Splinter the Silence Read Online Free PDF

head, sadness in his eyes. ‘Not me. Your team. People who care about you, who came to me because they didn’t dare go to you.’

That hit home. He wasn’t ashamed of landing such a low blow. He wanted it to sting, wanted her to feel the shame of what she was doing to herself. She couldn’t meet his eyes. ‘You’ve never seen me falling-down drunk. Throwing up over myself. Out of control. I’ve always been able to do my job. Always able to function.’

Tony shrugged. ‘So you’re a functioning drunk. You don’t have to be falling down in the street or pissing yourself or sleeping with unsuitable men or losing whole days at a time to be a drunk. All it takes is for you to be dependent. And you are. We both know it.’

Carol looked at Tony as if she hated him. ‘I don’t need to drink. I could stop any time I wanted to.’

He’d given her a long level stare then. ‘You think? Prove it. Let me stay here with you till Wednesday. It’s only four days. You go on the wagon and I’ll be here to support you. Believe me, Carol, I’d love to be proved wrong.’

She glowered at him, her expression a shifting mosaic of petulance and dismay. He wasn’t sure if she was more pissed off at the thought of going on the wagon or having to put up with him in her face all the time. ‘Fine,’ she said, clipped and tight-lipped. ‘If that’s the only way to get you off my case, fine.’ She tipped the last inch of wine down the sink in a defiant gesture. ‘You sleep in here, I’ll take the sleeping bag. I have to get up early and walk the dog. That way I won’t disturb you.’ And she’d stalked off. He suspected she thought she’d got the better of the exchange.

She was wrong. After she’d gone, he took advantage of the soundproofing to search the annexe for alcohol. Three bottles of malt whisky, two bottles of pepper vodka from the freezer, a bottle of gin, five bottles of Pinot Grigio, two bottles of cava, a bottle of brandy and five bottles of craft beer. He swallowed his qualms about her privacy and went through every handbag in the wardrobe, discovering three miniatures of vodka and one of whisky. Then, one by one, he opened the bottles and poured the contents down the sink. The fumes rose up, making his nose tingle. She’d be furious in the morning when she saw what he’d done. But eventually, she’d be grateful.
     
    Twenty miles away, on the outskirts of Bradfield, Ursula Foreman read through what she hoped would be the final draft of her monthly column for TellIt! , the popular online news site she’d helped to set up two years before. She ran both hands through her ginger curls in a bid to wake herself up and sharpen her concentration. As she read, she chewed one corner of her lower lip absently, her eyes narrowing as she weighed her words.

Four months ago, she’d written what she considered a thoughtful and measured piece about the effect on young women of unthinking, everyday sexism in TV soaps.

She’d been taken aback by the flood of vilification it had unleashed. A torrent of hate and anger had saturated her social media feeds. At first, she’d laughed about it, complaining about the lack of imagination displayed by the trolls. In response, they’d upped their game. Until then, Ursula had stuck to the accepted axiom – don’t feed the trolls. But she found it hard to stay silent in the face of such grim abuse. Her next column had probed the reasons why men – for it was, she was convinced, almost exclusively men – harboured such powerful negative feelings towards women they’d never met and whose words were unlikely to have any direct effect on their lives.

The second shitstorm was even worse than the first. Ursula wasn’t daunted by her attackers, though she was a little shaken when her partners in TellIt! told her to keep it up; her foul-mouthed critics were actually drawing more people to the site than ever before, which was good for business.

The following month, she wrote about