The Accidental Mother Read Online Free

“Oh,” she said. It was strange to know that Carrie had not been in the world for six whole months now, that the Christmas card would have gone unopened. She was unjustly hurt that she had missed Carrie’s funeral but not surprised. She did not know any of Carrie’s St. Ives friends, and she’d hardly known Carrie’s husband. Sophie took a deep breath and tried to bring the real world back into focus.
    She had to get on, go to lunch with Jake, she decided. She had to do something now that was normal and that she could control and understand. She just couldn’t understand Carrie being dead. She just couldn’t think about it.
    “Well.” She glanced at the business card she was still holding before handing it back as requested. “Tess. Thank you for letting me know. You’re right, it was a shock, but I think the best thing is to get on with life as normal, so if that’s all?”
    Tess looked taken aback and shook her head. “Oh dear,” she said, apologetically. “That’s not the only reason why I’m here, Miss Mills. Sophie. I didn’t come just to tell you Carrie was dead. Oh dear.” She took a deep breath. “It’s the children. Carrie’s children. Bella is six, and Izzy is just three.”
    “Of course,” Sophie said, shaking her head grimly. “It’s terrible for them. Just terrible.” She didn’t quite understand what Tess wanted from her.
    “Good, I’m glad you understand how difficult it’s been for the poor little mites. That’ll make everything so much easier for them.”
    Sophie was confused. “Make what so much easier?” she asked politely.
    “For the girls to come and live with you.” Tess studied Sophie’s blank page of a face. “You’ve forgotten, haven’t you? I was afraid that you might have—people never take these things seriously.” She could see that Sophie wanted her to get to the point. “Carrie named you in her will, but we only just found it, you see, a couple of days ago. Her neighbor had volunteered to sort through her things before they got cleared out—to save anything special and important for the girls. They found it in the bottom of a box of paints, can you believe—” Tess switched her smile back on. “She named you as the girls’ legal guardian, Miss Mills. You must remember you signed the agreement. She wanted you to look after them.”

Two
    S ophie had forgotten until that moment. Of course she had—why would she remember a half-drunk agreement she had made nearly three years ago? Carrie was never supposed to actually die.
    It had been after the girl’s christenings. Carrie’s mum had arranged the whole thing in the same Highbury church that Carrie had been christened and confirmed in. It was just after her first stroke, a mild one that she recovered from quickly, but she’d suddenly got a sense of her mortality and a renewed religious fervor that meant she had to see her grandchildren christened before she died, she simply had to, or so she’d told Carrie.
    “Of course it’s emotional blackmail,” Carrie had told Sophie on the phone, sounding strung out and stressed, two conditions her mother invariably inspired in her. “I don’t want them christened. But Mum’s really turned the screws, so I’m bringing them both up. It’s either that or living purgatory for the foreseeable future.”
    Sophie had felt a lot of sympathy for Carrie. She knew what it was like to have a twilight-zone mother; in fact, a lot of women her age had similar experiences with their mothers. For some reason, it seemed to Sophie that, immediately after becoming mothers, women began a degenerative process that slowly transformed them from bright and interesting people to dotty and eccentric and, especially in Mrs. Stiles’s case, unhinged harridans hell-bent on dragging their daughters to the same ruinous fate. It was the main reason among many that Sophie had decided she never wanted to have children: she never wanted to become her mother, let alone anyone