Read These Days of Ours for Free Online

her parents’ hall. Kate stared at it, jumped whenever it rang, drooping when she realised the caller
wasn’t Him. Twice a day she held the receiver to her ear to check it was working. In the right mood, Kate laughed at this behaviour, but that mood was increasingly elusive.
    Her cousin was a different animal; ‘I can’t face going in,’ whined Becca, two days out of every five. The reception desk she manned at a Soho media company was damp with tears
and she was prone to putting callers through to the wrong pony-tailed executive, so keen was she on relating her tale of woe to her colleagues.
    Charlie’s number danced teasingly in her head, but Kate went resolutely cold turkey. She loved him too much to call him; that’s how she sold her stubbornness to herself. Their
relationship was honest, straightforward, like a clean page in one of Charlie’s journals. They used to watch, baffled, as Becca and Julian tore chunks out of each other like warring T-rexes,
and felt grateful for their own uncomplicated rapport.
    No, Kate would keep her page clean. She’d honour their way of loving each other. If Charlie wanted her, he’d call; she was, after all, the aggrieved party. If he didn’t want
her, if he took this breach as an opportunity to end their relationship, then there was nothing she could do to change his mind. She couldn’t bear imposing herself where she’d once been
desired.
    Kate wanted Charlie, but that was pointless unless he wanted her back.
    A month in to the cold new landscape, Kate had an epiphany.
    We’ve broken up.
    Kate Minelli was now just another human to Charlie Garland. An ex. She couldn’t rely on him in that special way any more. She must carry on alone.
    Mistrustful of melodrama, she examined that feeling.
Of course I’m not alone
, Kate rebuked herself.
    It felt like loneliness, though.
    ‘How do I get through this?’ she asked her father, red eyed late one evening at the kitchen table when she couldn’t sleep and he supplied hot chocolate and a shoulder to cry
on.
    Dad sighed. ‘It’s not what it was,’ he said. ‘It’s not what it could be. It is what it is, darling.’
    ‘Mum’s philosophy is more basic,’ said Kate. She impersonated her mother’s dismissal of her daughter’s distress.
You can do better than that Garland boy!
    Quietly – Mum might be listening in – Dad contributed his own impression of one of his wife’s favourite sayings. ‘There’s plenty more fish in the sea!’
    ‘But my fishing rod’s broken.’ Kate sipped her chocolate, tasting the care Dad had put into making it.
    ‘Mum’s doing her best,’ said Dad, recognising the soft look in Kate’s eyes as hurt. ‘We named you after her, but there the resemblance ends, love. She’s in
one of her strops because of this trip to China I’m planning.’
    All roads led not to Rome but to Charlie; mention of Dad’s much discussed (and argued over) desire to visit China reminded her of how well her two favourite men had got along.
    Unanimous for once, Kate’s parents had despaired of Charlie’s chaotic upbringing, but whereas Mum muttered darkly about the revolving door on Mrs Garland’s bedroom, Dad never
disparaged Charlie’s mother. Instead, he forged a friendship with the boy, one that enriched them both.
    Unaccustomed to paternal input, Charlie was flattered when Kate’s dad sought him out. They would sit and talk while Kate got ready to go out, usually about Dad’s pet topic, Yulan
House.
    Kate and her mother tended to tune out when Dad brought up the Chinese orphanage he sponsored in a modest way, sending them a few pounds each month. He’d heard about it from an intrepid
colleague who’d volunteered at Yulan House a few years earlier. Inspired to send a little money with a brief note, Dad was charmed to receive a handwritten reply in quaintly perfect English.
It was the start of a correspondence between himself and the lyrically named Jia Tang, an indomitable woman who