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

‘Blimey, Ange. You could do this professionally!’

‘I wish,’ replied Angie.

Charley shot her a look, but Angie merely shrugged it off. Charley put the tray on the floor, expertly pushed the optimistic Buster away with her foot, and then sat cross-legged on the floor. Finn immediately reversed his little bottom onto her lap, plonking himself down sure of his welcome, and Charley slid her arms round him for a cuddle. A sudden wave of broodiness swept over her, catching her off-guard, and she couldn’t stop herself from thinking that if Josh were still alive they’d have had kids by now and this would have been her life. She hugged Finn’s busy little body to her.

‘You’re such a squidge-pot!’ she told him, giving him a squeeze, and he giggled.

Angie sat herself down next to them, pulling Eliot onto her lap with one hand, and handing Charley a mug of tea with the other. ‘How’s the job-hunting?’

‘Don’t ask,’ Charley groaned. ‘I haven’t got any qualifications. Apparently, you need a degree to do almost anything these days. I don’t even know anyone with a degree, so why does everyone suddenly need one? It’s ridiculous.’ She rolled her eyes.

Angie flushed slightly pink and tucked her short bob behind her ears.

‘Actually, I’ve got a degree,’ she admitted sheepishly. ‘Only Art,’ she added, catching the deflated look on Charley’s face. ‘And Will’s got a degree, but then he’s a teacher, well, a Headteacher, so he needs one.’

‘Well, that’s different,’ said Charley.

‘And I think Nisha’s got an English degree… or it might be Media? I can’t remember, and of course, Tara’s got an MBA.’

‘Tara’s got an MBA?’ It was the first Charley had heard of it. ‘Is this meant to be helping!?’ she joked.

Angie pulled a face. ‘Sorry.’

Once they’d finished their tea, they went down to the kitchen so Angie could wash her brushes, leaving the boys in their room burying fistfuls of brightly coloured plastic beads in a treasure chest Angie had knocked up out of a cardboard box.

Looking around Angie’s house it was immediately obvious the woman was hugely talented, but Charley hadn’t realised that her mate had actually been to art college and that, presumably, she’d had some sort of artistic career before she’d stopped work to have her children.

‘You wouldn’t really want to give up being a full-time mum, would you?’ Charley asked as Angie plonked the brushes into the sink to soak, and then tried to cram the mugs into the already crowded dishwasher.

Angie sighed. ‘Sometimes. I just feel like I’m missing out. Stuck here at home all day, every day. I envy you lot all working.’

I should be so lucky, thought Charley.

‘It’s just that… oh you know, four years at art college and then years working my way up as a designer, and now I spend my life painting bedrooms and my art box is full of wax crayons, felt-tip pens and finger paints.’

‘But you love being a mum!’

‘I know… it’s just that sometimes it feels like I’ve completely disappeared in piles of dirty laundry, dirty dishes and dirty nappies.’ Then, clearly seeing the concern on Charley’s face, she shrugged carelessly. ‘Ignore me. I’m just tired and hormonal. I love them all to bits, you know I do. And I really wouldn’t want my life to be any other way, obviously, or I wouldn’t be having another baby if I did!’ She laughed. ‘But sometimes, just sometimes, I wish I could be “Angie” for a bit and not just ‘Mum’ all the time.’

Somehow an afternoon at Angie’s wasn’t working its usual magic, and Charley left when Angie went to collect Beth from school. She drove home and let herself into the empty flat feeling lower than ever, overcome with guilt for wasting an entire afternoon when she should have been job-hunting. The mortgage, she reminded herself, was not going to pay itself.

Financially, Charley had nobody to turn to, not even her parents, since she’d burned her bridges when she’d left home, in a sudden breathless rush of romance, to live with Josh less than a month after she’d met him. Her mother had told her she was a fool to move halfway across the country to live with someone she’d only just met on a Club Med holiday.

‘It won’t last. You’ll end up alone and broken-hearted hundreds of miles away from home,’ she had warned Charley.

As it turned out, her mum had been right, though not in the way she’d predicted. After Josh had died, Charley’s mum simply couldn’t understand why Charley had refused to give up the flat in Bristol and move back home to the family pub in Suffolk.

‘There’s nothing to stay for,’ her mother had maintained and, when Charley had still refused to go home, her mother had taken it personally, baffled and hurt by her daughter’s rejection of the comfort and care she wanted to give her.

‘You can’t mope around playing the grieving widow forever,’ she’d snapped, and Charley had reeled, astonished by the cruelty of the remark.

Losing Josh had shaken the tectonic plates of her life so savagely that Charley had desperately clung to anything that still connected her to him. She couldn’t bear to pack away her life with Josh into cardboard boxes and abandon their flat, the home he’d lived and laughed in, the sofa they’d sprawled on together, the rooms they’d made love in. It would have meant surrendering all her hopes and dreams, discarding them as if they, and Josh, had never existed, but she couldn’t get her mum to understand. Pam had understood, of course, only too deeply, which had led Charley to turn to her instead, and her relationship with her own mother had suffered as a result – collateral damage in the fallout from grief. Charley had never been that close to her own mother in any event. The two had rarely seen eye-to-eye and had often clashed, especially once Charley had grown up. She did miss her dad, though, but he was