Free Kate's Wedding by Chrissie Manby Page A

life. And of love. If a woman as beautiful and lovely as Princess Diana couldn’t make love work, then how could anyone else have a chance?
    If she’d lived, Diana would have turned fifty in 2011 and Melanie and her husband would have celebrated their thirtieth anniversary. Tuning in to the chatter in the salon, Melanie heard Sarah explain to her client that Melanie’s royal wedding story actually had a sad ending.
    ‘She’s a widow,’ said Sarah in a stage whisper that was clearly audible in the backroom.
    ‘Melanie!’ Heidi shouted next. ‘Can we have the cathedral-length veils for Jessica Stott?’
    Melanie snapped back to the present.
    A cathedral-length veil would make Jessica Stott, who was all of five feet in her heels, look like a child dressing up as a ghost for Halloween, but Melanie always catered to her customers’ wishes. She was pretty sure that as soon as Jessica had the first veil on, she would ask for something shorter.
    ‘Coming right out,’ she said.
    Melanie paused by a mirror. She stuck her fingers in the dimples that Keith had always loved.
    ‘Happy face.’ She smiled, pulling the corners of her sad mouth upwards.

Chapter Fourteen
    The day of Kate and William’s engagement announcement brought much less welcome news for the Williamson family. Elaine’s biopsy had confirmed the presence of malignant cells. Cancer. Suddenly, the much-maligned NHS swung into impressive action as the oncologists drew up a treatment plan. There was no question that Elaine would have to have a lumpectomy. After that, there would be radiotherapy and perhaps a whole bunch of other therapies that sounded nowhere near as much fun as the therapies Kate indulged in at the beauty salon near her office.
    ‘This is terrible,’ Kate said to Tess.
    ‘It’s not a death sentence,’ Tess reminded her. ‘Plenty of people get through this.’
    But Kate had never had her younger sister’s stoicism. She couldn’t just treat the news of her mother’s breast tumour as she might have treated news of something like, say, a gallstone. Though in theory you could just as likely die while having your gall bladder removed as a tumour, the word ‘cancer’ was so much more evocative. It was as though the letters of the word themselves were shrouded in the black cape of death.
    Having Lily to care for meant that Tess couldn’t spend all day dwelling on their mother’s illness, but Kate could not think of anything else even while she was in the office. She spent hours online looking up breast-cancer statistics. Her mother had DCIS, ductal carcinoma in situ, which was, according to many of the websites, the simplest kind of breast cancer to deal with. And it had been caught early. There was no reason to believe the cancer had spread elsewhere. Kate printed out a stack of learned papers on the subject and tried to make sense of them in her lunch break. It shouldn’t have been hard for a lawyer, right? But Kate’s head swam with the unfamiliar acronyms; the difference of one or two letters could mean the difference between twenty more years or just a few months.
    At four o’clock, her father called for a chat. The effort of remaining calm and upbeat for the duration of the conversation was tremendous. She told her father that her ‘extensive research’ seemed to suggest that everything would be fine. These days, getting rid of a couple of tiny breast tumours was no more complicated than filling a rotten tooth, she assured him. Survival rates were getting higher and better year on year. She hoped that her father left the conversation feeling reassured, though Kate herself felt horribly drained. And then she had to go straight into a meeting and be her usual impressively professional self. Only she couldn’t. For a start, she had spent more time looking up breast cancer than she had reading the papers she should be discussing with her colleagues. Her attention drifted back to her mother whenever she wasn’t called on to speak