Tangled Lives Read Online Free PDF

but if not, please don’t hesitate to suggest an alternative.
    With best wishes,
    Annie Delancey
    She had written and re-written the letter until her head spun, then left it burning a hole on her laptop, unable to do any more about it.
    ‘Should I be more loving?’ Annie asked Richard now, reading the letter out to him one final time before sending it off. ‘It sounds so formal.’ She clutched the print out in her hand, hovering over her husband as he sat on the sofa in the sitting room, trying to read the paper before supper.
    ‘At this stage, “loving” would be a little weird,’ he muttered, not taking his eyes from the page.
    ‘Well, do you think it’s too personal then? The bit about naming him Tom? Perhaps I should leave that out?’
    Richard lowered the paper, smiling up at his wife. ‘No, I like that. It’s good to have something about your connection with each other in there.’
    ‘So is it bossy to be the one to suggest the time and place? Maybe he should be the one to take the lead on this. I mean, he’s a thirty-five-year-old man. He can presumably make his own decisions.’
    ‘Up to you, Annie. But I don’t see there’s anything wrong with making your own suggestion. If he has another idea, I’m sure he’ll say so.’
    ‘Yes, but I don’t want to put him off before he’s even seen me.’
    ‘Annie! You’ve written a brilliant letter. Just send it, for God’s sake.’
    But she wasn’t to be mollified. This was too important.
    ‘He’s probably got a car. I think I’ll leave out the bitabout the train. He can Google it anyway, if he needs to get one. I don’t want him to think I’m being patronising.’
    Richard just shook his head, picking up his paper again.
    ‘OK, OK,’ she walked over to her desk in the corner. After adding Marjory’s address and a covering letter to Kent Social Services, she pressed ‘print’, collected the letters from the tray, signed them, read them through just one more time, and folded them into an envelope before she had time to change her mind.
    Annie arrived at the bakery with some relief. She had spent the last two days, since sending the letter off, obsessively thinking about Daniel, imagining what they would talk about, how he would look: Will he resemble me? My side of the family? Or will the Carnegie clan be dominant? She tried to recall exactly what Charles looked like, but the image had become blurred by time. He was handsome – she remembered that much – tall and blond, his hair wavy and a little long – it was the sixties – and cringed as she remembered her eighteen-year-old self thinking him almost godlike. Perhaps his eyes were blue? She couldn’t be sure. And the set of his features wouldn’t materialise at all. She hoped Daniel didn’t favour his father too much; it would be hard to take.
    She hurried down the steps of her floury, sweet-smelling kingdom. Here she was in control and knew exactly what she was doing. She loved it. And the beautiful thing about a cake was its mechanical simplicity. People panicked aboutcakes but the truth was that, if you followed certain steps, you got certain results. Nothing in her life had ever been as uncomplicated as her cakes.
    The room was large and light. Although it was a semibasement beneath a two-storey sixties block of offices behind Gospel Oak station, the high windows, which faced onto a small car park at the rear of the building, ran the length of the bakery and took up almost a third of the back wall. So although the strip-lights were on except when there was very bright sunlight, the room never suffered from the claustrophobia of a basement.
    Four long, laminated work surfaces stretched across the space, a bank of ovens sat against the north wall, an industrial-sized fridge on the opposite side. Metal shelving ran above the work surfaces and against the walls, stacked high with baking tins, cake-stands, boards, cutters, tins of icing, flour, sugar-craft, ribbon, dowels to hold the