Read Online High Tide by Veronica Henry - Free Book Online Page A

If you need more, come back and see me.’
    ‘Thank you.’ It was worrying, thought Kate, how relieved she was. Maybe that was a sign of dependence?
    Who was she kidding? Of course she was dependent. She couldn’t remember her last night’s sleep without them. She took them as a matter of course.
    Dr Webster looked at her, stern but concerned.
    ‘I really recommend you find some way of coming to terms with your sleep problems without resorting to medication. Lifestyle, diet, exercise – these can all be a cause but they can also help. Relaxation. Yoga—’
    Kate’s phone chirruped in her bag. There must be a stronger signal here at the surgery, and all her messages were getting through at once. She resisted the urge to burrow in her bag and check them immediately.
    ‘Sorry,’ she apologised.
    Dr Webster smiled.
    ‘Being a slave to your phone doesn’t help. I give myself a rule not to check mine after six p.m. I shut it in a drawer when I get home.’
    Kate tried not to laugh at the suggestion. She might as well have said don’t breathe after six p.m. That was when the really important messages started to come through. From drunken clients or bolshy chefs or flaky performers.
    ‘Try to find a doctor who will help you with your dependence. Rather than enabling it.’
    Easier said than done, thought Kate. She felt sorry that she wasn’t going to be here longer. She knew Dr Webster wouldn’t indulge her dependence for any longer than was necessary.
    ‘I’ll deal with it as soon as I get back.’
    Doctor Webster handed over the prescription. ‘I hope the next few days go as well as can be expected.’
    Kate almost snatched it out of her hand. She’d have just enough time to go and fill it at the chemist before getting home, changing and making it to the church.

    Kate filled her prescription at the chemist halfway down the high street, the same one where she had bought her first lipstick, countless Alka-Seltzers after a heavy night at the Neptune, and the pregnancy test for Debbie when she’d had a scare. A chemist, she thought, held so many secrets, as her tablets were handed to her in a white paper bag.
    She hated herself for the relief she felt.
    Then she hurried home.
    She’d hung her funeral outfit up the night before to get rid of the creases. A black Prada dress and courts. A pair of sheer black tights. A three-strand pearl necklace – fake, but expensive. She sighed as she looked at the clothes on the hanger. She would look ridiculous. Totally overdressed. It wasn’t as if she needed to impress anyone. This wasn’t Manhattan, where to be anything other than immaculate was a hanging offence. This outfit was totally inappropriate. She would look as if she thought she was better than everyone else. Her mum’s friends would be turning up in whatever they happened to be wearing that day. Pennfleet didn’t stand on ceremony.
    Nothing else she’d brought with her seemed suitable.
    And so she opened her wardrobe. It smelled of the lavender-stuffed hangers her mum had given her one Christmas. And the Dewberry Body Shop scent Kate used to wear. She breathed in her youth: so sweet. It was comforting.
    She pawed through the remaining clothes: baggy jumpers, bright cotton skirts, a denim jacket, a chunky Arran cardigan with a hood that she used to wear all winter. At the back was her favourite dress, the one she had worn to death since she’d bought it with the money her parents had given her for her eighteenth, on a shopping trip to Exeter. It was dark-green velvet, with tight sleeves and covered buttons all down the front and a fishtail skirt. She’d thought she was the bee’s knees in it.
    The dress still fitted. Like a dream. She slipped on a pair of flat black suede pumps with it. With her hair down, and a pair of earrings she found in her dressing-table drawer, she looked more like the girl who had left Pennfleet all those years ago.
    This was the girl her mother would want her to be. At least for