Free Another Love by Amanda Prowse

the unfortunate situation in which he found himself. She saw the policeman take a step forward and pat his arm, which made her smile. Everyone loved David Arthur Wells.
    The memory of this last image made Romilly turn towards the bedroom door just as David came in with the glass of water. She smiled weakly at him. He didn’t smile back.
    ‘I don’t much like the new neighbour,’ he said curtly as he set the glass down on the bedside cabinet.
    ‘You don’t know her!’ Romilly forgot her contrition and leapt to Sara’s defence.
    ‘Neither do you,’ he countered. ‘Obviously I’m not saying be rude or ignore her, but don’t encourage her to be friends. There’s something about her I didn’t like.’
    Fun police… Romilly felt a small giggle leave her mouth at the thought, as David switched off the lights and left her to sleep.

Celeste
    Sara Weaver. Now there’s a name I haven’t considered for a while. I used to love her. I really did. My mum told me often enough that she was her only friend and so I was grateful to her for that. I wanted someone to look after Mum and for her to have fun with, just like I did with my friends. And Sara was fun to be around. She was different. She knew the words to songs on the radio, not old people’s songs but songs that my friends and I liked, and she could make me laugh. She wasn’t like any other adult I knew. She didn’t follow the rules and she liked to make a mess. She used to come into our house like a wind, shaking up the quiet and changing the way things felt, and when she arrived I’d see Mum’s expression lift and so I wanted her to be there as much as she could. My mum would call her, giggling, when my dad left for the day or had nipped out, like giving her the nod that the coast was clear, and that made it seem illicit, naughty. And it felt like I was in on the secret, like one of the grown-ups, even though I didn’t know what the secret was. It was exciting.
    One day we pulled every cushion from every sofa and chair in the house and built a fort and then, when I was in it, Sara jumped on it, trapping me inside and squashing me. It was funny at first, I was giggling fit to burst. But then she put more weight on the top, might even have fallen asleep, I don’t know, but it felt like an age that I was inside, in the dark, unable to move my arms and legs and feeling the weight of her pressing down on my chest. My giggles had meant I’d lost my regular breathing pattern and no matter how hard I tried to fill my lungs, I couldn’t. I felt a tightness in my chest and I was very close to sheer panic, when she suddenly moved and flung the cushions high and wide until I was free and we both lay on the floor. I was laughing so hard from relief, but then my mum picked up this bean-filled cushion and stood there whacking me with it, and the three of us laughed and laughed until we cried. I cried really hard then, and I didn’t want to laugh any more.
    When my mum put me to bed that night, I told her that I had been scared and that I couldn’t breathe and she said it was best that I didn’t tell Daddy, she placed her finger under my chin and lifted my face to hers, ‘we don’t want to worry him, do we?’ I shook my head. She then held me tight and kissed me, whispering into my ear, ‘you can throw all the bottles away with me tomorrow, we shall go on a secret mission!’ She knew I liked the sound of the glass smashing after you dropped it into a little hole in the top of the bottle bank.
    Then, of course, as I got older and heard my dad speaking frankly about Sara’s influence on my mum, begging Mum not to even go out with her, I stopped loving her and started to mistrust her. I felt guilty about all those times I’d laughed with her and began to see that it was in some way disloyal to my dad. I could see she was the wedge between my parents, the thing keeping them apart, or so I thought. And I began to hate her for that.
    As I say, I haven’t thought about