebooks, a jug full of peonies only just on the wrong side of ripeness, but nothing worse. Rufus brought the flowers a week or so ago, wrapped in yellow tissue tied with a green ribbon, ‘because I thought they were cheerful and you’d like them’. Bettina had been ungracious about them – for no reason other than the