Letting You Go Read Free

worried needed more help than the trust could offer. ‘I thought it might be love but on second thoughts, you seem a bit …’
    Alex’s smile was automatic. ‘Manic Mondays, Dan!’ she lied. Dan was a good guy. He’d be quick to offer his sympathies but it always felt like borrowing clothes she liked the look of, knowing they’d never fit right. ‘Now hurry up and get those soups out, they’re going cold!’
    ‘OK, OK … I’m going, I’m going.’ Dan loaded the last teas onto his tray and jostled back out through the kitchen doors. Alex’s thoughts meandered straight back to Eilidh Falls. She would call them all later, before they sat down to dinner together. Six o’clock, same time every year, no variations, no surprises. Alex dreaded it. She dreaded the thanks her mother would lavish on her for sending flowers and she dreaded hearing the consolatory lilt in Jem’s voice planted there by Alex’s perpetual absence. But most of all, Alex dreaded the complete normality of the conversation she would have with her dad. The shooting of the breeze. She had to wonder what they would have done for conversation all these years had it not been for oil changes and tyre pressure.
    ‘Oi.’ Dan’s face popped through from the other side of the hatch and startled her. ‘You don’t fool me, Alex. I might be a speccy kitchen hand with a flair for jazzy garnishes,’ Dan waved the tray of food and drinks flamboyantly past the servery hatch for Alex’s appraisal, ‘but I’m tuned in to the ways of women, you know. I know what’s eating you.’ He looked over his shoulder towards the twins playing air hockey with the condiments on the table. ‘You’re really worrying about them, aren’t you?’ Alex’s thoughts shifted from one broken family to another. She sent a small request into the universe that a little time and distance might help them too.
    ‘They’ll be OK, Alex,’ Dan reassured. ‘Look at them.’ One of the twins began giggling at something his fatherhad just done with the pepper pot. ‘They might be going through the wringer but they’re still a family. A family can get through anything if they just stick together. Am I right?’
    Alex could already feel the return of that automatic smile.

CHAPTER 2
    ‘C rappy
neon
, Alex. Neon! It’s a florist’s not a bloody tattoo parlour! You should see it all lit up at night. One big, craptastic eyesore.’
    ‘Jem, please stop saying
craptastic
, darling. You sound like a teenage boy.’ Alex heard their mother sigh in the background and allowed herself a little one of her own so the other two Foster women couldn’t hear it. The call was on loudspeaker. It was Blythe’s way of pulling Alex as best she could back into the heart of the family home while she prepared the meal Alex never came back to eat.
    Jem exhaled irritably again. ‘Carrie always did have a flair for cheapening her environment.’
    ‘Jaime Foster, you catty girl.’ Alex heard their mother tease.
    ‘Better a cat than a total bitch, Mum.’
    ‘Oh, Jem.’ Their mum didn’t like bad language of any sort. Never had, although Blythe would turn a deaf ear if Ted or the girls used an obscenity so long as there was a legitimate reason. Like stubbing a toe, or winning the lottery. Not that anyone had ever won the lottery.
    ‘Alex knows what I mean, mum,’ Jem called back to Blythe. ‘You know what I mean, right Al?’
    Alex was decompressing, gradually leaving the carnage of Dill’s birthday the way those crazy scuba divers she sometimes watched on Discovery would gradually leave a doomed shipwreck in the murky depths, steadily and cautiously in case they got ‘the bends’. Returning to the surface of Foster family life felt a lot like that sometimes. Something to take steady before the change in pressure did something catastrophic to Alex’s system. Thankfully, although Jem’s evergreen hang-ups with Carrie Logan – arch-frenemy since their days at Eilidh High – had never made