Ellie's Return Read Online Free PDF

and security of her tiny rat-like dogs.
    Ellie had thought no more of the flight
until the evening that Alfonse had humiliated her, not so much because she
wanted to get away from him but because of the fact that whenever things went
wrong in her life since she had parted from Tom, he was the first thing she
always thought of. It was not so much that Ellie led a complicated life, she
was a freelance product manager and she had taken the job in Venice in as almost
an off-hand way as she had booked the flight back to England, which is to say
it was an opportunity that was just there at that moment and when she asked
herself why not, there was no reason why not. The relationship with Tom had recently
ended, and so was the contract she had been working on for the two years that
she was with him, so this came as a part of a natural need to move on and she
had seized it. She had considered waiting around indefinitely to see if Tom
wanted to explain his strange actions but she decided that if he wanted to find
her enough he could. He had not, in the event, and as unhappy as that made her,
at least changing everything else gave her some sense of balance.
    The unfortunate thing was that she could
not help comparing every man she ever met, to Tom. If she could stop doing that
they might stand a chance, but all in all they would still compare unfavourably.
It wasn’t that all the men she met were of a type, they were not, but there was
nothing there that compared with what she had before.   In the great scheme of things, Alfonse
was the latest in a long line of failed first dates, very short-term
relationships and general disappointments that had simply managed her
expectations of the end of the line. When he had treated her so badly that
night she realised that it was because she had tolerated that kind of thing from
him for long. She had tolerated it because she did not care for him enough one
way or another rather than because she was a victim, but whether or not she
thought of herself as a victim, the one thing she did not doubt was that she
could do a lot better. She knew that because she had done better, and she had
not allowed Tom’s rejection of her to colour her view of him or of herself, she
had not tried to hate him because she could not, and she did not take his rejection
to heart because he had always loved that she valued herself, and to reject
that now would be to diminish herself. She would miss Alfonse as a foot
massager, but doubted she would remember anything else about him in three years
whereas Tom, after three years, was still ingrained in her soul.
    Only the previous week when she was
pondering that fact, did she decide that if she were to move on with her life
she would need to discover what it was that had caused them to end so suddenly.
Tom had changed over a matter of weeks from someone who was absolutely devoted
to her to someone who could not bear to look at her, but he never told her why,
in fact they hardly saw each other again after he started to change so there
was little time ever to discover what his problem might be and eventually he
simply failed to answer the phone, or reply to her emails or communicate in any
way, to the point where she was hurt, but also angry enough to leave until he
came to his senses. She just did not think it would be this long.
    If anybody knew what was wrong it would be
Lola. She had known Lola and Claudia since their early university days. She had
always felt like the link between the girls but she was sure they must still be
friends now without her so it would be good to go back and see them. Lola was
always so close with her and Tom; of all the girls she had always been the more
outgoing and adventurous one. Even Ellie would admit that she herself was
something of a late bloomer, which might be a nice way of saying slow developer,
since she did wonder sometimes at her own naiveté, but she was fortunate in
that Lola had always been there to put her right and set an