Just Keep Breathing, GS Rhodes [best book club books for discussion TXT] 📗

secrets from one another. Whenever things got hard in either one of their lives, their first port of call was to speak with the other sibling about it. But now there was something that Kidd certainly couldn’t talk to her about, at least not without causing a heck of a lot of damage. Even so, it didn’t feel good.

“Finish it today,” Kidd said. “Alright?”

“I will, I promise,” he said. “Thanks again, Ben. And I’m sorry.”

Kidd shook his head. “You don’t need to apologise to me. But you do need to make it up to Liz.”

They said their goodbyes and Kidd watched as Greg walked away with Beth. The other woman. He had noticed last night that things between them weren’t great, but he hadn’t wanted to think that something like this was going on. But here it was, right in front of his face. He couldn’t very well ignore it.

He looked back to the restaurant where he saw John looking at him through the window. John waved, none of the wiser, and Kidd offered him a smile. He might not be able to ignore it, but he would have to forget about it. At least for now.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Kidd returned to his lunch with John, trying to explain in as few terms as possible exactly what had just happened. John hadn’t even met anyone from Kidd’s family, he hardly wanted his first impression of his sister’s husband to be that, but he couldn’t help it.

John was his trademark kind and understanding self, and no sooner had they spoken about it did the topic get buried under a discussion about what they’d each done that day. With John working in publishing, his morning had mostly consisted of meetings that he was conferenced into so he didn’t have to go into the office, and editorial work on the many different authors that he worked with. He loved his work, and it definitely consumed him sometimes, but not quite in the same way that Kidd’s did. He wanted to learn from John in that respect, learn how to leave the work stuff at the office and live a somewhat normal life.

John walked him back, the two of them walking hand in hand until they reached the front of the station. Kidd found himself promising that he would make things up to John with the reunion, and John made it his mission to show Kidd that he wasn’t altogether bothered about it, that everything was fine and neither one of them needed to panic. It was what Kidd needed to hear.

He turned his attention back to the station, refocussing his mind on the matter at hand. Finding Sarah Harper.

“And who on earth was that handsome man dropping you off?” Diane chirped from behind the desk, her eyes practically on stalks. “You should have invited him in.”

“What? So you could interrogate him? I don’t think so,” Kidd said with a wink.

“He’s gorgeous.”

“Don’t be jealous, Diane,” Kidd replied, taking out his key card for the door. “You’re my one true love, you know that.”

“Oh, stop that, you’ll make me blush!”

Kidd pushed through the door and headed back towards the Incident Room. DC Powell and DC Ravel were out, DC Campbell saying through a mouthful of food that they had nipped out to get lunch.

Has he done anything other than eat today? Kidd thought as he passed Campbell’s desk and headed to where DS Sanchez was perched, her phone in one hand, a disposable cup of coffee in the other.

“Good lunch?” she said, wiggling her eyebrows at him.

“I’ve had better.”

The playfulness in her face suddenly fell off a cliff and she eyed him carefully. “Why? What happened?”

“Oh, it was nothing with John,” Kidd replied, quickly telling her that he’d seen Greg with another woman at the restaurant.

“So you confronted him?”

“Gave him a bit of a bollocking, yeah,” Kidd said. “Couldn’t help myself. Would have decked him if I didn’t have somewhere else to be.”

“Ben!”

“What?”

“What did he say?” Zoe asked.

“He’s breaking it off with her,” he replied. “And we’re not telling Liz.”

DS Sanchez sighed. “And why are we not telling Liz?”

“Because I’m not about to be responsible for their family breaking up,” Kidd said. “If he wants to tell her, that’s his choice, but I’m not going to be the one to do it. He said he’s going to break it off with Beth.”

“And you believe him?”

“I have to believe him, Zoe,” Kidd replied flatly. “I don’t want to be the one to do it, so Greg Spencer is going to have to grow a pair and come home to his wife instead of hanging out with some floozy from the office.”

DS Sanchez considered this, taking a slow sip of her coffee. She made the tiniest gasp before she looked back up at Kidd. “You don’t think that’s where he was last night, do you? When he came in late?”

Kidd hadn’t even thought about that. If he had, he might have asked. He sighed and looked at Zoe. “I sincerely hope not, but I think you might be right.” He headed over to his desk and put his things down, the phone now had enough juice and had switched itself on. He took a seat at his desk and opened it up.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Sanchez groaned. “You can’t just—”

“But I am just,” he interrupted. “Look, it wasn’t the right thing to do but once I saw what I saw I couldn’t unsee it.” He tapped through the phone again, finding the website and copying down the URL. He typed it into a browser on his computer and opened it up. It looked just as it had done before, the same white background with grey lettering so it was barely legible. “Do you want to look or not?”

DS Sanchez couldn’t help herself, grabbing a chair and pulling it round to sit next to Kidd. He scrolled down. There had to be hundreds of posts. Some of them were text, some of them were