Read Online Too Close For Comfort by Eleanor Moran - Free Book Online

recognise him. His face was torn apart, savage and otherworldly, a million miles from the meek-looking man who had shepherded Saffron towards her classroom the other
day. I quickly turned back, but the image of his ravaged expression felt like it was stamped on my retinas. I hoped there was someone there to hold his hand but I couldn’t allow myself to
keep looking back at him like a curtain-twitching old lady.
    Joshua was crossing to the pulpit now. Kimberley slid her cat-like eyes towards Helena, quick and sly, the message one that I couldn’t decode. But then . . . I saw him
before he saw me, stranded as I was on the end of the pew with a perfect view of the aisle. My heart pounded in my chest, my whole body straining for an escape route. How could Lysette have failed
to share this vital piece of information? I looked at her, her hand in Ged’s, clenching and unclenching, her eyes trained downwards on the order of service. The last thing I wanted was to be
thrown together with the man – he was technically a man now, but to me Jim would always be a boy – who had broken my heart, broken my spirit, when I was too young to protect myself from
him.
    He’d arrived now: I stared at him, a frozen smile hitched across my face, and he grinned back at me like it had been a week, not a couple of decades. His green eyes sparkled the way they
always had, only now they had lines etched into the olivy skin that surrounded them, pads of flesh beneath. I continued with my spiky inventory: his dark hair was greying at the temples, his
well-turned features hollowed out by age. He was short and wiry when we were teenagers, but now he had a cushion of flesh around his midriff. For all of that, he was still handsome: even now, I
knew him well enough to know that he enjoyed that fact. His eyes darted back to me as he reached across to kiss Lysette.
    ‘Hello, sis, sorry I’m late,’ he whispered. ‘Hi, Mia.’
    ‘Hi.’
    Was he evaluating me the way I was evaluating him? Of course he was. I tried not to care about the verdict.
    ‘Thanks for coming,’ gulped Lysette.
    Joshua had arrived at the pulpit. He stood there for a few seconds in silence, his gaze trained on the front row where Max was wedged between two older children who I assumed were his
half-siblings, his eyes glued to his dad. An auburn-haired woman – Lisa, I felt sure – was sitting directly behind them, her hands resting on the dark wood of their pew, proprietary.
Joshua slowly withdrew some pages from the inside pocket of his immaculate charcoal suit.
    ‘It’s impossible to put into words what me and my family are feeling right now, so I’m not going to even attempt it. Instead I’m going to talk about the Sarah we all knew
– the woman who lit up our lives and will be utterly impossible to forget.’
    My eyes unconsciously moved towards the redhead. It seemed almost comical, the idea you’d be left for a younger model and then have to endure sitting through your ex’s love-soaked
eulogy. Another guttural sob wrenched itself out of Mr Grieve. I forced myself to focus, reaching for Lysette’s hand as Joshua continued. It was as much for comfort as it was to comfort her
– I was grateful for her hard squeeze back. She was meant to be giving a reading and I could sense the dread building up inside her. There wasn’t really enough room on the pew now Jim
had arrived, and I was uncomfortably aware of his thigh resting against mine. I wriggled away, but there was nowhere much to wriggle to.
    ‘It’s that fact that gives me a scrap of comfort. The idea that Sarah will never be forgotten. Her spark, her beauty, her . . .’ He looked down at the
typewritten pages that lay on the lectern. ‘Life force. None of those things can be erased from our memories, and that means she’ll always be part of us. She was a wonderful mother to
Max . . .’
    As his words continued, my eyes strayed back to the front rows. There was a man squeezed close