Read Online My Husband's Wives by Faith Hogan - Free Book Online Page B

you leave here, not without making sure that you’d be all right; you were obviously so upset when you arrived.’
    â€˜I must have been if I came into the wrong surgery.’ Annalise found herself laughing, an unexpected outcome for the day.
    â€˜So, at least you’re smiling.’ He got up to show her out. ‘Cosmetic Surgery is on the next floor, but really, my advice is for you to go home and get over this disappointment.’ He handed her the slip of paper he’d been writing on the desk. Outside in the waiting room, two women sat beneath a giant oil painting of a serene lake in the midday sun. Annalise wondered about Grace Kennedy and what kind of a woman it took to captivate a man like Paul Starr. She knew men like him were way out of her league – they’d go for the smart girls, the talented girls, the successful girls. At the lift, she unfolded the piece of paper he had handed her. It contained only two words:
Good luck
and then his phone number beneath.
    Â 
2016
    Twenty-six years of age, and she had a grey rib. Annalise Connolly couldn’t figure why these things always happened to her. These days, life happened to Annalise, nothing she could do about it. That was half the problem though, wasn’t it? That and the fact that she felt fat and manky and trapped! There, she said it. She peered closer into her bathroom mirror. It wasn’t good. She was morphing into someone unrecognizable. She was wearing a scrunchy, for heaven’s sake. Not a good scrunchy either; not one like Ralph Lauren featured in his Spring/Summer New York collection, where the models had their hair sculpted – yes, actually sculpted. God, Annalise thought to herself, I’d love that. There were probably livelier looking corpses up in Glasnevin cemetery. Paul had said it, at the time; lime green was not a good colour for a north facing en-suite. She should have listened to him; he was never wrong. Paul. They were, she knew, an unlikely pair. A Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta Jones – only they were
both
ancient.
    â€˜Come on you guys,’ she yelled down the corridor at Jerome and Dylan. Two children, four years; how had that happened? ‘Dylan, take the saucepan off your head,’ she said absently as she walked past the melee that permanently covered her kitchen floor. ‘Homes are for living in,’ she had told Paul all the time. Anyway, she’d much rather spend time with the boys than all day cleaning as if she were some unfortunate Eastern European woman. The saucepan was stuck. She tugged it as hard as she could, but there was no moving it. Madeline would know what to do about this.
    Madeline Connolly was still a young woman – early fifties, although she’d pass for skimming along the edge of her mid-forties. She was the polar opposite of her daughter. A qualified accountant, she wore her auburn hair neat, her clothes sharp, and offered her advice wisely and sparingly. She gave up work when Adrian was born, tried for baby number two and eventually conceded that it wasn’t going to happen. Then, the adoption board made contact. They had a little girl, three years old, pretty as a picture, birth mother had died of a heroin overdose, father unknown. Her parents had been honest with her from day one, but they’d loved her as much, sometimes, she wondered, if not more, than her bookish brother. Adrian lived in the Emirates now, a successful engineer. She had at least managed to pip him to the reproduction post. Maybe, she thought, it was the only thing she’d managed to do well.
    â€˜You have to come over, Madeline.’ She rang out of desperation. Her mother wasn’t due to visit for two more days, but… she couldn’t ring Paul. True, he would sort everything out, but he made her feel as if she was hopeless. Not that he would say anything to make her feel bad; quite the opposite, it seemed he loved her even more when she was