Christmas at Tiffany's Read Online Free Page B

Wherever that might be. Down there, perhaps? She peered out of the window again.
    Or would it be London? Or Paris? She shut her eyes and tried to imagine herself as the girls had predicted for her in the car – slick, metropolized, heels clicking as she sashayed down a busy shopping avenue, men turning to stare. She couldn’t see it herself. For the past ten years, the only things that had turned to stare when she passed were the chickens. But as they had bumped away from the estate, a plan had slowly and painfully come together. The girls had argued fiercely around her silent, teary form as to who knew what was best. London was nearest and most approachable, Suzy had argued, for a girl who’d never lived in a city before. Kelly had countered that what Cassie needed was a complete break from everything she knew, a baptism of fire to get her going with her new life, and that New York was just the city for her culture shock. Anouk believed that she was better suited to Paris’s quieter sophistication, and she was already fluent in the language.
    They had argued all the way to the airport, no one able to edge ahead of anyone else because, in truth, nobody, not even Cassie, knew what kind of life she really ought to be living, much less where. In the end they’d hit on a compromise. Just as their mothers had implored them as toddlers, they were going to share.
    Share Cassie. She was to spend four months in each city, living with them in turn. She would stay at their apartments – Anouk and Suzy had guest bedrooms; Kelly had a truckle bed – not only because the shortest rental period would be for six months, which was too long, but also because she wouldn’t be able to afford anything. Cassie had no money of her own, just a joint credit card which Gil could cut off at any time, and although she had inherited a modest trust after her father’s death, the girls were unanimous, in this at least, that she shouldn’t touch it until she knew where she was going to settle. It was going to be months before the divorce settlement came through, but here again the girls could help. Both Kelly and Suzy ran their own businesses and could feasibly bring her in on a temporary basis. Anouk was self-employed as well, although her business was too niche to employ anyone without specialist training, but she promised to work on some of her contacts and get something lined up for Cassie when she arrived in the new year.
    So that was the plan – a city with a friend in it, a bed to sleep on and a temporary job. The girls would rebuild her from scratch, and each friend would get her turn to exercise her own influence. Cassie had agreed to give herself up to them completely, and had promised she wouldn’t protest or refuse any of their ideas for her. After the year’s end, she would know which was the real Cassie and how she was going to live; her life would be up to her again, but she would be a new Cassie by then – confident, sexy, worldly and full of purpose.
    It was getting started that was going to be the hard part, and she’d had to plead for a day’s grace between lives. The girls hadn’t wanted to leave her alone for a minute, but Cassie had insisted that she needed a few hours to herself before this new chapter in her life began, and they had reluctantly booked her into a drab airport hotel room with a hard bed and a well-stocked minibar. Kelly had flown out that night, Anouk and Suzy had caught a train back to London together, and by midnight on the tenth anniversary of her wedding, Cassie was alone and sobbing where no one could see. And when the tears were still falling on the plane twelve hours later, she simply comforted herself that anonymity brings with it the shamelessness of being able to cry very loudly in public.
    She looked out through wet eyes at the famous skyscrapers closing around her, the big sky folding down into smaller parcels of blue as the plane prepared to land. She might as well be landing on the moon as