Free Lessons in Heartbreak by Cathy Kelly Page A

points.’
    ‘Selective blindness,’ Anneliese smiled back at him. ‘I see the bits I like and I like most of it.’
    Walking along the beach now, Anneliese knew she’d have to take the picture off the wall when she got home. It would hurt too much to see it.
    The wind bit into her face, stinging her eyes. Anneliese stared down at the sand, determined to find something to shift her mind off the sharp pain in her heart. A few yards ahead of her lay a piece of driftwood, tangled up in a skein of chemical blue net from the fishing boats.
    Bending slowly, she picked it up. It was a foot long, twisted like a coil of rope. Some of the driftwood was beautiful, sculpted by the sea, still a thing of beauty despite the battering.
    And then there were pieces of driftwood that were just that: wood flung on the beach after thrashing around in the surf, desolate and hollowed out, ugly and unwanted. Like this one. Like me, Anneliese knew.
    She wasn’t a plant at all – she was driftwood. Ugly to most people, beautiful only to the very few.
    Summoning all the pent-up energy in her body, she hurled the driftwood back into the ocean and screamed at it.
    ‘I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.’
    There was nobody to hear her scream. Her voice was caught on the wind and whipped away into the air where the seagulls paid no attention.
    Edward hadn’t seemed to pay attention that morning when she’d got up at eight and said she was going to Sunday Mass at nine, then might call in on Lily. He’d murmured something that sounded like assent, and rolled over in the bed, bunching the snow white of the duvet around his lanky frame. Anneliese didn’t mind. She was a lark and he was an owl. Opposites and all that.
    Ten minutes later, she was showered, dressed and sipping a cup of green tea before she hurried out the door. She’d grown to like green tea, for all that she’d loathed it for ages after the acupuncturist had said it was good for you. Why was it that things that were good for you took a long time to get used to and things that were bad were instantly addictive?
    The early service in St Canice’s in the square in Tamarin was pure and perfect. The cold spring sun sent rays of light shining through the stained-glass windows, leaving dust motes hanging in the air, an effect that was for all the world like celestial rays blessing the faithful in biblical paintings. There was no music at the early service.
    The choir sang at eleven Mass, with Mr Fitzpatrick strangling hymns on a rheumatic organ, with the congregation wincing and Father Sean smiling bravely, willing people not to laugh openly.
    Dear Father Sean. He had a great sense of humour which he had to subdue because not everyone wanted a priest who cracked jokes. Anneliese felt sorry for him, having to toe some invisible line.
    Eleven was the family Mass too, where toddlers knelt on pews and twinkled bored eyes at the people behind them. Adorable but distracting.
    At nine on a Sunday morning, the church was only a quarter full and it suited Anneliese perfectly. She loved the peace of it all. Time to think but not so much time that her mind skittered off into dark areas. No, she didn’t like that. Luckily, it never happened at Mass. Something to do with the ritual of standing and kneeling, murmuring responses to prayers that were engrained in her soul because she’d been murmuring them for so many years.
    Anneliese’s religion was a meditative, safe place for her to rest rather than an intense, doctrinaire version.
    Then the migraine came helter skelter into her head without warning; not the full blast that required lying down, but certainly a blistering ache that made her eyes narrow with pain.
    There was no point waiting: she had to go home and lie down. She could phone Lily and apologise later. Her aunt, well aunt-in-law strictly speaking, because she was actually Edward’s aunt, wouldn’t mind. Lily had many glorious qualities – she was funny, warm, had a marvellous sense