Between Sisters Read Online Free PDF

the women on the fifth floor had kids and really needed a wife to keep the show on the road. Bedroom antics were way down the list.
    ‘I wouldn’t be into yer man from the Stones,’ said Gladys, senior supervisor from the insurance company, as if Mick Jagger was waiting outside for her command to have him washed and sent to her tent. ‘The mouth on him.’ She shuddered. ‘Now, that nice Michael Bublé, if he was around … Well, you wouldn’t kick him out of bed for getting crumbs on the sheets, would you?’
    Everyone laughed, breaking the tension.
    But Cassie didn’t laugh. Instead, she thought of how long it was since she and Shay had made love. True, she was perpetually too tired for sex. Arguing with the girls gave her tension headaches too, but it was months now and Shay hadn’t made a single move to make love to her. She tried to remember the dates but couldn’t, yet she realised that it was a long time since Shay had reached out in the bed towards the wall of her back, stroking, telling her he wanted her.
    She put down the magic concealer pen, no longer really caring about how she looked. Was her husband going off her? Had he gone off her? The ripple of anxiety over abandonment she’d never truly been able to shake began to hit earthquake status.
    ‘Cassie.’ A voice interrupted this terrible thought. ‘Do you have a moment?’
    It was Karen, a junior in Cassie’s department: a sweet girl in her twenties who was going out with the boyfriend from hell.
    Desperate to talk, Karen just blurted it out: ‘I told him what I was thinking and he walked out. Just walked out, Cassie. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I thought we’d talk about our relationship but he didn’t. He got his stuff, said I was too high-maintenance with my talk about our plans for the future, and then he went. My brother’s wedding is next weekend and we were going together, but now I’ll be there on my own.’ Karen’s crying sounding like howling. ‘Cassie, what do I do?’
    Cassie managed to put an arm around Karen and let her howl.
    As ever, it was a supreme irony that Karen had come to her for help. People had been coming to Cassie for help and support all her life. People told her things. She didn’t know why.
    ‘You have an open face; we have open faces,’ Coco had said years before. ‘We look like we can keep secrets and that we don’t judge.’
    Coco had been born looking as if she was interested in everyone, with sparkling brown eyes that could turn almost black with emotion and feeling, and made the person talking to her feel as if nobody else on the planet existed but them and their problems. She exuded warmth, caring and kindness. And she didn’t mind.
    Cassie had been born looking as if she was the woman who could sort out every problem, starting with the Middle East. And she did mind.
    Tell me and I will fix it was the unspoken message on her face, and although Cassie had spent hours looking at herself in the mirror trying to figure out why people felt this about her, she was at a loss. She only saw a woman with dark eyes, winged brows, those darn freckles and a too-wide mouth that possibly smiled too much because smiling was safer, she’d learned over the years. Smiling stopped people asking ‘are you all right?’
    Since she’d been seven, though, she’d understood pain. Was that the secret? Did people see pain in her eyes and think she’ll understand ?
    Either way, Cassie fervently wished she hadn’t been born with this look on her face. She knew the secrets of half the people in her office, many of the mothers in the girls’ school and, when Coco was busy, her friends turned to Cassie for advice. It was exhausting.
    Grammy Pearl had the same gift. People loved to talk to Grammy and total strangers flung themselves at her at parties, telling her their life stories while searching for tissues in their pockets or handbags.
    Weird how genetics worked. They’d got this unasked-for gift from