The Women Who Ran Away: Will their secrets follow them? Read online

  Copyright © 2020 Sheila O’Flanagan Extract from Her Husband’s Mistake © 2019 Sheila O’Flanagan The right of Sheila O’Flanagan to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in Great Britain in 2020 by HEADLINE REVIEW

  An imprint of HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  First published as an Ebook in 2020 by HEADLINE REVIEW

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library eISBN: 978 1 4722 5480 1

  Author Photograph © Bill Waters Jacket images © Iakov Kalinin, Mykola Mazuryk, Kaushik Ray, Kaspri (all @ Shutterstock) and 1Photodiva/Getty Images Hand-lettering © Carol Kemp HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  About the Author

  Praise

  Also By Sheila O’Flanagan

  About the Book

  Map

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Acknowledgements

  Read the opening section of HER HUSBAND’S MISTAKE

  Have you read all of Sheila O’Flanagan’s irresistible novels?

  About the Author

  Sheila O’Flanagan is the award-winning author of over twenty bestselling novels, including The Missing Wife, My Mother’s Secret, If You Were Me, All For You (winner of the Irish Independent Popular Fiction Book of the Year Award) and Bad Behaviour, as well as the bestselling short-story collections The Moment we Meet, originally published as Destinations, The Season of Change, originally published as Connections, and Christmas With You.

  Sheila has always loved telling stories, and after working in banking and finance for a number of years, she decided it was time to fulfil a dream and give writing her own book a go. So she sat down, stuck ‘Chapter One’ at the top of a page, and got started. Sheila lives in Dublin with her husband.

  www.sheilaoflanagan.com

  @sheilaoflanagan

  /sheilabooks

  Praise for Sheila’s irresistible novels

  ‘A fabulous tale with refreshingly inspiring heroines’ ***** Heat

  ‘An exciting love story with a deliciously romantic denouement’ Sunday Express

  ‘Romantic and charming’ Candis

  ‘This Gone Girl-esque novel will have you gripped until the very end’ **** Look

  ‘I read the book in one sitting as it was so enjoyable, full of romance and kept you riveted until the last page. A must’ Woman’s Way

  ‘This is a real must-read’ Closer

  ‘Will keep you guessing right up until the end’ Bella

  ‘One of our best storytellers’ Irish Mail on Sunday

  ‘A thought-provoking read’ New!

  ‘A captivating novel of family ties and romance’ Sun

  By Sheila O’Flanagan and available from Headline

  Suddenly Single Far From Over

  My Favourite Goodbye He’s Got To Go Isobel’s Wedding Caroline’s Sister Too Good To Be True Dreaming Of A Stranger The Moment We Meet Anyone But Him How Will I Know?

  Connections

  Yours, Faithfully Bad Behaviour

  Someone Special The Perfect Man Stand By Me

  Christmas With You All For You

  Better Together Things We Never Say If You Were Me My Mother’s Secret The Missing Wife What Happened That Night The Hideaway

  Her Husband’s Mistake The Women Who Ran Away

  About the Book

  In Sheila O’Flanagan’s stunning new novel, two women face up to shocking truths about the men they’ve loved – and start to make their own decisions about what to do next . . .

  ‘One of my favourite authors’ Marian Keyes

  Deira isn’t the kind of woman to steal a car. Or drive to France alone with no plan. But then, Deira didn’t expect to be single. Or to suddenly realise that the only way she can get the one thing she wants most is to start breaking every rule she lives by.

  Grace has been sent on a journey by her late husband, Ken. She doesn’t really want to be on it but she’s following his instructions, as always. She can only hope that the trip will help her to forgive him. And then – finally – she’ll be able to let him go.

  Brought together by unexpected circumstances, Grace and Deira find that it’s easier to share secrets with a stranger, especially in the shimmering sunny countryside of Spain and France. But they soon find that there’s no escaping the truth, whether you’re running away from it or racing towards it . . .

  Chapter 1

  Grand Canal, Dublin, Ireland: 53.3309°N 6.2588°W

  Even after she’d put her luggage in the tiny boot of the convertible, Deira still wasn’t sure if she was going to go through with it. Which was crazy, she told herself, because this was the easy bit. The harder part had been the previous night, when she’d walked into the dimly lit underground car park and waited for the Audi to unlock automatically. Even as she’d told herself that nobody would take any notice of her, she’d expected one of the residents to suddenly appear and ask her what the hell she was doing. But the one person already there, a young man in head-to-toe Lycra, was more concerned with unchaining his bike than with Deira’s actions.

