Married By Christmas Read Online Free PDF Page B

remember? If I thought that something was really wrong, I’d tell you, wouldn’t I?’ Mutely, Anna nodded into her shoulder. ‘Look, I’m sure you are wrong about this. I’m sure you are,’ Liv said with a conviction that Anna could not know came just as much from her refusal to believe that Tom could do such a thing to Anna, or to her in a weird kind of way, because, well, she could stand him being in love with her best friend, but anyone else? Liv wasn’t at all sure she could stand that.
    ‘But he is being moody,’ Anna said, pulling back to look Liv in the eye. ‘And for Tom that’s massive, isn’t it? He never worries about things. For him to be moody, then something has to be really wrong.’
    ‘Look … I … He … The thing is …’ Liv tried, starting several reassuring sentences, but the truth of the matter was she agreed with Anna. Tom hadn’t been able to look Anna in the eye for days, which could be put down to pre-wedding jitters, but, more than that, he hadn’t been able to make eye contact with Liv either, not even one of his usual fond ‘what is she like?’ rolling glances that he occasionally sent Liv’s way when Anna wasn’t looking.
    ‘You think it too, don’t you?’ Anna said, always able to read Liv like she was an open book, with one marked exception.
    ‘No,’ Liv said firmly, tightening her grip and looking Anna in the eye. ‘No, I don’t. I think that whatever it is, it won’t be another woman. That’s just not Tom.’
    ‘But look at this!’ Anna dipped into her bag and showed Liv Tom’s archaic and battered Filofax, which he kept on because he was forever losing his phone in the back of taxis, and on the tube, and also because Anna enjoyed buying him pre-organised inserts for it, detailing things like family birthdays, holiday dates and most recently the times and places he had to be for the wedding.
    ‘You stole his diary?’ Liv gasped, her expression a mix of impressed and horrified. ‘You, Anna Carter – who never ever does anything wrong – stole your boyfriend’s diary!’
    ‘I didn’t steal it,’ Anna said, thumbing to today’s page. ‘He left it lying around, in his bag, which was under the stairs … behind his mountain bike. Anyway, look!’
    Liv took the bag, and read the entry that Anna was pointing to.
    ‘Martha, 2 p.m. PE KHS’.
    ‘Right,’ Liv said slowly. ‘So? It’ll be a meeting, something to do with work.’
    ‘So? What do you mean “so”? Who is Martha?’ Anna asked her. ‘Never in the whole time that we have been together has he ever mentioned a Martha, not once. And now suddenly he’s having a meeting with Martha. How many people called Martha work in football journalism? I’ll tell you how many, none. I know. I Googled it. Martha,’ she spat. ‘It’s a typical slut name, if ever I heard one.’
    Liv paused for a moment, taking a breath, resisting, only just, the impulse to slap the hysteria out of her friend. This was typical Anna, it always had been ever since Liv had first gotten to know her at school. Anna was like a swan: on the surface she appeared beautifully serene, calm and in control, but just underneath everything was working frantically away, trying to keep her life from clattering over a waterfall. Both the truth, and the tragedy, was that Anna did not need to be so afraid. Even when she and Liv had first met, and Anna was sharing a room at the children’s home with a girl who bullied and stole from her, the worst of her life was behind her, because what could be worse than being abandoned by your mother when you were a little girl? And since then she’d worked so hard, done so much to drag herself away from that precarious existence, excelling at school, and at university, at the expense of making a wide circle of friends, of meeting men, or being much like any other twenty-something, until she had a home, a business, a rock-solid best friend and fiancé all before thirty, and all bang on or ahead of