Who Loves You Best Read Online Free PDF

Center where I coached part-time after taking the job with the Martindales; I fancied him, and he knew it. A couple of years older than me, he was everybody’s friend: laughing loudest and drinking heaviest. He could stop a tank with one massive fist, and lift me onto the bar without breaking a sweat. I was the club princess, everybody’s sweetheart (people say I look like a younger Sandra Bullock, only with green eyes); most of the rugby team fancied the pants off me, and I knew it, too. Of course we ended up together. We were the Homecoming King and Queen of Stockwell.
    Friday nights to Monday mornings were just one long party. Sometimes I wished we could spend more time alone together, just the two of us, but as Jamie said, you’re only young once. Plenty of time to stay in and watch TV when we’re collecting our pensions.
    I don’t know when his drinking tipped from sociable last-man-standing into a serious problem, because it happened so gradually I didn’t notice. Or told myself I didn’t notice. But around a year ago people began to take me aside and ask if something was wrong at home. (There wasn’t, unless you count a chronic reluctance to grow up.)Jamie started missing rugby practice, turning up late to games, or not turning up at all. Most nights, he fell asleep on the sofa in front of the TV, a dozen empty beer cans on the floor at his feet. I tried to speak to him, but he brushed it off. Eventually, the club had no choice but to drop him from the team. I felt sorry for him, of course, even though it was self-inflicted; I knew exactly what he was going through. But Jamie couldn’t pull himself out of it. He just sat around feeling depressed and sorry for himself. I still cared about him, but it got harder and harder not to lose my patience.
    I was pretty sure he was building up to ask me to marry him on Christmas Day; he’d turned thirty in November, his plumbing business was doing really well despite his drinking, and his mum was dropping heavy hints about grandkids. I couldn’t let it drift on any longer. I had to end it. I was just waiting for the right moment.
    And then he had his “accident,” and everything changed.
    I don’t know what Annabel’s idea of a “lovely family” is, but I think their surname might be Addams.
    The first family lives in a huge fuck-off McMansion in Notting Hill. I’m mentally doubling my salary as I sit in a lounge the size of my parents’ townhouse, and wondering if I should ask for a car too (Kirsty has the use of a brand-new Mini Cooper) when they offer to show me around. “My” room turns out to be a single bed in the corner of their two-year-old daughter’s nursery.
    “We have a lot of guests,” the mother says brazenly. “We can’t afford to tie up a good bedroom on a permanent basis.”
    The second family lives in Wimbledon, near the tennis club. The house isn’t that big, but I’d get the whole attic floor to myself, including a small kitchen. The wages are a bit more than I’m getting now, and best of all, I’ll have eight weeks off every summer when my charge, a seven-year-old boy, goes to California to stay with his dad.
    Then I meet the kid.
    “He’s a fucking psycho!” I yell to Annabel later. “His mother left the room to answer the phone, and the bastard stapled the cat’s tail to the rug! He just grinned when he saw me watching—I swear, that little bastard’s another Ted Bundy. Why did his last nanny leave?”
    “Personal reasons,” Annabel says uncomfortably.
    “How much did the mother pay her to keep quiet?”
    “She had a very generous severance package—”
    “I’ll bet. How many nannies has he had so far?”
    A pause. “You’d have been the eighth.”
    “Annabel—”
    “You’ll love the next family,” she promises quickly. “Two little girls aged four and six, private health insurance, great salary—”
    I take to the mother immediately, and the little girls are sweet, too. My own room, a car on weekends,