Just Between Us Read Free Page B

thinking again of her own life and how happily it had turned out.
    Adele often said, grudgingly, that Rose was lucky. But Adele was right. She had been lucky.
    Nobody could be prouder of their daughters than she was of Stella, Tara and Holly. Even if she hadn’t been their mother, she’d have thought they were special women. She had a granddaughter she adored, too. Amelia had a great way of staring up at her grandmother with those big, grave eyes and asking things like: ‘Granny, will you and Grandad have a baby so I can play with it?’
    Stella had roared with laughter when Rose told her about it.
    ‘What did you say?’
    ‘I said we were thinking of getting a puppy and would that do?’
    ‘Oh no,’ Stella howled. ‘She wants a dog more than she wants a baby sister; she won’t let you forget that.’
    If only, Rose thought, Stella had someone in her life. Tara was blissful with Finn, happier than Rose would have imagined she could be. Seeing her middle daughter so settled, made Rose long for the same happiness for Stella. She’d have given anything to see Stella content. Not that she would ever say that to Stella. But a mother could hope.
    And as for Holly: well Holly never told anyone what she wanted. Rose did her best to be there for Holly in the background but her youngest daughter had retreated from life in Kinvarra, and Rose, desperate to help, had to accept it. Perhaps Holly was happy after all. Because you never knew, did you, reflected Rose.
    Hugh insisted that Rose should stop worrying about her brood.
    ‘They’re modern women, haven’t they the lives of Reilly?’ he’d say, proud as Punch of his three bright daughters. When the girls came home to Kinvarra, Hugh was always keen to take them into town to lunch or dinner, to ‘show them off’ as Rose teased him.
    ‘I’m surprised you haven’t set up the Daughters Sweepstake Race,’ she joked, ‘where all the great and good of Kinvarra get their offspring in the race to see who’s the best.’
    ‘There’s a thought,’ he said gravely. ‘You’re always telling me you’re fed up with organising charity dinner dances and cake sales. A sweepstake would be a sure-fire winner.’
    Dear Hugh. He’d been blessed with a great sense of humour, for all that he drove Rose mad with his ability to spread chaos all over the house without ever bothering to tidy up. No matter how many times she scolded him, he still left the bathroom looking like someone had been washing the Crufts Best In Breed in it, with at least three soaked towels thrown around and the top off the shower gel so that a trail of sticky gel oozed into the shower tray. But, despite everything, she loved him and he was a wonderful father.There had been bad times, for sure. But Rose had weathered the storms, that was all in the past. She was lucky.
    The Millers’ rambling farmhouse was in darkness when Hugh Miller returned home. Once, Meadow Lodge had been the badly-maintained home of a small farmer with several rackety haybarns, a silage pit positioned right beside the kitchen window and sheep contentedly grazing in the garden, doing their best to fertilise the landscape. When Hugh and Rose had bought it forty years ago, they’d knocked down the crumbling farm buildings, turned the three-acre plot into a decent, sheep-free garden, and had modernised the whole house. Nobody looking at Meadow Lodge now would ever think it had been anything but a gracefully proportioned building with fine big rooms, a huge comfortable family kitchen and gas heating to cope with the winds that sometimes swept down through the midlands and Kinvarra. Rose had filled the house with comfortable couches, luxurious-looking soft furnishings, lots of pictures, lamps that cast a golden glow and plenty of unusual ornaments.
    With his arms laden down with his usual consignment of papers and briefcase, Hugh unlocked the front door, shoved it open with his shoulder and turned on the lights in the hall. He wondered where