Three-And-A-Half Heartbeats Read Online Free PDF Page B

for my daddy.’ She was adamant.
    ‘Ooh, lucky Daddy.’ Grace felt the familiar twinge of envy as Daddy was again declared the favourite. She tried to ignore it, silently reprimanding herself for harbouring such a thought.
    ‘Can I put these in it?’ Chloe asked.
    Grace looked up again to see what her little girl was suggesting. In her tiny palm, sticky with wet dough, was a selection of the smallest Lego bricks and a green paperclip. Well, so long as the cookie is for Daddy…
    ‘Of course you can, darling. That’s a lovely idea.’
    Chloe beamed with delight. Despite being only three, she had fully expected her suggestion to be rebuffed. It was Lego and a paperclip after all.
    Grace watched as her daughter peppered the mixture with the little multi-coloured plastic bricks, pushing each one into position with her podgy fingers and using the paperclip to crown her glorious creation.
    ‘I finished!’ she announced as she dragged the remnants of the cookie mixture along the front of her apron.
    Grace grabbed the greased baking tray. ‘Come on, baby, help Mummy put your cookie on here and then we can bake it.’
    Chloe’s tongue popped out of the right side of her mouth, one of her many endearing habits that denoted extreme concentration. Grace had seen Tom do something similar when they were playing backgammon or when he was writing emails; she loved how nature asserted itself in the strangest of ways.
    Many hands in this case did not make light work; instead it rather confused what should have been a straightforward task. As they wrestled with the dough and Grace tried to manoeuvre the metal tray, the slippery mixture somehow managed to end up in a squashed mess on the floor.
    Tears at the injustice of this sprang instantly from Chloe’s eyes. ‘My cookie! Silly Mummy!’ Chloe wailed. ‘You silly Mummy!’
    Grace pulled her little girl from her chair; she held her a little too tightly and cooed into her sweet-scented scalp. ‘I’m sorry, Chlo. Please don’t cry. We can scoop it up and cook it anyway and no one will ever know. Okay?’
    ‘‘Kay.’ Chloe sniffed and wiped her eyes with her dough-covered fingers, sticking blobs of cookie mixture onto her long eyelashes. ‘My eyes are sticky!’ She rubbed them again and blinked furiously.
    Grace reached for the kitchen roll, hoping she’d saved the email she’d been composing before she’d had to abandon her phone. As ever, she wondered how things had deteriorated so quickly into farce.
    That afternoon, the three of them sat on the sofa with their legs stretched out on the large, square, padded stool that doubled as a table, watching Mr Bloom plant things.
    ‘How was Paz?’
    ‘Good. Happy.’ Tom smiled as his daughter wriggled back into his arms and rested her head on him. ‘Wow, now this is the life.’ Tom winked at his wife.
    Grace nodded, hoping for a sly snooze while Chloe was engrossed in the television. She looked at the utter contentment on her husband’s face and it made her smile. His own childhood had been privileged but lacking in affection and he’d been very clear to Grace about wanting them to parent Chloe in a different, if not a better way.
    Tom was the oldest son of Maxwell and Fiona Penderford and home had been a solid mansion on the edge of the North Yorks Moors – not that he’d spent much time in it, as he and his younger brother Jack were sent away to school at the age of seven. Tom had once explained to Grace that he had always felt his visits home upset the delicate balance that was his parents’ existence. His mother always appeared to be slightly flustered by his presence, as though she really didn’t know what she was supposed to do with ‘the boys’ when they were home. It made Grace sad that Tom could recall no more than a couple of occasions when they’d sat down to dinner as a family; and when they had, there’d been stilted conversation and discomfort all round.
    Maxwell Penderford had taken his family’s