Read Online Every Vow You Break by Julia Crouch - Free Book Online Page B

house to Marcus, and nothing would fall apart if he had to go away for work. She applied for the job and got it, despite feeling she was somehow bluffing her way in.
    And, she wondered as she arranged Marcus’s clothes on the shelf above Jack’s things, where had that got her? Not very far.
    She hung up his one good shirt, a Paul Smith number she had bought him the previous Christmas. It was beautiful: blue with tiny pink flowers on it. But she couldn’t look at it without remembering how annoyed he had been at how much he thought she had spent on it. His estimate, as it happened, was well below the mark.
    It had taken her one week to realise that in working for the council she had dug herself into a graveyard of ambition. Her office was full of people who liked an easy life: any display of spark was met with mistrust. And she had no respect whatsoever for her team leader, a vacillating man in his early forties who didn’t have it in him to make a single decision.
    But she stuck with it because it fitted her life. And when Jack – as Marcus said, her happy accident – came along, the council’s maternity policies proved to be munificent. When he was six months old, she secured a place in the subsidised workplace nursery and returned to work. It all seemed so effortless that her new plan of giving up her tenured, risen-through-the-pay scales status and going back to freelancing looked bonkers.
    But something had to change. She was bored. So bored she sometimes felt like screaming. When she first married Marcus, she had imagined she would lead a life of bohemian glamour. Now she found herself a local government employee with a pension plan and a weekly time sheet.
    She knew that, older and wiser, she could now make a business work. In a few years’ time she would have her own office – a modern affair, she imagined, of taut steel wire banisters and pale oak – and two or three employees working on contracts with those mysterious blue chip companies that paid so well.
    The deal she had struck with herself after the abortion was that if there were not going to be any more babies, there would be a career. If her marriage was going to survive after all these years, she had to make herself happy again.
    She sat down on the squeaky bed and finally got her own few things out of the suitcase. What had she been thinking when she packed? Besides her running gear and the clothes she had worn on the journey, she had one pair of olive linen trousers, a green sleeveless top, two T-shirts, an inky tunic, a black jersey Boden thing and a pink floral dress she had bought years ago in a slim phase and hoped still fitted her. There were not enough clothes there, not really for a whole summer.
    Wondering what she was going to wear to the barbecue, she eyed the pink dress. Before she let herself have a chance to think about it, she had peeled off her clothes and slipped it over her head. It was low cut, with a slightly structured front section that laced up like a corset. Smoothing down the front, she looked at herself in the worn, full-length mirror someone had propped up against the wall thinking, no doubt, that no actor’s bedroom is complete without one.
    She was pleased to see that the dress fitted. Her breasts were still quite large from her recent pregnancy, giving her something of a cleavage. She turned for a side view, breathing in as much as she thought she could manage for the whole evening. It wasn’t too bad. She decided that this dress would be her outfit for the night, worn with her denim jacket and her black pashmina.
    She was still looking at herself when she heard the staircase rumble under Marcus’s heavy step.
    ‘So the big ’uns have taken the little ’un off to the playground, or something,’ he said.
    ‘Great.’
    ‘Can we get the suitcases off the bed?’ he said. ‘I’ve got my lines to do and there’s nowhere else for me to go.’
    Lara thought of the big, empty house, about how many perfect