My Best Friend's Girl by Dorothy Koomson Read Free Book Online Page B

speeding by, plus the occasional police siren. I’d stopped thinking those police sirens were coming for me a couple of hours ago but my mind was still racing at 100 mph—it had been for most of the night.
    Eight hours earlier, I’d checked us into a hotel that was within walking distance of St. Jude’s Hospital. The room was sparse and small, but it had a double bed, a small cot bed for Tegan and a television—everything we needed.
    As the door closed behind us, I walked over to the cot; Tegan was like an anvil in my arms, my biceps, elbows and forearms were frozen in pain because I’d been holding her for so long. The second we’d got in the back of the taxi that would bring us into central London, Tegan had climbed into my lap, wrapped her arms as far around my torso as they would go, rested her face against my chest and fallen asleep. The whole sixty-minute drive into town I’d had to restrain myself from breathing too deeply or shifting about in case I jostled her awake, although it had to be said she was doing a pretty good impression of being deeply ensconced in dreamland. She hadn’t stirred when I’d shuffled and contorted my way out of the taxi, nor when I talked the receptionist through the registration form, nor when we came up in the elevator to our room. She was likely to be out for the count all night.
    I laid her gently on the cot bed, then nearly jumped out of my skin as her eyes flew open. With her dirty blond hair fanned out around her as she lay on the tiny bed, Tegan’s eyes didn’t leave me as her pale oval face slid into a mire of fear. She was terrified. Wide awake and terrified.
    Join the queue, honey,
I thought. I was terrified too. The implications of what I had done were only just starting to hit me. I’d done something big and stupid and I was petrified because of it.
    “What’s the matter?” I asked cautiously. My fear that she might burst into tears outweighed all my other fears. I had no clue how to handle a crying child, except maybe to scream “Shut up!” In all the preceding years, with all my nieces and nephews, with Tegan herself, when a tiny person got crysome, I handed them back to the person responsible for them, secure in the knowledge that nothing I could do would appease them so I didn’t have to try. In other words, I passed the buck back to the person who’d chosen to become a parent, who’d chosen to deal with tears, snot and tantrums.
    Tegan’s visage of terror didn’t slip, not even for a microsecond as she stared up at me.
    “Do you want to sleep in the big bed?” I asked, taking a wild guess at what might be troubling her—apart from being abducted from the place she’d called home for the past few months and being held hostage by a woman she hadn’t seen in two years.
    Tegan nodded.
    “OK, but let’s have a bath first, all right?”
    She nodded.
    “And maybe something to eat?”
    She nodded again. “OK, good.” That was a plan. A good plan. I could work with this. Bathe her, feed her, get her to go to sleep. Sorted. I got to my feet as Tegan sat up on the small cot bed. She pulled her knees up to her chest, wrapped her arms around them and watched me go across the room to the table with the phone and menu.
    I picked up the laminated menu card and scanned it for something that she might like. It was clear that she wasn’t going to speak to me so there was no point in asking her. Burger and fries seemed the easiest choice.
    She didn’t move as I did homeyfying things like turning on the telly, flicking through the channels to find something unlikely to corrupt her young mind and putting on a couple more lights. I searched through the bags, found her blue checked pajamas, a clean pair of white knickers and a white undershirt. I lay them on the big bed and went to the bathroom.
    It was a functional bathroom with possibly the tiniest showerhead in the world hanging over the bath, but it was clean and mildew-free, a miracle considering it had no