Mummy Needs a Break. Susan Edmunds

      

      MUMMY NEEDS A BREAK

      Susan Edmunds

       Copyright

      Published by AVON

      A division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 2019

      Copyright © Susan Edmunds 2019

      Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019

      Cover illustration © Sara Gerard

      Susan Edmunds asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

      A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

      This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

      Source ISBN: 9780008316099

      Ebook Edition © July 2019 ISBN: 9780008316082

      Version: 2019-06-15

       Dedication

      To my husband, Jeremy

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

      Copyright

      Dedication

      Chapter One

      Chapter Two

      Chapter Three

      Chapter Four

      Chapter Five

       Chapter Six

       Chapter Seven

       Chapter Eight

       Chapter Nine

       Chapter Ten

       Chapter Eleven

       Chapter Twelve

       Chapter Thirteen

       Chapter Fourteen

       Chapter Fifteen

       Chapter Sixteen

       Chapter Seventeen

       Acknowledgements

       Keep Reading …

       About the Author

       About the Publisher

       CHAPTER ONE

      How to make blue playdough

      What you’ll need*:

       1 cup water

       1 tablespoon vegetable oil

       ½ cup salt

       1 tablespoon cream of tartar

       Blue food colouring

       1 cup flour

       *A sharp eye to catch bits before they’re ground into the carpet

      Combine water, oil, salt, cream of tartar, and food colouring in a saucepan and heat until warm. Remove from heat and add flour. Stir and knead like it’s your husband’s head, and he’s just informed you he’s working through the children’s bath time, again. Warning: The kids will eat more playdough than you realise. It will turn everything in their digestive systems a deep shade of yellow. Apt really, when you’re discovering what a coward the man you married has become.

      It was a particularly muggy spring evening when my usually uneventful, comfortably boringly suburban life fell apart. I was eight months pregnant, sweaty, grumpy and was working late. Again.

      ‘So, tell me a bit about what’s happened.’ I had tucked my phone into the crook of my neck, a pen making an indent in my middle finger as I scribbled on my notepad. Somewhere beyond the door to my makeshift home office in our spare bedroom, I could hear my two-and-a-half-year-old son, Thomas, pushing a toy truck or car repeatedly into the freshly painted wall of the kitchen. At least, I hoped it was a car. The way our day was going, it might have been his father’s head.

      The woman at the other end of the phone coughed. Could she hear me tapping my pen on my notebook? I eyed the clock: 6.30. My workday was meant to finish at 5 p.m., but the emails from my editor had become increasingly frantic. If we didn’t want yet another front-page story about the unseasonable weather, I needed to get a quote from this woman about her burgled-for-the-fourth-time-in-a-month clothes store.

      ‘I don’t want to make myself more of a target …’ I could hear her jangling a bunch of keys.

      I deployed the most soothing tone I could muster. She sounded about the same age as my mother, but the photos I’d found of her in our files looked as if she was only a decade or so older than me. ‘I’m sure you won’t. You must want something done to improve safety?’

      I bit my lip, allowing her silence to spread out between us. She did not take the hint to fill it.

      ‘More security guards for the mall? Better monitoring?’ I tried. ‘Have you lost a lot of money?’

      A wail echoed down the hallway. She didn’t seem to register it. Judging by her breathing and the whir of vehicles in the background, it sounded as if she was hurrying across a car park.

      ‘Oh, heaps. The insurance excess wipes me out each time. I’m too scared to work late here by myself.’

      I swallowed. ‘I’d love you to raise awareness of the problem.’ I had to get the words out before she came up with another excuse to put the phone down. ‘Maybe stop other business owners getting caught out.’

      ‘I guess.’ The line went silent again.

      Thomas howled from the next room. I cringed. Could his father not handle one bedtime alone? ‘Have you any footage? We could post it on social media, see if anyone IDs the guys?’

      I nudged the door open with my foot and stuck my head through, gesturing frantically at my husband, Stephen, to reduce Thomas’s noise output by a couple of thousand decibels.

      He strode past, throwing Thomas over his shoulder and marching