Secrets Read Online Free Page A

sagged, both her face and body. She supposed she was still attractive in most people’s eyes, but in her own she was like an overblown rose, the petals on the point of falling.
    Putting her hands on either side of her face, she pulled the skin back tighter. Instantly her jaw was firmer and the lines around her mouth disappeared, evoking memories of how she had once looked. She had been a head-turner, with her perfect figure, pouting lips, beautiful blonde hair and skin like porcelain, and if she’d made a good marriage to a wealthy man, maybe she’d still look that way now.
    But fate had conspired against her all the way down the line. All the suitable young men went off to war when she was just thirteen, and of the few that came back, most were spoken for, or else damaged the way her father was.
    Thirty wasn’t so very old, but there was no way of changing her life now, any more than there was of arresting her fading beauty.
    She had married Jim in desperation because she was pregnant with Adele. She saw him as a temporary refuge, believing that after the baby was born something better would turn up. But instead she’d landed herself in a trap.
    It was bitter irony that Pamela’s arrival four years later had changed her view of her marriage for a while. The last thing she’d wanted was to be burdened with another child. Yet she had loved her from the first moment she held her in her arms.
    In one of those soppy romances she used to read so avidly as a girl, she ought to have come to love Jim truly too, but that didn’t happen. She just became resigned to being stuck with him. Yet while she could look at Pamela, so much like herself, she still had a trace of optimism there was something good around the next corner.
    But without Pamela there would be nothing. She was back to where she’d started with Adele, the very cause of her blighted life, and Jim of course, a man she couldn’t love or even respect.
    Adele was sitting on her bed trying to darn her only half-decent pair of socks when Rose came into the room.
    Her immediate reaction was to say how nice her mother looked. But she bit it back, afraid it wasn’t appropriate to compliment anyone dressed for a funeral. But black suited her mother, and the way her blonde hair was curling round the little black netted hat was very pretty.
    ‘Is it time to go already?’ Adele asked instead. ‘I was just finishing darning this sock. I’ve only got to put it on.’
    ‘You needn’t bother, you aren’t going,’ her mother replied sharply. ‘Funerals are no place for children.’
    Adele felt a surge of relief. In the two weeks since Pamela died she had thought of the funeral with absolute dread. Pamela had always been scared of graveyards, and Adele knew she’d feel spooked watching as her coffin was lowered into the ground.
    ‘Is there anything you’d like me to do while you and Daddy are gone?’ she asked. She knew there wasn’t to be any kind of tea afterwards, as neither her mother nor father had any relatives coming. But Adele thought it possible they might bring back a few neighbours.
    A slap across her face startled more than hurt her. ‘What did I say?’ she asked in puzzlement.
    ‘You don’t bloody well care, do you?’ Rose shouted. ‘You little bitch!’
    ‘I do care. I loved her just as much as you,’ Adele retorted indignantly, and began to cry.
    ‘No one loved her like I did.’ Her mother pushed her face right up to Adele’s and her eyes were as icy as the weather outside. ‘No one! I wish to God it was you who was killed. You’ve been a thorn in my side since the moment you were born.’
    Adele could only think her mother must have gone mad to say such a terrible thing. Yet however scared she felt, she couldn’t let it pass without fighting back. ‘So why have me then?’ she retorted.
    ‘God knows I tried hard enough to get rid of you,’ her mother snarled, her lips curling back like a dog’s about to bite. ‘I should’ve left