Free The Model Wife by Julia Llewellyn

couldn’t help another swipe. ‘I can’t believe you’re still getting this vile newspaper. It’s obsessed with Princess Diana and how Britain is being swamped with evil immigrants.’
    ‘Dad likes the football reports,’ Jan protested feebly, ‘and I like the horoscopes. I suppose we could try another paper…’
    But Thea wasn’t listening. She was opening an email that had just arrived on her BlackBerry from her best friend Rachel. ‘You’re back’ read the subject field.
    Yo, girlfriend, so glad you’re home. Def on for dinner on Tues. But no boozing, sadly now am up the duff. Can’t wait to catch up.
    Scowling, Thea pressed delete. She was getting sick of this. Having fulfilled a lifelong ambition to live in Manhattan, Thea had nonetheless been thrilled to get the call from Roxanne Fox asking her to come home.
    ‘You are exactly the kind of talent that is missing from the newsroom,’ Roxanne had said. ‘Dean and I want you at the heart of things, jazzing this programme up.’
    Within forty-eight hours Thea had packed her belongings and was on her way to JFK to catch her one-way flight to Heathrow. From the back of her kamikaze taxi, she had sent out a flurry of emails and texts announcing her return. After her lonely childhood, Thea had grown into an extremely gregarious adult who considered a night in to be a night wasted. She could quite easily go for several weeks without cooking a meal in her pristine oven or picking up the TV remote.
    Things had slowed down a bit in Manhattan. She’d made a handful of friends – mostly gay – through introductions or work, but she’d found herself having to try much harder to keep things on the boil than she had in her twenties, and she’d found the whole dating culture utterly soul destroying. By the end of two years, she couldn’t wait to come home. Three days ago, she’d disembarked at Heathrow, expecting to be deluged by messages from friends, welcoming her return. But the greetings had been discomfortingly lukewarm. There was the odd text or email, saying ‘Gr8 C U Soon I Hope’, but no one had made any firm plans to meet.
    The people she had spoken to all said how pleased they were to have her back, but were all unwilling to commit to anything definite. ‘I’d love to, but my in-laws are in town/the new nanny’s just started and I don’t dare leave her to babysit/I don’t live in London any more, didn’t you know, we’ve moved to Scotland’ were the kind of answers she received.
    Pussies. What the hell had happened to all the old party crowd? Even Rachel, who’d always laughed at women who stroked their bumps and said things like ‘we’re pregnant’, was probably playing Mozart to her foetus now and reading it Tolstoy in original Russian to improve its chances of getting into the best nursery.
    ‘So now you’re back in London, how does it work for lunch?’ Jan asked.
    ‘How do you mean?’
    ‘Well, what do you do? Take in sandwiches and a flask?’
    Inwardly, Thea groaned. What was it with her mother’s obsession with food? ‘No, Mum. Mostly I’ll have lunch in the canteen. Sometimes I’ll go out if there’s time.’
    ‘Go out?’ Jan was scandalized.
    ‘Yes. To a caff.’
    ‘That must be pricey. Wouldn’t you be better off taking sandwiches?’
    Thea ignored this.
    ‘I could make you some if you like? To take in on Monday.’
    ‘No, thanks, Mum.’
    ‘Are you sure? I could do you – what did you say you had in New York?’
    ‘I’ll be fine. No one takes in sandwiches.’
    ‘What? You all eat in a caff every day ?’
    ‘Usually in the canteen. It’s subsidized.’
    ‘But it still must cost a bomb.’
    ‘We can afford it,’ said Thea, thanking the Lord she had to get back to London for meetings and, of course, for Dean Cutler’s dinner party on Friday night. She carried on leafing past articles about how useless the government was, what Victoria Beckham had worn to some party, the latest cure for cellulite when –