Woman to Woman Read Online Free PDF Page B

listen and blend in, trying to think of something funny to say while their more confident sisters fitted in perfectly.
    “Hit me if I ever turn out like that, won’t you?” she’d told Michael after their engagement party. His matronly cousin had bored her to tears with advice about the right washing machine.
    “Don’t worry, darling,” he’d laughed, ‘you’re never going to turn into an Elsie, I promise.”
    But she had. Well, sort of. Maybe she didn’t discuss the advantages of a Zanussi as opposed to a Whirlpool when they went out, but she certainly didn’t fit in the way she used to.
    And Michael knew it.
    That was the hardest thing about going out to parties or dinners these days; being aware of Michael looking at her distantly across the room as if she had failed some secret test.
    She hated sitting around a dinner table with two or three glamorous career women sparkling around Michael and vying for his attention, while she sat in isolation, too selfconscious to chat to the men placed beside her. No wonder he’d wanted another woman.
    She wasn’t beautiful, particularly clever or even good at some high-powered job. She was a housewife and, even though that’s what he’d wanted her to be a few years ago, that’s not what he wanted now.
    Maybe if she’d stayed the woman he married, that enthusiastic girl who’d walked blindly through life, hoping for the best instead of
    settling into domestic bliss like Ma in Little House on the Prairie, maybe then he would have still loved
    She looked at least ten years older than she really was with her pale, slightly plump face and the beginnings of a double chin. But she had finally decided to do something about it.
    Without breathing a word to Michael, she had started a diet.
    Not one of her diet on Monday, stuff your face on Tuesday diets, but a proper diet. She had decided that this was the real diet, the one which would change her life. That, however, was last week.
    Sadly, she dropped the lipstick onto the lace-covered dressing table. What was the point, she asked herself? Why bother trying to look better now? He had gone and found someone else anyway.
    “Ash, let me in,” Fiona roared up at the open bedroom window.
    “I’ve brought the Hobnobs, darling. What more does a woman need.”
    An hour later, Aisling was sitting in the passenger seat of Fiona’s sleek black Nissan NX as her friend expertly manoeuvred the car into a parking space in the Frascati Centre.
    “Don’t back out on me now,” warned Fiona, climbing out of the car and slamming the door with a careless bang.
    “You’re going to look stunning tonight if it kills both of us.”
    It just might do that, thought Aisling to herself as her friend frog marched her towards the expensive boutique she’d always avoided in the chic Blackrock shopping centre. She had been looking forward to the launch party for months now, eager to meet the team of journalists she had heard so much about from Michael in the past year but had never met.
    Michael had been working late more and more. The odd newsroom parties seemed to have dried up along with any chitchat at the Morans’ kitchen table. Working late my ass, Aisling growled to herself as she followed her friend into the shop.
    “Shopping is the only cure for a broken heart,” Fiona continued gaily, slim brown arms outstretched to rifle through racks of expensive little
    black numbers. In a daze thanks to a five-milligram Valium, Aisling moved sedately towards the party dresses, separating the hangers with totally steady fingers. She was beginning to feel quite “good, happy almost. Something sexy, she smiled inwardly, fingering the rich brocade and crepe outfits, looking for a dress to knock the spots off Michael’s bloody fancy woman. Aisling knew that the Valium was giving her an unrealistic high, but she simply didn’t care and sank into the numb happiness she felt flooding her head.
    For a day that had started out in the worst possible way,