Free Runaway Wife by Rowan Coleman Page B

into the arms of the man who never tired of hurting her. There had to be some way of stopping Shona from making the same mistake again; telling her how wrong she was never worked. There was only one thing that Rose thought might be powerful enough to influence Shona, and that was loyalty. Shona’s unswerving loyalty to her.
    “Come here.” Rose said the words out loud at exactly the moment the idea formed in her head. “Come here to me, please.”
    “What?” Shona asked, incredulous. “What are you talking about?”
    “Come here. You say I’m not strong enough to deal with this alone, and you’re right. I need you, Shona, I need you with me, and even if you don’t want to admit it, you need some time to think about what you’re going to do next. Run away too, come here and bring the boys and we can both hide for a while. I can help you clear your head, and you can make sure I don’t make a total fool of myself with Frasier or my father.”
    “Mate, I can’t just disappear like you,” Shona said, distracted enough by the idea to sound like her old self again. “People will worry about me.”
    “Oh, thanks very much,” Rose said.
    “You know what I mean. My mum, my job, Ryan . . .”
    “Ryan doesn’t care about you, Shona,” Rose said brutally, unable to contain herself any longer. “He wants you, maybe he does love you in his own particular, twisted way, but he doesn’t care about you. If he did, he wouldn’t have a bevy of women and four more children scattered across Kent. You know he only ever comes back to you when he’s broke and has nowhere else to go.”
    There they were, the facts laid bare, the reasons why Rose couldn’t bear for Shona to make the same mistake again, and Rose had said them out loud, even though she felt like a hypocrite, even though she knew she could never tell anyone, not even Shona, what it was Richard did to her. But this wasn’t about her, it was about saving Shona.
    “I know it sounds bad from the outside, but you don’t know . . .” Shona trailed off, aware that she was repeatingexactly what Rose had just said to her. “No one knows, do they, what it’s like inside? How you feel stuff you don’t want, think things you shouldn’t. It’s like . . . it’s like you’re two people—the person who knows what to do, and the one who does what she wants, whatever the consequences.”
    “Come here, Shona, please,” Rose begged, concern flooding her voice. “Please, come and escape with me for a bit. I’ve decided I’m not going to call Richard. I’m not going to let him get inside my head again. He’ll find me eventually, but not yet. We’ve got time, you and me, not much, but a little bit of time before everything catches up with us, and I’m determined to make the best of it. I’m sure there is room here—I’m the only guest—but I’ll book you in as soon as I get off the phone, and you can help me get my head straight and strong before I have to face him again. And I can help you finally move on from Ryan. Besides, if you come here, then I’ll look a whole lot less like a stalker when I ‘bump’ into Frasier.”
    “OK,” Shona said, so quietly that Rose was unsure she’d heard her. “OK, I’ll borrow Mum’s car and drive up tomorrow. But I’m only coming because you need me, you bloody loser. And you better tell me where the hell the godforsaken shit hole of Millthwaite actually is.”

Chapter
Five
     
    R ose sat in Jenny’s living room, the weak August sunshine battling through the silver clouds to illuminate the spotless room. Maddie was sitting on a dining room chair, her head buried in the enormous doll’s house where she was happily arranging its occupants around the new technological arrival of television into their nineteenth-century lives. She felt curiously at peace considering the hurricane of a day she was about to step into, Richard snapping somewhere at her heels, her father alone somewhere in the hills, oblivious