Sheltering Rain by Jojo Moyes Read Free Book Online

said, too brightly, when she walked into the living room: “Oh, it’s you sweetheart! I didn’t hear you out there! I was just thinking, What shall we have for supper?”
    Her mother didn’t cook supper. She was a useless cook. It was Geoff’s job.
    And then she had met him . Justin Stewartson. Photographer on a left-leaning national newspaper. A man so full of his own sense of self-importance that he had caught the tube rather than travel in her mother’s battered car. A man who thought he was it because he wore a leather jacket that might have been cool about five years ago, and khaki-colored trousers with desert boots. He had tried too hard to talk to Sabine, throwing in comments about underground bands that he thought she would know, trying to sound both cynical and knowledgeable about the music business. She had given him what she hoped was a withering look. She knew why he was trying to be friendly, and it wouldn’t wash. And men over thirty-five could never be cool, not even if they thought they knew about music.
    Poor old Geoff. Poor fusty old Geoff. He had sat at home, brow furrowed as he worried night after night about patients whom he couldn’t get sectioned, ringing around all the psychiatric units in central London in an effort to stop some other nutter ending up on the streets. He hadn’t had a bloody clue. And her mother had merely drifted in and out distantly, pretending to sound as if she cared, until the day that Sabine came downstairs and it was obvious that he knew, because he gave her one of those long searching glances, like, “Did you know? Et tu, Brute?” It was difficult to fool Geoff, because of his psychiatric training. So when she stared back at him, she tried to convey some sense of sympathy, some sense of disapproval at her mother’s pathetic actions.
    She didn’t let either of them know how hard she had cried. Geoff had been irritating, and a bit earnest, and she had never let him think he was a dad of sorts. But he had been kind, and he had cooked, and kept Mum sane, and he had been around since she was a kid. Longer than any of the others, in fact. Besides, the thought of Mum and Justin Stewartson doing it made her want to vomit.
    The announcement that Rosslare was now a few minutes away came at just after four-thirty. Sabine slid out of her seat and made her way to the foot passengers’ disembarkment point, trying to ignore the little flutter of nervousness in her stomach. She had traveled alone only once before, and that had been a disastrous “holiday” flight out to join Jim, her mother’s previous live-in partner, in Spain. He had wanted to reassure her that she was still family. Her mother had wanted to reassure her that she still had a father of sorts. The British Airways stewardess had wanted to reassure her that she was obviously a “very big girl” to be traveling alone. But even from the moment Jim had met her at the airport, with his heavily pregnant, wary-eyed new girlfriend trailing in his wake, she had known it was going to be a disaster. She had seen him only once after that, when he had “tried to get her involved” with the new baby. The girlfriend had looked at her like she wanted her to get as uninvolved as possible. She didn’t blame her, really. The baby wasn’t a blood relative, after all. And she wouldn’t have wanted some kid from a previous relationship hanging around like a lost soul.
    The doors opened, and Sabine found herself transported along the walkway, hemmed in on all sides by chattering people. She wondered about putting her earphones back on, but she was secretly afraid of missing some vital announcement. The last thing she wanted was to have to ring her mother and tell her she had gotten it wrong.
    She glanced around her, wondering what her grandmother was going to look like. The most recent picture she had of her was taken more than ten years earlier, when she