Fire After Dark Read Online Free PDF Page A

dark hair, the amazing lace mini-dress she’s wearing.
    Tracing my finger around the girl’s face, I realise that I know this woman. I glance up to the framed photographs that cover a nearby side table. Yes, it’s unmistakeable. This is Celia herself, a modelling shot taken in the earliest days of her career. I turn the other pages quickly: there are three more shots of Celia, each with that delicate air alongside the high-fashion look. In one, her dark locks have been cut to a close crop, a gamine style that makes her look even younger.
    That’s weird, I think, puzzled. I always imagined Celia as a strong woman but in these photos she looks so . . . not exactly weak . . . Fragile, I guess. As though life has already dealt her a blow. As though it’s a big bad world out there, and she’s facing it alone.
    But she came back from it, didn’t she? Other photographs around show Celia at varying stages of her life and as she moves through it, that vulnerability seems a little less evident. The Celia, glowing and laughing in her thirties, is definitely stronger, more confident, more prepared to take on the world. She’s sophisticated and knowing in her forties, glamorous and experienced in her fifties in a world before Botox and fillers when a woman’s age showed whether she liked it or not. And age looks good on Celia.
    Maybe she just realised that the blows will always come. It’s how you deal with them, how you get up again and carry on.
    Just then, the silence is shattered by a shrill ring and I jump with a gasp, before realising it’s my phone going off. When I answer, my parents are on the line, wanting to hear how I am and what I’ve been up to.
    ‘I’m fine, Mum, really. The flat is gorgeous. I’ve had a lovely day, it couldn’t be better.’
    ‘Are you eating properly?’ my mother asks anxiously.
    ‘Of course.’
    ‘And have you got enough money?’ my father says. I can guess he’s on the sitting-room extension while my mother is sitting in the kitchen.
    ‘Honestly, Dad, I’ve got plenty. You don’t need to worry.’
    Once I’ve recounted everything to them in minute detail, told them my plans for the next day and assured them that I’m completely safe and able to look after myself, we say goodbye and I’m left in the strange buzzing silence that descends after lots of chatter and noise abruptly stops.
    I get up and go over to the window, trying to quell the loneliness I can feel growing inside. I’m glad my parents called and everything, but they’ve unintentionallybrought me down again. It feels all the time as though I’m struggling as hard as I can to get out of the black misery that’s swamped me since the night I surprised Adam; it takes all my strength to get just a few steps away, and then the lightest touch sends me straight back into its depths.
    The flat opposite is still in darkness. Where is the man I saw last night? I realise that I’ve unconsciously been looking forward to getting back here and seeing him again; in fact, he’s been floating through my mind all day without my really being aware of it. The image of him half naked, the way he moved so gracefully about his sitting room, the way he stared so directly at me – it’s all burned itself onto my retina. He looked like no man I’ve ever seen before, not in real life at least.
    Adam is not a particularly tall man and although he’s strong from the work he does for his father’s building company, it’s made him stocky rather than defined. In fact, the longer I’ve known him, the more solid and squarish he’s become, perhaps because he gets his energy from a greasy-spoon diet of endless fried food and cooked breakfasts. And in his downtime, he likes nothing more than to sink several beers and make a late-night trip to the chip shop. When I saw him that night, raising himself on his elbow and gazing at me in horror, with Hannah’s frightened face on the pillow below him, my first thought was: He looks so fat . His