My Best Friend's Girl Read Online Free PDF Page A

sounded convincing to boot.
    Mr. Hamilton-Mackenzie was never going to change, I knew that. When we first met, Adele would often get falling-down drunk and confess how awful her life had been before Leeds. She’d tell me about her father’s quick-to-discipline attitude. About time spent in the hospital with broken arms, fractured legs, a cracked jaw as a result of being “punished.” Once he’d knocked her through a ground-floor window and a piece of glass had lodged itself in her back, narrowly missing her kidney—the glass had to be removed by surgery. Another time he’d hit her with the buckle end of his belt and gouged out a huge chunk of her left thigh, meaning she rarely wore skirts.
    Amazingly, annoyingly, depressingly, no one suspected what was going on. Or, if they did, they looked away, not wanting to get involved. No one noticed, it seemed, what was going on behind the closed doors of the Hamilton-Mackenzie household. They accepted it when Mr. Hamilton-Mackenzie, a respectable, clean-cut example of white, middle-class decency, despaired time and again at his daughter’s clumsiness, her tomboyishness that got her into scrapes, her silliness that made her hook up with rough boys.
    Like me, Del’s escape was college. She desperately wanted to be loved by her father, and the only way I could help her was to pretend that he was capable of it and say that one day he would. Whether she believed me or not, it kept the hope alive in her, and even I knew we all need hope to survive.
    My family weren’t perfect but they were bothered—very vocally so—if I didn’t go home every few months; they did call me regularly for a chat and, because she was my friend, they accepted Adele into the fold. Adele found a new place called home with the Matikas. It wasn’t her real home, it wasn’t the love of her father, but every time my mum told us off for waking up the house when we came in at 3 a.m.; every time my dad reached into his wallet and gave her a tenner to buy herself something; every time my sister asked for advice about her love life, it was almost as good as her real home. She felt she belonged.
    Obviously, only one thing could possibly come between us: a man.

chapter 4
    T his was surreal.
    Being in London, a city I had fled over two years ago. But not just London, this particular area of it. Waterloo.
    I wandered across Waterloo’s huge station concourse, memories slamming into me with every step I took. No one seemed to notice how freaked out I was. How I walked slowly, expecting to run into a younger version of Adele, or even myself. Commuters hurried around me; announcements for trains blared over the loudspeakers; life rushed on oblivious. Oblivious to the fact that this was the place where I used to come to meet Adele after work for drinks when we were both single. When she wasn’t ill and thin, the shadow of a person lying in that hospital bed. She used to work just around the corner and I used to get the tube here from Oxford Street, where I worked, so we could travel home together after a few drinks.
    Waterloo was also remarkable for another reason. This was the place where I met him. At a house party just up the road from here. Him, the man who came between me and Adele.
    He wasn’t just any man, though. He was Nate Turner, my fiancé.
    Nate walked into my life one cold April night and said he didn’t want to walk out of it again. I told him to try that line on a woman who might believe it. “I’m going to win you over,” he’d stated seriously.
    “Better men than you have failed,” I’d replied equally seriously.
    Eighteen months later we decided to get married. And three years after that we set a date for the following year. We didn’t have the perfect relationship, more a perfect understanding. He put up with a lot from me, had to deal with my issues.
    My “issues” weren’t immediately obvious. By the time I met Nate my outward appearance was that nothing bothered me, that year