  Nevertheless, the familiar click as she slid her hand along the driver’s door was comforting. So was lowering herself into the driver’s seat and finding that it still moved automatically to her favoured position when she pressed the memory button. She’d been afraid it would have changed. But there was no lingering scent of an unknown perfume or a different shampoo. No sense that someone else had taken her place. Nothing at all was different. Her heartbeat slowed down. Everything felt normal. Easy. Right.

  Driving slowly out of the apartment complex, she’d told herself that her criminal career was off to a good start.

  Of course she had a key, which surely meant that taking the Audi wasn’t actually a criminal act, no matter how anyone else might see it; but she wasn’t supposed to be here, doing this. Deira didn�
�t care. She was past caring. And being back in the car was comforting in a way she hadn’t expected. So it was worth it.

  Now, as she slammed the boot closed and walked back into the granite mews overlooking the canal, she felt a sudden rush of tears fill her eyes and clamped down hard on her jaw to try to stop them falling. It didn’t matter that she was tired of crying; the slightest thing still set her off, blubbing uncontrollably and embarrassing both her and anyone around her. She rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand. If for no other reason than the sake of her skin, she needed to get over it. Her complexion was ruined from the salt of her ever-present tears.

  She glanced at the clock on the kitchen wall and released a slow breath. Unless she was going to chicken out at the last minute, she’d have to leave soon. After all the trouble she’d gone to, missing the ferry would be a complete disaster.

  But instead of picking up her keys and bag and heading back outside, she put a pod in the coffee machine and made herself an Americano. She sipped it slowly as she studied the tickets in front of her, making doubly sure that she had the right date. It would be idiotic of her to go on the wrong day, but over the last couple of months she’d done so many idiotic things that she didn’t trust herself any more. She recalled the phone calls, the emails and – worst of all – the scene in the office, and she shuddered. She’d been made a fool of, but she knew she’d been a fool too. And that was hard to take.

  She put the tickets back in her bag. She had the right date. She wasn’t a complete idiot, no matter what other people might think.

  Although the trip had been booked nine months previously, she’d totally forgotten about it until the direct debit for the balance had resulted in her account being overdrawn. She hadn’t even realised she’d gone into the red until her bank card had been declined at her hairdresser’s. It had been one more humiliation added to all the others. Naturally she’d burst into tears again.

  It had been Gavin who’d first suggested taking the car to France, confessing a need to drive a stylish convertible along some decent motorways before people judged him a sad old fart and passed comments about his virility and the size of his penis.

  Deira had laughed when he said that, and wrapped her arms around him.

  ‘Nobody would think that of you, ever,’ she’d told him. ‘They wouldn’t dare.’

  Because Gavin Boyer looked at least a decade younger than his fifty-seven years. True, his hair, once even darker than Deira’s, was now almost entirely silver-grey, but that only made him appear even more distinguished than when he was younger. He was still tall and broad, and even if his waist was thicker than it had been in his twenties and thirties, he’d managed to maintain his athletic build. Rather unfairly, in Deira’s view, he achieved this without any great effort other than golf twice a week and an occasional visit to the swimming pool of the nearby gym. Metabolism, he’d say airily, when she complained that, at seventeen years younger, she put on weight simply by looking at a packet of biscuits. He made no comment at all about her monthly trip to the hairdresser to have her own increasing number of greys covered with an approximation of her natural chestnut brown.

  Definitely not fair, she thought now. But life wasn’t fair, was it? Because if it was, she wouldn’t be standing here with a rapidly cooling cup of coffee in her hand wondering if he would set the police on her when he got home.

  She took a sip of the coffee. There was no need to worry. He wouldn’t set the police on her because he wouldn’t know that the car was gone until the end of the following week, and even then he wouldn’t know she was the one who’d taken it. Besides, even if he did suspect her, she’d be miles away and there’d be nothing he could do about it. Interpol would hardly worry about a missing car, after all.

  She shook her head. Car thief. Interpol. None of that was part of her life. France was supposed to have been a holiday. For both of them.

  Their original plan had been to explore Brittany for a few days before heading to Paris. Deira had told Gavin that if he was going to indulge in his dream of open-top cruising down the motorway, she wanted to be able to say she’d driven around the French capital in a sports car with the warm wind in her hair. When he’d looked at her in bewilderment, she’d explained that one of her late mother’s favourite songs had been the haunting ‘Ballad of Lucy Jordan’, in which a thirty-seven-year-old woman feels so trapped in her life that she knows she’ll never get to do just that. When Deira was old enough to understand the lyrics, she’d sympathised with Lucy Jordan and wondered if her mother had ever felt the same way. Now approaching her own fortieth birthday, she’d visited Paris on a number of occasions but had never driven an open-top car around the city’s streets – and had never particularly wanted to until the day they’d collected the convertible.

