After the One, Cass Lester [top romance novels .txt] 📗

After lunch, sitting round the tree it was as if it was just another Christmas: presents were opened, new toys played with, and Ben and Jessica ate candy canes and chocolate money. Pam had kept herself busy looking after everyone, endlessly doling out food, treats, hugs and cuddles, instinctively knowing that grief can’t settle on a moving target. Charley had spent most of Christmas Day curled up on the sofa, numb, barely able to speak, letting the festivities wash over her like a relentless tide until she could retreat to the sanctuary of Josh’s old room, where she could lie on his bed, wrap his duvet round her, close her eyes and wish it were him.

It took Charley and Pam the remainder of the afternoon to go through the bags, although they’d have done it much more quickly if they hadn’t let themselves get diverted by memories or by laughing at the sheer hilariousness of some of Josh’s possessions: a pair of socks printed to look like sandals, his barbeque apron that said ‘Hot Man doing Hot Work. Pour me a Beer!’ and a plastic inflatable Sumo suit. Charley remembered him putting it on first thing one morning.

‘Help me blow it up!’ he’d cried, his blue eyes dancing with fun.

‘Don’t be daft! You’ll never get in the car!’

‘Good point!’ he had said, and then in all seriousness, he’d stood in front of the mirror and solemnly put his tie on top of the Sumo suit, to go to work. She remembered laughing until she’d cried – he’d looked so utterly ridiculous.

Pam’s voice brought her back. ‘Oh my God, where did he wear that?’ she was asking.

‘At the showroom. For a dare!’

‘Who dared him?’

‘Luke.’

Pam laughed out loud. ‘I might have guessed!’

Charley doubted anything that her sons had got up to would have surprised Pam. The stories Josh had told her about what he and his brother had got up to as kids had been hilarious.

In the end, the sort-out was nothing like the painful blub-fest Charley had dreaded it would be. ‘Is there anything you’d like to keep?’ she asked Pam.

Her mother-in-law smiled, but shook her head. ‘That’s very sweet of you… but I don’t need anything.’

When Charley found the Arctic Monkeys T-shirt and the Italian leather belt, she steeled herself and put them both in the charity bag. The Hugo Boss aftershave had gone off, so she poured it down the loo and put the bottle in the recycling. She kept the Prosecco flutes, their wedding album and Josh’s wedding ring, of course, all the photos, his blue cufflinks and wallet. She chucked the festival wrist bands out, but then had a swift panic and hoicked them out of the bin liner, much to Pam’s amusement. She then promptly rescued the Arctic Monkeys T-shirt from the charity bag, as well. Pam rolled her eyes.

‘What?’ exclaimed Charley wide-eyed with innocence. ‘It’s a perfectly good T-shirt. I can wear it in bed!’

And that was it. Now all they had to do was make the bed – literally.

Chapter Eight

‘Do you even know how to do this?’ asked Pam, as Charley confidently ripped the packaging off the bed frame.

‘It’s a flat pack from IKEA!’ exclaimed Charley. ‘We’re two intelligent women, armed with an Allen key. There ain’t nothing we can’t do!’

Pam looked unconvinced, so Charley went on, ‘Trust me. I’ve done a DIY course, and it’s nothing like the dark, mysterious art it’s cracked up to be.’

Methodically she laid out all the bed pieces on the floor and then picked up the instructions, at which point, irritatingly, her phone rang. Glancing at the number, she saw it was the pub. Bloody, bloody hell! She was meant to be at work! She didn’t want to take the call in front of Pam, not because she was ashamed of working in the pub, she tried to convince herself, it was more that she still hadn’t told Pam about her redundancy. She wanted to explain her change of circumstances in her own way, and at the right moment, so Charley shot off to her room, calling over her shoulder, ‘Won’t be a sec!’ It didn’t even occur to her how Pam might interpret, or rather, misinterpret that action.

In the privacy of her room Charley garbled a profuse apology to her manager, and explained that a family crisis had come up unexpectedly. After assuring him she’d be in the next day, she pocketed her phone and went back to the spare room. Much to her relief, Pam didn’t even mention the call. Less than an hour later, despite IKEA’s best efforts to make the instructions as opaque and confusing as humanly possible, Charley had defied them, and her mother-in-law’s expectations, and had built the bed.

Although Pam might have found building a flat-pack bed a challenge, an hour or so later she was completely in her element in Charley’s kitchen.

‘Where’s the garlic crusher?’ she asked, rootling through the cutlery drawer.

‘Sorry, haven’t seen it for ages,’ fibbed Charley, reluctant to admit she didn’t actually have one, and wondering how to break it to Pam that she didn’t actually have any garlic either. Charley had bunged the pizzas in the oven and was now watching Pam conjure up a salad from the pitiful contents of the fridge.

‘It’s not the just the betrayal and the humiliation…’ continued Pam, savagely sharpening a vegetable knife as if it were her chosen weapon of assassination. ‘It’s that he’s made me feel so stupid. Look so… ridiculous!’

‘Nobody will think you’re ridiculous,’ said Charley gently.

‘I damn well do,’ retorted Pam, viciously slicing up a slightly limp tomato. ‘You’d think I would have guessed. Maybe not when he was working, but once he’d retired… when it took him hours to buy a light bulb for the downstairs loo… or when he spent the entire afternoon at the garden centre because “it was raining too hard to get to the car”… or the whole day in Bristol “buying underpants”, for crying out loud. What kind of idiot