Read Online Dark Mirrors by Siobhain Bunni - Free Book Online Page B

have been quite pragmatic: put up and shut up. Looking at the chair opposite, she imagined him sitting there, in his woolly cardigan with the brown cross-hatch buttons, his legs crossed, while rhythmically he puffed on his pipe, pausing every now and then to let a billow of smoke escape to the ceiling and catch his breath, ready for more. Scrutinising her, calculating, through the slits of his lids, squinted to avoid the sweet-smelling haze, he would give her his opinion.
    “ Now you listen here to me, Esmée Jane Gill, ” she could hear him say.
    For a third time that day her phone rang, disturbing the intimacy of her fictitious moment and as her father’s image melted away she answered it without saying hello.
    His deeply resonant tone sounded in her ear after a short pinched silence.
    “Esmée? It’s Tom.”
    “I know,” she replied curtly. “I recognised your number.”
    “How are you doing?” he asked, the sympathy in his tone telling her he knew her situation.
    “I take it you’ve spoken to Mum?”
    “Yep.”
    “Mad, isn’t it?” Esmée mocked pitifully, expecting no compassion from her estranged brother.
    “Yep.”
    “Is that all you have to say? ‘Yep’?” she quizzed, sitting out the silence before his monosyllabic response echoed.
    “Yep.”
    She couldn’t help laughing, genuinely this time, feeling the tension dissipate a little.
    “I’ve booked a flight home,” he said. “I’m coming in on the six o’clock flight on Friday. We should talk.”
    “Okay,” she replied, taking the extended olive branch offered, surprised by his sense of urgency but pleased that he thought enough of her to come home. “I’ll pick you up. Text me before you take off.”
    “See you then, and Esmée . . .”
    “Yeah?”
    “Hang in there.”
    Despite herself a warm feeling of appreciation came over her as she put down the phone. Her brother was an asshole but he was still her brother. She’d deal with him face to face. Finishing the last of her coffee, she wondered what her state in life would be on Friday: alone, single, or forever married?
    Once again, her phone rang. It was Penny, again, and as before she rejected it.
    She took her mug into the kitchen, rinsed it and left it on the polished stainless-steel drainer. Then, resting her bum against the counter top, she moved her thumbs with great speed and dexterity around the small key pad to compose a text to her obviously and understandably concerned sisters: Sorry for silence. Man trouble. Don’t want to explain twice. Call to 6 Brook Lane this evening at 6. Es
    It took all of thirty seconds for each to respond with a simple OK.

    * * *

    That afternoon after school, as promised, Matthew’s buddies came over to play havoc in the new house. Esmée had told their mothers that morning outside the classroom that she would pick them up after school and drop them home to their respective houses at about five. Each offered to collect her son but Esmée insisted that she would deliver them home, not wanting to have to explain to them, of all people, why she was living in a different house. They’d hear all the details in good time: the schoolyard was alive with busy gossips expertly masquerading as bored housewives eager to share the latest titbits of information. It was there that she found out about the apparently romantic meal Philip had shared with a woman who was definitely not his wife. Susan Morecombe had delighted in complimenting his companion’s sleek dark hair and tall slender figure, but Esmée, anxious not to be made a fool of, reversed the role to inform her informer that Philip’s so-called date was, in fact, his sister home from Arizona. The memory of Susan’s face, a long bony face framed with limp hair, complicated by a mouth full of forwardly aligned teeth that only a horse could be proud of, remained with her still. God knows what Susan saw Philip do with his ‘sister’ that night to make her cheeks turn red so visibly! If Philip