Second Chance by Jane Green Read Free Book Online Page A

sweet she seemed.
    He took her to a movie that weekend and then out to the Queen’s Arms for a drink a couple of nights later. Olivia invited him to a party that weekend, slightly apprehensive about Ben meeting her friends, worried he would find them too young, but after he told her how much he liked them, he kissed her, and Olivia floated up to her A levels on a cloud of joy.
    They all studied together for their A levels. At the local library, Holly, Olivia, Saffron, Tom, Paul, and sometimes a couple of others, Ian and Pete, would grab a table upstairs, throw their books open and whisper to one another as they worked, all moving downstairs mid-morning, like a wave, to go to the local Italian coffee shop for cappuccinos and Silk Cut King Size.
    Over twenty years ago and Holly remembers it as if it were yesterday. She remembers when they first met, when Holly loved Tom and knew that there would never be another Tom, how Tom and Paul had the same jacket in different colours. They had, in fact, bought them together one Sunday morning down at Camden Market, the five of them weaving their way through the crowds on Chalk Farm Road, cool, confident, indestructible.
    Tom’s jacket was navy. Paul’s was green. Holly’s heart used to lift when she saw Tom’s jacket. Just a glimpse of navy in those early days would send herheart soaring, stick a smile on her face that seemed to last for weeks.
    Holly remembers how Tom used to smile at her across the desk as they worked in the library. Sometimes she’d be buried in revision and she’d look up and catch Tom’s eye and he’d grin; and even then, even when she was over her crush, knew that Tom probably wasn’t the one for her, no longer spent nights crying in her bed as she listened over and over again to the soundtrack for
Endless Love
, even then she knew that whatever she and Tom had, it was special.
    And thought that, maybe, at some point in the future they would find one another again.
    Holly spreads the photos out on the floor and starts to move them around, sifting through for the photos from school, photos of Tom, needing to see him again, if only in a photograph.
    She pulls one from the pile. It’s Tom and some girl. Holly doesn’t even remember who she was, only that she never liked the girl very much. Holly had been at Tom’s flat when she had seen the photo; it was during one of her phases when she had been in love with Tom, but gently, one of the resigned phases when she didn’t expect anything to happen, had been there so many times before only to have it pass. She had seen the photo and had demanded to have it because Tom looked so handsome, smiling next to the girl she hadn’t liked. He looked almost model-like, and Holly had been so proud of knowing him.
    Tom had cracked up laughing when Holly had saidshe was taking it. ‘I’m going to cut her out and stick me in instead,’ she had said with an evil glint, and Tom had shaken his head as if he didn’t know what to do with Holly, which he didn’t. She was, in turn, funny, delightful, warm, wise, insufferable, jealous, insecure and impossible. He loved her but didn’t know how he could live with her. He loved her but wasn’t in love with her.
    Not today, at least.
She just was.
Holly Mac.
A fact of his life.
Someone who would always be a part of him.
As he would always be a part of her.
    Holly gathers all the photos of Tom and stares at them, one by one, thinking back, emerging from her reverie to answer a ringing phone.
    ‘Hello?’
    ‘Holly?’ It’s a familiar voice. A voice from a long time ago. It swims back through her consciousness, bringing the past back with it.
    There’s a pause as Holly nods, the voice trying to place itself, stopping her from speaking.
    ‘It’s Saffron.’
    ‘Oh Saff,’ Holly starts to cry. ‘Tom.’
    There are tears on the other end of the line. ‘I know,’ Saffron says, her voice uneven and small. ‘Tom.’

Chapter Three
    Olivia steps through the door of her