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She might be looking forward to being in Brighton and seeing her parents, but she wasn’t looking forward to the journey one little bit.
***
‘Are we nearly there yet?’ Izzie was taking a turn to sit in the window seat – not that there was much to see out of it. The plane was currently over the South China Sea, and beneath it was an endless blue vista.
‘Not yet, sweetie. Why don’t you have a nap? It’ll make the time go quicker,’ Annabelle suggested. Jake was already a dead weight on her other side, his head resting on her arm, and she shifted position as carefully as she could so as not to wake him. ‘There’s a fleece in my bag,’ she added. ‘Fold it up and you can rest your head on it. Careful,’ she warned, seeing the letter that the postie had handed to her before they’d left almost fall out as Izzie rooted around in the bag which Annabelle had stuffed underneath the seat in front. ‘Can you pass me that letter, please?’ she asked. She may as well read it now – it might take her mind off the endless hours ahead of her.
Izzie scrunched herself up in her seat, making Annabelle quite envious of her daughter’s rubber limbs and bendy spine, then closed her eyes. Hopefully, both children would have a nice long sleep before they’d need to be entertained once more. She didn’t regret not taking the children to the UK when they were younger, she decided, easing the flap of the letter open, and she felt rather sorry for the parents of a toddler three rows down who’d been letting everyone know his displeasure at not being allowed to run up and down the plane. Primary-aged kids were hard enough to keep amused and she could only imagine—
What?
Annabelle scanned the letter, her eyes refusing to believe what she was reading even as her blood froze in her veins and her whole body felt numb and cold.
It must be wrong. The letter was meant for someone else, surely. It happened sometimes – the postie would pop the wrong mail into the wrong letterbox. With her heart thudding uncomfortably and her mouth dry, Annabelle checked the name on the top and the address.
Oh, God… She felt sick when she realised that the letter was indeed meant for her.
Annabelle closed her eyes for a moment and took a deep breath. Telling herself that she must have misread it, she slowly opened them and gave it another go, this time reading every word slowly and carefully.
The letter’s message hadn’t changed on the second reading.
It still informed her that her house was being repossessed.
The bastard! The lowdown, dirty, sodding…
How could Troy do such a thing!
Annabelle read the letter for a third time, trying to take it in, and didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. You couldn’t write this stuff, she thought, hysteria bubbling close to the surface and threatening to spill over.
Troy, it seemed, had taken out a loan against the house –herhouse, the one she and his children lived in. The letter was a notification that she had two weeks to vacate the property before the bank took possession of it.
Two weeks! How the hell was she going to find somewhere to live in a measly two weeks?
Suddenly it struck her that they would shortly be homeless. They wouldn’t have a house to return to.
What was she supposed to do now?
