Set Me Free Read Online Free PDF Page A

this child, but I’ll do well by him, as it is my duty.
    At that moment, as I held Leo and slowly, slowly soothed him with my presence, my scent, my whispered words, I felt a part of my love for Ash leave me, painfully, inevitably. Like losing blood, I was losing love, pouring out of my heart and dissolving in the air between us. We sat in silence. All of a sudden, my husband seemed a stranger to me, and I wished he’d go and leave me alone with my son.
    One night, not long after we’d come home from hospital, Lara came to sit beside me as I nursed Leo. She touched his head with infinite gentleness. Around him, Lara was like this little instinctive animal, geared to protect and nurture. After all my fears about how she’d take his birth, I was immensely relieved.
    â€œI can’t remember who I lived with when I was a baby,” she whispered.
    â€œYou lived with several foster families, my love, until you went to Uncle Peter and Aunt Beth, who loved you very much.” Peter and Beth were an older couple who had fostered Lara for two years after it was decided she couldn’t go back to her father and that an adoptive family was needed. The social workers had done everything they could not to separate her and her dad, after Lara’s mother’s traumatic death when she was two. During those two years with Peter and Beth they looked for a suitable family until they found us. An older child with a difficult history can be hard to place, as opposed to babies and toddlers, who usually find a family relatively quickly.
    â€œYes, but I don’t know who looked after me when I was a baby.”
    â€œWell, it was your mother for a while. And then other kind people . . . Do you want me to ask Kirsty for their names? Would that help?”
    She shrugged. “No point.”
    I was flooded with regret, the pointless, useless regret that it hadn’t been me looking after her since the beginning. Because it felt that way, it felt like she’d been with us forever, that she was mine. Although she’d only been with us five years, it felt like that there could never have been a time in which we simply didn’t know each other.
    â€œThey certainly did a good job, your foster parents. Look how lovely you are, how clever and smart and pretty.”
    Leo had stopped suckling and had fallen asleep at my breast. Lara rested a hand on his sleeping form, bundled up in blankets. “I’m happy Leo is here,” she whispered.
    â€œYes. Lara and Leo. They sound good together, don’t they?”
    â€œYes,” she said with a little smile, but I could see the ever-present spark of sadness in her eyes.

3

A house of straw
    Margherita
    Leo was now two. I delighted in him, and so did Lara. She was fiercely protective of her little brother and showered him with love. Ash mainly ignored both of them.
    To everyone else, my husband was a model father, coping with his daughter’s issues and a demanding job. Behind closed doors, it was a different matter. Things weren’t going well between us at all. He was distant, both in body and in soul, and I waned under his indifference, like my world was slowly being drained of colour.
    Love was leaving us both, slowly and silently, and I hurt, I hurt.
    And then Lara’s father died suddenly. Among his belongings they found a picture of Lara’s mum with Lara in her arms – it was the first photograph of Lara’s mum I’d ever seen. Apparently her father had destroyed them all when she’d died.
    When she saw the photograph, Lara said nothing.
    â€œYou have her eyes, Lara. Beautiful blue eyes,” I said, my heart in my throat as I studied her solemn face.
    â€œI know why she died.”
    â€œYou do?”
    â€œShe killed herself. With pills.”
    I was speechless. Those words, so much bigger and darker than any child that age should contemplate. “Nobody knows for sure,” I whispered. Which was