BooksBarbecue
Back Too Close
Chapters (28)
  1. Cover
  2. Dedication
  3. Epigraph
  4. Prologue
  5. Chapter 1
  6. Chapter 2
  7. Chapter 3
  8. Chapter 4
  9. Chapter 5
  10. Chapter 6
  11. Chapter 7
  12. Chapter 8
  13. Chapter 9
  14. Chapter 10
  15. Chapter 11
  16. Chapter 12
  17. Chapter 13
  18. Chapter 14
  19. Chapter 15
  20. Chapter 16
  21. Chapter 17
  22. Chapter 18
  23. Chapter 19
  24. Chapter 20
  25. Epilogue
  26. Acknowledgements
  27. About the Author
  28. About the Publisher

Another thing was unduly bothering me – and this really is rather pathetic and adolescent. I’d seen photographs on Facebook of all my uni chums at a party to which I hadn’t been invited and I was surprisingly hurt by this; in the dark hours of the night, it plagued me. On top of this, Karl was doing a lot of consulting abroad. He seemed to be away all the time so I was single parenting and trying to cope with my increasingly deteriorating parents. I was getting more and more concerned about their future and what was going to happen with them, and was spending every spare hour I could trying to sort through their house and its endless junk. Josh, now sixteen, seemed to have decided I was a fool – everything I said appeared ridiculous to him and was received with a snort of derision. The school was complaining about his behaviour, and Annie was also in trouble – she’d got into a fight in the playground and had sent one boy to the ER. I seemed to be failing on every front.

I was feeling more and more distant from Ness. Her life had changed now and she was making the most of the weeks without the children. She had a new-found freedom and was frequently off for weekends with her old mates at spas, always trying to get me to come along too, but of course I couldn’t because I was the fort-holder. I felt a little ousted; I was no longer her priority, her life had moved on. I felt isolated and lonely on all fronts, actually. I was losing too many things at once and had woken up that week with the distinct whiff of it – that old tidal wave of misery on the horizon.

‘You’ve got a lot on your plate,’ Dr. Rhys Evans said. ‘It’s not a crime to struggle.’

At that moment Sebo poked her head around the door. ‘Did Mrs. de Cadenet come back in here?’ she asked. Dr. Rhys Evans and I looked at each other and then got up quickly. My mother had gone AWOL; we rushed about the building and eventually found her talking to the greengrocer round the corner about aubergine recipes.

There we have it, Dr. R. So that was the day my mother started knocking back the Floradix for her lack of iron and I started knocking back the Lofepramine for my lack of happiness.

Chapter 10