Page 75 of Christmas at Sturcombe Bay
“Shelley! Shelley, wait!” It was Lisa running after her.
Shelley scowled angrily as she turned. “What?”
“What are you doing? Where are you going?”
“It’s none of your business.” She felt as if the pressure inside her was going to burst. “Just . . . Just go away. Leave me alone.”
Lisa’s eyes widened in shock — Shelley had never spoken like that since she had come to Sturcombe. “Why? What’s the matter? Has someone done something? Said something? Tell me.”
Shelley turned away, hunching her shoulders, squeezing her eyes shut to try to hold back the tears. “Just leave me alone.”
“Whatever’s wrong we can sort it out,” Lisa coaxed.
Shelley shook her head fiercely. “I said leave me alone.”
Lisa sighed. “Okay,” she conceded after a moment. “But you can’t walk out just like that. You have to give a week’s notice.”
“Why?”
“It’s in your contract.”
“What contract?”
“You were given a copy when you started.” Lisa’s voice was beginning to sound strained. “Didn’t you read it?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
Ah, there it was. The crunch. Her stomach roiled — dammit, was she going to be sick?
Lisa laid a gentle hand on her shoulder. “Why didn’t you read it, Shelley?”
Shelley looked away. There was no point trying to come up with an excuse. Lisa knew. She was too astute not to have guessed.
“You can’t read, can you?”
Where the hell was that bus? It never came along when you needed it. As the tears spilled over, Lisa folded her in a warm hug.
“It’ll be okay. Look, let’s not stand here in the rain. Come on over to my house and we’ll get a cup of tea and talk about it.”
“What about the baby?”
“She’s fine. She has her Uncle Paul and a whole squad of honorary aunties and uncles making a big fuss of her. Come on.”
There was no point trying to resist Lisa when she was determined. They crossed the road and walked a little way up the hill, turning right past Lisa’s husband’s surgery.
Her house was a short distance further on — a large white detached house with bay windows and orange roof tiles, and a pretty front garden behind a low brick wall, with a neat lawn and well-tended flowerbeds where roses were still blooming bravely.
Shelley had been here a couple of times before and it always seemed like paradise to her. She hesitated on the doorstep as Lisa opened the front door.
“I’m wet. I’ll drip all over your floor.”
“Don’t worry,” Lisa insisted. “It won’t hurt the tiles. Come on in. Give me your coat.”
She hung their coats in a closet beside the front door and led the way through to the kitchen.
The whole house was light and bright, with white walls and pale wooden floors, and at the back there were huge windows looking out over a lovely garden and beyond to a view of the rain-drenched bay.