  Until recently, she would have felt enraged at the notion that any woman would feel washed up by the age of thirty-seven. But she’d come to realise that there was more to it than how you felt, and she knew there were things she’d previously considered unimportant that she’d never have the chance to do. And that, more than anything else, was why she’d cried every single day for the past two months.

  She glanced at the clock again. She knew she was cutting it fine. It was a three-hour drive to Ringaskiddy, and she was supposed to be at the ferry terminal forty minutes before the ship sailed. Unless she was going to abandon her plan, she had to leave now. Yet something was holding her back. She wasn’t sure exactly what. A reluctance to commit herself to all the driving? The knowledge that she was poking a hornets’ nest? Fear of what people would say?

  ‘If he rings, it’s a sign and I won’t go,’ she said out loud, even as she knew he wouldn’t ring, and that if he did, she’d be in a panic to get the car back before he realised it was gone. Even thinking about him ringing was a sign of her weakness, not her strength. Anyhow, she didn’t believe in signs or omens, good or bad.

  Life was life, she often said to her friend Tillie, who had a more open view on random signals as pointers for making important decisions. Seeing a white feather floating on the air or a sudden shaft of sunlight on a dismal day didn’t mean anything more than the fact that a bird had flown by or there was a momentary break in the clouds. Tillie would shake her head and tell her that she needed to be in touch with her inner self a bit more. But Deira was afraid of her inner self. She wasn’t sure it was a part of her that needed being in touch with at all.

  Maybe the very fact that her account had been debited without her actually noticing it was a cosmic sign. Perhaps the fact that she’d had no problem taking the car was a sign too. Or the sign could simply be that the sun was shining in a clear blue sky and the drive would be lovely.

  On the other hand, it was always possible there would be something on the way to Cork that would make her come to her senses and turn around again.

  ‘Plenty of signs on the road to Cork,’ she muttered as she picked up the car keys. ‘Mostly telling you about motorway exits.’

  She slung her bag over her shoulder, set the alarm and walked outside.

  The morning air had warmed up and the bright sunlight dazzled off the canal water as she sat in the driver’s seat and lowered the roof of the car. Truth was, she rarely drove it with the roof down. She lived in Ireland, after all. There was always a good chance that a torrential downpour would arrive out of the blue. And even on the sunniest of days, the wind-chill factor meant that it wasn’t always ideal for open-top driving.

  But today was perfect.

  So maybe that was the sign.

  Deira wondered if she should call Gillian and tell her what she was doing. But if she did, her older sister would want to know when she’d decided to make this trip and who she was going with and why she hadn’t said anything before and . . . No, talking to Gill would definitely be a sign, Deira thought. A sign that I’ve lost my mind completely.

  She started the car and pulled away from the kerb. Her phone rang almost at once, and her heart began to beat wildly.r />
  ‘Are you on your way?’ asked Tillie.

  ‘I’ve just set off.’

  ‘You’ll be late.’

  ‘No I won’t.’

  ‘No phone calls?’

  ‘No,’ said Deira.

  ‘Everything will be fine,’ said Tillie. ‘Have fun.’

  She waited for Tillie to remind her not to do anything crazy, but when she didn’t, Deira simply replied that she’d do her best to have a good time.

  ‘You deserve to,’ said Tillie. ‘I’ll send you positive vibes and keep in touch.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Deira ended the call and continued to follow the canal before turning onto the industrialised Naas Road. The traffic on a Saturday morning wasn’t too heavy, and she nudged her speed up a little. Her hair whipped across her face and she tucked it behind her ears. My life hasn’t been wasted, she told herself, as she thought again of Lucy Jordan. It really hasn’t.

  And yet as she drove on, she was regretting once again the choices she’d made and the decisions she’d taken that now meant that, in ways she’d pretended to herself didn’t matter, the last thirteen years of her life had been entirely wasted. There was no point in thinking otherwise. Nothing could change it. That was the thing. Not taking the car, not driving to Paris, not telling herself that forty was the new thirty. What had happened had happened and the worst part of it all was that she’d been complicit in it. Which really did make her an absolute, utter, complete fool.

  ‘Of course you’re not a fool.’

  Tillie’s words, spoken when Deira had first broken the news to her, came back to her.

  ‘Yes I am,’ Deira had told her. ‘I’m the same kind of fool that all women are. Thinking they’re doing what they’re doing because that’s what they want when really it’s just because they’re in love with the wrong man.’

  Tillie had hugged her then.

  And Deira had felt the rage and the hurt ball up inside her so tightly that she literally doubled over with the pain of it.