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

easy-going and tolerant to the point of being conflict-averse and chose not to stand up to her mum. It hadn’t been intentional, but inevitably she’d drifted away from her family.

Back at her flat, sitting hunched over her computer at the kitchen table, Charley told herself to be more realistic and to stop chasing jobs she wasn’t qualified for, and to apply for something more modest and attainable, such as a bar job. She hadn’t worked behind a bar for years, but her parents owned a pub and she’d grown up in one, which had to count for something, surely. It wasn’t exactly a dazzlingly exciting prospect – in fact it was pretty grim, really – but it looked to be the best she could do.

Chapter Four

‘You cannot possibly take a bar job. No. NO!’ Tara yelled down the phone at Charley. ‘You have way more to offer than that. I’m coming round. This evening.’ She’d rung off before Charley could protest, but not before her heart had begun to sink. She knew her mate was only trying to help, but Tara in full flood was… forceful. And in all honesty, Charley wasn’t feeling robust enough to stand up to her; there was every danger she’d end up being persuaded, or rather browbeaten, into doing something she’d regret.

Tara arrived at around half eight that evening, after she’d put Monnie to bed. She strode into the living room, and, pausing only to hand Charley a box of hazelnut chocolate pralines, ordered her to sit on the sofa whilst she propped up a pop-up flip chart on the coffee table and took out four different coloured marker pens from her bag.

‘You,’ she asserted, pointing an accusing finger at Charley, ‘are not going to waste the rest of your life working in a sodding bar.’

Charley bit her lip and tactfully decided not to remind Tara that her parents had spent their entire working lives doing just that.

‘You have a chunk of redundancy money and some savings. This is your chance to do whatever you want in life. Come on, Charley! This is your big chance!’ Tara efficiently peeled back the cover page of the flip-chart pad to reveal a blank sheet of paper.

‘Did you nick that from work?’ Charley asked dryly.

‘Yes. And don’t change the subject.’ Taking up the red pen, Tara wrote: WHAT I WANT TO DO in large letters. Then she turned to eyeball Charley. ‘Right, Charley Taylor, what do you actually want to do for a living?’

‘I don’t know!’ wailed Charley, half melodramatically, half in earnest.

‘Well, do you want to carry on doing admin work?’

The unchecked grimace which crossed Charley’s face said it all. Spending the rest of her life in admin felt more like a life sentence than a career choice. The problem was she couldn’t envisage herself doing something else because she simply didn’t have any idea what that ‘something else’ might be.

‘We can put anything you like up here,’ said Tara. ‘You don’t have to actually do it… We can just pretend it’s a game if that makes it easier…’

It didn’t. Charley’s mind was as blank as the sheet of paper, and worse, under Tara’s scrutiny, small flutterings of panic began to jitter away in her stomach, making it harder for her to think clearly.

Tara carried on, with evidently increasing desperation. ‘Well, what did you always want to be… when you were little?’ she prompted. ‘Or before you met Josh?’

Before I met Josh? Charley couldn’t even remember there being a ‘before I met Josh’. Not very long after Josh had died, some people, thoughtless people who lacked empathy and imagination, had hurt Charley, really hurt her, by telling her she had grieved for long enough and that she should go back to work and take her mind off things, and then later, improbably, incredibly, they’d told her she should move on and find someone else. How dared they? Josh wasn’t just the love of her life, he was her life. Losing him had cleaved her life in two: the wonderful part, full of fun and love and laughter, labelled ‘After I met Josh’, and the other part labelled ‘After Josh died’, which was where she lived now. The part labelled ‘Before I met Josh’ simply wasn’t on Charley’s life calendar. Maybe she had once had ambitions and dreams, but life had swept them aside. She shrugged helplessly at Tara and said, ‘I don’t know. Nothing, really. Sorry—’ she finished, feeling even more of a failure.

But Tara wasn’t giving up that easily. After a brief pause for thought, she changed tack. ‘Okay. Let’s look at this differently.’

She crossed out WHAT I WANT TO DO and wrote WHAT I LIKE DOING, then she folded her arms and looked at Charley. ‘Well?’

‘Knitting, reading, watching quiz programmes, being with mates…’ reeled off Charley robotically, wondering what the point of all this was.

Tara rolled her eyes and tried again. ‘What are you most looking forward to this year?’

Charley ran through the year ahead in her mind’s eye… not her birthday, she still missed Josh too much, and she wasn’t going on holiday because didn’t have anyone to go with, and she wouldn’t go on a singles holiday if you paid her. She frowned… and then suddenly, it was obvious. ‘Oh, the Prosecco Night!’

‘The Prosecco Night?’

‘Yeah. Not just the fundraiser itself, but setting it all up, sending out the invitations, finding all the little Prosecco goodies to sell, getting in the fizz and the nibbles, not to mention totting up the cash at the end of the night!’

Tara nodded in agreement. ‘Not a bad thing to look forward to at all!’

People grieve differently, as Charley had discovered. She couldn’t bring herself to even light a candle on a cupcake to mark Josh’s birthday, but Tara was different, she celebrated her mum’s birthday every year with great gusto, affection… and Prosecco!

One bright autumn afternoon a few months after Kim had died, Charley and Tara had gone to Clifton Downs so that Monnie could ride