Free Dearest Rose by Rowan Coleman Page B

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 put you in hospital with four broken ribs, a collapsed lung and internal bleeding. The boys wouldn’t have gone into temporary care, and he wouldn’t have done time for it.’
    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 repeating exactly 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, urgency and 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 do the same. Besides, if you come here, then I’ll look a whole lot less stalkery 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
    ROSE 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 to her just as he had been every single day for more than twenty years. And one step closer to seeing