Putting Out the Stars Read Online Free PDF

come, and he had no other family close enough to drag all the way to Rome.
    And now it was seven years later, and Breffni had moved back home two years ago with Cian at her side, and Polly had arrived a few months after that. And Laura was godmother to Polly, and got on
well with Cian, and was married to the man she adored, and enjoyed her work most of the time.
    And every so often, she managed to forget the one thing that stopped her from being completely content.

    ‘Only me.’
    In the sitting room, Breffni pressed the off button on the TV remote control and smiled. Cian’s predictability was one of the things that had decided her, after a few disastrous
roller-coaster romances, that he was the one she needed to make a life with. She couldn’t remember a day when he hadn’t let himself into the house with those words:
only
me.
    ‘Hi – in here.’ She stood and walked towards the door and met him as he came through, shaking off his jacket. He looked tired; she’d run him a bath after dinner. She
leant her head briefly against his chest, pressed her palms into his back, felt the solid bulk of him. He smelt of mint, and the fabric softener she dolloped into the washing. ‘Mmmm. Miss
me?’
    ‘But of course.’ He dropped a kiss on her blue-black hair. ‘How’s the patient?’
    ‘Ex-patient – totally back to normal. Sang in the bath, demanded two stories in bed.’
    He smiled what Breffni called his Polly smile, his whole round face seeming to blur around the edges. ‘Is she gone up long?’
    Breffni shook her head against his shoulder, dropped her arms. ‘She’ll still be awake, just about – and dinner’s in ten minutes.’
    ‘Thanks, love.’ He turned and headed for the door, and she stood and followed the muffled thud of his steps up the stairs and across the landing to Polly’s room.
    In the kitchen she lit the stub of red candle that sat in an eggcup in the middle of the oval table. They always ate in here, even when they had visitors. The cottage didn’t have a dining
room, just a biggish kitchen and a slightly smaller sitting room downstairs.
    In winter they practically lived in the kitchen, firing up the wood stove and settling down with their books and mugs of tea into the battered old couch they’d inherited with the house. It
had been left in the sitting room, but they shoved it into the kitchen to make room for the pair of two-seaters and wooden rocking chair they’d bought. They planned to fire it onto the skip
they were waiting for, but somehow it had never made it past the corner near the stove.
    It was worn and a bit lumpy, and the cover was threadbare in places, and Breffni would never have chosen a sofa covered in blue and green check, but there was something extremely cosy about
collapsing into its depths after a day at work. When they decided to keep it, she bought a big, woolly, dark blue throw and three fat, cherry-red cushions, and hung on to the receipts for a week
until she was sure they all worked.
    Now, when the weather got wintry and everyone complained about the shorter days, she knew it was only a matter of time before they gravitated towards the kitchen and the long, cosy nights by the
stove. Who needed a life full of excitement anyway? That kind of thing only happened on telly, didn’t it? What she and Cian had was worth so much more. And so what if he didn’t make the
earth move, if he wasn’t exactly Brad Pitt? Breffni was willing to bet that Jennifer Aniston never stopped worrying about how to hang on to him. No, she and Cian were the lucky ones –
secure, settled, relaxed with each other. That was what counted – having someone you knew would always be there, no matter what.
    Listen to her – she sounded like Granny Mary. She smiled as she put out cutlery and glasses, and thought:
I must ask her if she can babysit on Thursday night.
She took a bottle of
Chardonnay from the fridge and left it on the worktop – that’d go fine with the beef