Read Never Too Late for Free Online Page A

woman entirely. There, with her hands in the soil, Keela was calm, happy, and easy to talk to, a delightful companion for the weeding and planting.
    Such a complex character, so difficult to know what her daughter-in-law was thinking or feeling. She certainly wasn’t the sort of woman she’d envisaged her gentle son marrying. There was nothing she could put her finger on but Keela made her feel uneasy, almost as if she was in the presence of a wild, untamed and totally unpredictable elemental force.
    Now then Maggie , she remonstrated with herself, stop this fanciful nonsense running through your head. It’s just the influence of the wild night.
    The devil riding out, her mother used to say, when the tiles were rattling and the trees groaning at the strain on their branches.
    She entered the bay window, pulling the edge of the thick lined velvet curtains behind her – best quality material, of course, that she had taken great pride in making up herself for her grand new home all those years ago. Blocking out the room’s light allowed a clearer view of the cold silver moon being harried by jagged racing clouds. She shivered uneasily and hurriedly and retreated, straightening the curtains against the night.
    I just needed to make more of an effort to really get to know Keela.
    Maggie… A small, rueful smile flickered briefly over her lips.
    When was the last time anyone but my own side of the family and close personal friends had been allowed to call me Maggie?
    The day she had plucked up courage and told Iain of her pregnancy he had been very firm on the issue. “Don’t fret about anything now, Margaret,” he’d said. “We’ll be married in 3 weeks and you’ll never look back. I’ll make a good life for you and our child.”
    “Margaret?” she queried, puzzled. “Why Margaret all of a sudden? Everyone’s always called me Maggie – you included.”
    He’d shaken his head emphatically. “That may have been good enough up to now but you won’t be working class any more. Not as my wife, oh no!” He’d taken her hand and stared intently into her eyes. “We are very upwardly mobile, as the current expression has it,” he’d promised her. “There’ll be nothing but the best for my son.”
    That was so typically Iain – he wanted a son so he could conceive of no other possibility than that she was carrying a boy. And as usual he got what he wanted.
    Then Chloe had come along but there were to be no more children, for all they tried so hard. It had been a bad time for her when she was finally told that the state of her Fallopian tubes precluded all possibility of an unassisted pregnancy, and Iain would never have agreed to that. Thank goodness her mother had come on an extended visit from Vancouver to help her through that period, a time when she had bordered on clinical depression for a while.
    She’d really missed her parents since they’d emigrated to Canada to live with her older brother and his family. Nine hour flights with two young children were not to be tackled lightly, especially as Iain could never make the time to join her, so visits had been few and far between. Had the children felt the lack of close contact with their grandparents, aunt, uncle and cousins? Who could tell? It was too late now to worry about it.
    Chloe had left home now, too, to take up her first job in the City after completing her degree. That had seen another change to her name – Chloe preferred to call her Meg if they met by chance in town and her colleagues were with her. She tried to make it seem like a compliment that she wanted to call her that rather than Mum, saying that not many girls had mothers who still looked young and stylish enough to be taken for an older sister.
    Have I ever had the chance to make any decisions about my life? What could be more fundamental about your knowledge of yourself than your name, and yet other people keep changing it for me. And I let them! Is it because I love them or a