Nyctophobia Read Online Free PDF

complicated; being totally honest involved getting into something I could barely admit to myself.
    Mateo’s old college friend Darrell flew over from Jerez to be a witness, and gave us a beautiful wine cabinet which we had nowhere to store because I was still at my mother’s and Mateo was split between a rented apartment in Madrid and a borrowed room in the old mayor’s house in Jerez. I invited a pair of colleagues from my old practice, just to show that I wasn’t entirely friendless. I met Mateo’s daughter, Bobbie, and the relative proximity of our ages helped to make us instant buddies. She was a bright and enquiring almost-nine year-old, with all the openness and confidence I’d never had as a child, but there was a prim stillness about her, too, so that I was never quite sure if she was in the same room with me.
    We spent a working honeymoon in Seville and Salamanca, and Mateo took me on a tour of the Rioja region, teaching me the differences in varieties of wine. During this time he often spoke of his family’s birthplace and how he longed to go back there, and as I was anxious to distance myself from his first wife, I agreed to look for a house in Andalusia. He was delighted by the idea, so we rented a hotel room at the coast and began hitting the websites. We shortlisted around fifteen places, and as his time was limited we viewed some of them separately. It seemed amazing to me that I could make someone so happy just by agreeing to do this one thing.
    I’d spent five years studying for my architectural degree and two more working in a domestic practice. Shortly after the partners had agreed their bank loan, the credit crisis hit us all hard. The staff took deferred wages while they tried to find new clients, but with a glut of defaulted properties on the market nobody was looking to build from scratch. Unable to pay our most basic bills, I watched in a state of panic as the enterprise collapsed around us. I was the youngest in the team, and the first to be let go.
    After we went into liquidation, I was unable to pay my rent arrears and moved back in with my mother, where I spent my mornings fruitlessly searching for a new position and my afternoons sleeping on her couch. I knew it was a bad idea, and that we would end up wanting to kill each other within days, but I had no choice. The future I had mapped for myself hadn’t panned out, and I needed to save money. I had no CV to speak of, and as finding work in my chosen field was proving impossible I wondered how long it would be before I ended up in some backwater office doing filing.
    Marriage had been the last thing in my plans. Anne said that marrying in your twenties was what girls with supermarket jobs did, not ones with careers. My mother was full of advice about things that were too late to change. After my first dinner with Mateo, I had fought with her.
    ‘Your first real date in over a year, and you’ve picked someone who’s barely divorced?’ she said, incredulous. ‘He’s a friend of Sandy’s, you know.’
    ‘His wife knows Sandy,’ I pointed out. ‘And at least he is divorced.’
    ‘He’s twice your age.’
    ‘He’s eighteen years older. It doesn’t matter to me, and it certainly doesn’t matter to him.’
    ‘You could at least try to think it through. Especially after all I’ve had to put up with from you in the past. You know how easily led you are, all those ridiculous fads you went through. Remember the astrology, the Buddhism, the spiritual realignment or whatever it was? And where did any of it get you? Do I have to remind you?’
    She really didn’t, and of course did so at great length. I tried to stop her but she carried on over me. Whenever Anne started on the past, there was nowhere to escape to. The flat had one bedroom; I was sleeping on an incredibly uncomfortable DFS sofa in the lounge. She followed me from one room to the other, determined that I should be reminded.
    ‘You didn’t speak for over a year,