The Thirty List - Eva Woods Mills & Boon M&B

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since she became a primary school teacher: one, an exponential increase in bossiness; two, a habit of asking did we want to go to the toilet before we went anywhere; and three, the total loss of any physical shame. Now she was prancing about the floor, accompanied by an eye-rolling Cynthia, who gamely waved her long limbs about, then broke off as the song stopped and her phone rang. ‘Cynthia Eagleton. No, for Christ’s sake, I said send them out already. Listen, Barry, this is a serious question—what do you mean that’s not your name? Never mind, I’m going to call you Barry. Can you not do anything for yourself? How do you manage to get out of bed in the morning? Just get it done.’ She hung up, sighing. ‘I swear it’s a miracle he can even blow his own nose, that boy.’

      ‘Was it hard for you to get a day off?’ I mumbled dustily.

      ‘Only about as hard as it was for Richard Attenborough and his mates to get out of that prison camp. But don’t worry, darling. I’m here to help. Barry, or whatever his name is, will just have to learn to tie his own shoelaces.’ Cynthia’s had a lot to contend with in life. Not just the fact her mum saw fit to call her Cynthia—there was some great-aunt’s will involved—but also the fact she was ten years older than her siblings, and the only one to be fathered by her mum’s first love, who’d been deported back to Jamaica before Cynthia was even born. Still, she’d clawed her way up to a top legal job, she strikes terror into the hearts of her colleagues and she does have really nice hair.

      Emma looked down at me kindly. ‘It’s good you want to listen to this song, you know. You’re done with all that R.E.M., then? Sixteen renditions of “Everybody Hurts” in a row?’

      ‘Not sure,’ I mumbled into the floor.

      ‘Well, you’ll have to be, because I’ve buried the CD in the garden and I’m not telling you where.’

      ‘Oh.’

      ‘Do you want to get up now?’

      ‘Not really.’

      ‘Come on, love. I’ll give you a sticker.’

      So this was me, Rachel Kenny, aged thirty, imminently to be divorced, having to be prised away from my hardwood floors, my back-garden hydrangea and my wind chimes and exposed-brick chimney piece. All those things I barely looked at but saw every day, and which were mine. I had floor dust down my front and was wearing an old college sweatshirt, partly because everything was packed, and partly because I had owned it before I met Dan, and I wanted to try to reset to that person.

      This was the kind of crazy logic I was operating on at this moment in time. Things that suck about divorce, number seven: you go completely and totally out of your tree.

      Finally, after two emergency trips back for things I’d forgotten that seemed really important at the time (hairbrush, muffin tray, mop), we were in the van Emma had hired me.

      ‘Ready?’ Cynthia asked me, settling into the wide front seat.

      ‘I don’t know. It’s … My whole life was there. I don’t know what I’m going to do now.’

      She squeezed my arm with her manicured hand. ‘I know, darling. But what’s that thing your dad always says?’

      ‘Um … Countdown’s never been the same since Carol left?’

      ‘No, I mean that other thing. If you can’t go back, you have to go forward.’

      I stared back at the house. Dan would be coming back later. I didn’t even know where he’d been staying while I moved my things out. This was what we’d come to. ‘Do you think I should leave him a note? I mean, I can’t just … go. That can’t be the last conversation we ever have. We were together for ten years!’

      They exchanged another look. ‘We’ve talked about this, Rach,’ said Emma gently. ‘I know it’s hard, but this is just how it has to be.’

      We drove off. The house receded in the mirror to the size of a Lego cottage, till I almost felt I could pick it up and pop it into the pocket of my hoody, and then I couldn’t see any more anyway because of the tears filling my eyes, spilling out and running down onto my dust-stained front. Cynthia passed me a flowery tissue and Emma patted my hand as she cut up school-run mums in massive Jeeps. I closed my eyes.

      Things that suck about divorce, number nine: moving out of the home you spent years creating, with nowhere else to go. And remembering halfway up the M3 that you left the KT Tunstall CD in the car, which was no longer yours, along with all the rest of your life.

      I cried four times on the journey from Surrey to London. One was in the forecourt of a garage while Emma filled up (Cynthia refused to get petrol on her green leather driving gloves). Dan and I had done a lot of driving when we first got married and bought our car, a fourteen-year-old Mini. When we still had things to say to each other. We’d get the worst compilation CD we could find in the garage—Seventy Valentine’s Day Rockers! Fifty Smooth Driving Tunes!—and sing along, eating crisps, our hands touching in the greasy packet. I wondered if I’d now be sad every time I went to a garage for the rest of my life. It would make popping out for a Twix quite problematic.

      One good thing about crying is it’s quite a useful way to pass the time, if you don’t mind chronic dehydration and people staring at you, so the journey went by for me in a blur of motorways, hiccuping sobs and love songs on Mellow Magic FM, and soon we were at Cynthia’s Chiswick-based palace. She has three storeys and even a garden you could swing several cats in.

      We had stopped. The girls were looking at me, worried. I wiped my face, feeling like one of those criminals who needed to be bundled out of court in a blanket. You messed up your marriage, Rachel Kenny! Even though you had three Le Creuset pans and a fixed-rate mortgage! This court finds you guilty of being an idiot!

      ‘Come on, darling,’ said Cynthia. ‘Let’s get you down for the night.’

      ‘I’m not a baby, you know.’

      ‘Funny,’ Emma said, ‘because with all the crying and dribbling, it is actually quite like being with a baby.’

      I gulped. ‘At least I still have bladder control. Unlike you that time with the Red Bull shots.’

      Emma smiled and patted me on the hand. ‘That’s my girl. Don’t let the bastards grind you down.’

      Cynthia actually had a spare room, with a bed and soft white sheets and a carafe of water on the bedside table, plus arcane things like armoires and runners that I’d only ever seen in design magazines. Once I was settled into bed for the night—completely shattered, all my stuff in archive boxes, with no idea where my toothbrush might be—my phone bleeped with a text. Dan? My heart did a sort of funny swoop and fall, guilt and sadness and something else all in one. But no, of course it wasn’t Dan. I doubted he would ever text me again. It was Emma, asking if I was OK. I didn’t know how to answer that, so instead I composed imaginary texts to Dan, supposing he were actually talking to me and might listen to what I had to say.

      I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry. Please let me come home.

      I miss you.

      I can’t do this on my own.

      I didn’t send them, and for the rest of the night my phone stayed as dark and silent as the R.E.M. CD that was now buried somewhere under my bedding plants, ex–bedding plants, in a garden I’d probably never see again. I thought of him saying two years before: I’ll never leave you, Rachel.

      Yeah, right. But then, neither of us had exactly kept the promises we made that day.

       Chapter Two

      When I woke up in Cynthia’s white-cotton-and-distressed-wood (why would it be distressed? It’s in a lovely

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