Dearest Rose Read Online Free PDF Page A

you don’t mind a few boys’ things, do you, madam?’
    ‘Yes, actually, I do. I don’t like boys,’ Maddie told her, not that Jenny heard her as she bustled off, already intent on her mission.
    As a result, Rose, who after more than a decade of marriage to a GP, had become accustomed to wearing nice skirts, sensible tops, always dresses and never trousers, found herself sporting a pair of hipster jeans with a rip at the knee, jeans that would have exposed the lower half of her stomach if she had not managed to find a longish black T-shirt to cover it, one with a slash neck that sloped off one shoulder. Rose wasn’t old – she was only thirty-one – and she knew plenty of women of around her age who dressed like Haleigh obviously did and didn’t give it a second thought. And she knew some – for example her friend Shona – who dressed like a fifteen-year-old with questionable morals.
    Rose had always been conservative though, at least since she stopped being simply Rose and started being a wife, not long after her eighteenth birthday. Richard was always very insistent that she should take care not to attract the wrong sort of attention, telling her that as his wife she had a certain standing in the community, that there would be certain expectations. And Rose, whose teenage years had been chaotic and confusing, had been not only happy, but grateful to comply. Marrying Richard had been like stepping out of the glaring heat into a deep cool pool of calm. Rose didn’t even own a pair of jeans, let alone hipster ones, and it came as quite a shock to her to find that unless she was completely delusional – which, considering where she was and why, was entirely possible – nineteen-year-old Haleigh’s clothes rather suited her.
    Sweeping her long, smooth curtain of hair over one shoulder, Rose turned round to find Maddie on the bed regarding her, clearly not entirely satisfied with the boy’s jeans that she had been given, but somewhat mollified by a very tiny, pink Las Vegas T-shirt that Rose had found in the pile of Haleigh’s clothes. On Haleigh the skimpy article surely had to reveal more than was appropriate, but on Maddie it came to just above her knees and had just enough glitter on it to make the boy’s jeans bearable. As soon as she had her bearings she’d find the nearest town and buy them some more clothes, other than the few bits of underwear she’d managed to scoop up under her arm as they left, but for now these hand-me-downs would have to do.
    ‘What do you think?’ Rose asked her, smiling, smoothing the T-shirt down over her slender hips. Maddie looked thoughtful.
    ‘Daddy wouldn’t like it,’ she said.
    ‘No, I know.’ Rose turned back to the mirror, pulling at the neck until both of her shoulders were covered, if only briefly. ‘But Daddy’s not here.’
    ‘Mummy?’ Rose met her daughter’s eyes in the reflection. ‘Does Daddy still like me?’
    Biting her lip, Rose swirled to engulf Maddie in a hug that the child instinctively resisted, her body tensing, just as it always did when anyone touched her.
    ‘Of course he likes you. He loves you, darling,’ Rose told her, kissing Maddie’s screwed-up face. ‘You’re the apple of his eye, you know that.’
    ‘I don’t think I do,’ Maddie said. ‘Why would anyone want an apple in their eye? It would hurt.’
    ‘What I mean is, whatever has happened between Daddy and me, it’s not to do with you. It’s not because of you. Daddy loves you.’
    Maddie turned her face from Rose, her lips pressed together in a thin pale line. It was clear that she found it hard to reconcile what she’d witnessed, what had happened, with Rose’s version of events, and Rose had no idea how to fix that, only that she was certain she didn’t want Maddie to blame herself.
    ‘He didn’t act like it, did he, though?’ Maddie said. ‘Before … when … and when we got in the car and came here. He was very, very angry.’
    ‘I know,’ Rose said,