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Back Broken Hearts Save as PDF
Chapters (79)
  1. Title Page
  2. Copyright
  3. Dedication
  4. Prologue
  5. PART ONEEdinburgh November 2008
  6. Chapter One
  7. Chapter Two
  8. Chapter Three
  9. Chapter Four
  10. Chapter Five
  11. Chapter Six
  12. Chapter Seven
  13. Chapter Eight
  14. Chapter Nine
  15. Chapter Ten
  16. Chapter Eleven
  17. Chapter Twelve
  18. Chapter Thirteen
  19. Chapter Fourteen
  20. Chapter Fifteen
  21. Chapter Sixteen
  22. Chapter Seventeen
  23. PART TWOLondon November 1988
  24. Chapter Eighteen
  25. Chapter Nineteen
  26. Chapter Twenty
  27. Chapter Twenty-One
  28. Chapter Twenty-Two
  29. Chapter Twenty-Three
  30. Chapter Twenty-Four
  31. Chapter Twenty-Five
  32. Chapter Twenty-Six
  33. Chapter Twenty-Seven
  34. Chapter Twenty-Eight
  35. Chapter Twenty-Nine
  36. Chapter Thirty
  37. Chapter Thirty-One
  38. Chapter Thirty-Two
  39. Chapter Thirty-Three
  40. Chapter Thirty-Four
  41. Chapter Thirty-Five
  42. PART THREEEdinburgh November 2008
  43. Chapter Thirty-Six
  44. Chapter Thirty-Seven
  45. Chapter Thirty-Eight
  46. Chapter Thirty-Nine
  47. Chapter Forty
  48. Chapter Forty-One
  49. Chapter Forty-Two
  50. Chapter Forty-Three
  51. Chapter Forty-Four
  52. Chapter Forty-Five
  53. Chapter Forty-Six
  54. Chapter Forty-Seven
  55. Chapter Forty-Eight
  56. Chapter Forty-Nine
  57. Chapter Fifty
  58. Chapter Fifty-One
  59. Chapter Fifty-Two
  60. Chapter Fifty-Three
  61. Chapter Fifty-Four
  62. Chapter Fifty-Five
  63. Chapter Fifty-Six
  64. Chapter Fifty-Seven
  65. Chapter Fifty-Eight
  66. Chapter Fifty-Nine
  67. Chapter Sixty
  68. Chapter Sixty-One
  69. Chapter Sixty-Two
  70. Chapter Sixty-Three
  71. Chapter Sixty-Four
  72. Chapter Sixty-Five
  73. Chapter Sixty-Six
  74. Chapter Sixty-Seven
  75. Epilogue
  76. Acknowledgements
  77. About the Author
  78. By the Same Author
  79. About the Publisher

Kailash keeps telling me that I need to act more like a lady–usually I tell her to piss off (which seems to highlight her point), but sometimes I see what’s she’s getting at. What went on between me and Joe when we first got back to the flat stays between me and Joe. Afterwards? Well, that’s a different matter.

By the time I’d managed to drag myself out of bed, he was snoring softly and the first rays of morning were creeping in through the wooden blinds of my bedroom windows. I crept through to the kitchen, pulling his T-shirt over my head as I walked, smelling everything I liked about him on it. I didn’t know whether to wake my flatmate Louisa up as I guessed she’d probably been listening all night anyway–maybe I should just get the postmortem over and done with. I decided against it. I wanted to keep this to myself, even exclude Joe, just for a little while longer.

When I was with him, when it was just the two of us, everything seemed so right, but as soon as I started thinking about things, I went down the road that had caused us to split up more times than I could count. Where could this possibly lead? I wasn’t the type for settling down. I wasn’t maternal. It would be obvious to anyone who knew the tiniest part of my life history that what I had come from was never going to make me average wife-and-mother material, but the truth was that I did actually have lots of strong women in my life–they just weren’t enough to convince me that I could do what they had done in their own ways.

My mother, Mary McLennan, had been my rock. I had been through the time of worrying whether I was being horrible to Kailash by still thinking of Mary as my ‘real’ mother, but Mary had done everything for me and I missed her more and more as I got older. Kailash? She had given birth to me, and she had saved my life, but she was hardly the perfect Mum. How much of that was my fault, I don’t know. Malcolm had been right when he had said that she would do anything for me, but I still reacted against that. What sort of mother could I possibly be when my own background was so fucked up?