The Birthday That Changed Everything: Perfect summer holiday reading!
'A lovely, emotion-filled, giggle-inducing story' – Sunday Times bestselling author Milly JohnsonShe wanted a birthday surprise, just not the one she got…The last thing Sally Summers expected from her husband on her special day was that he’d leave her for a Latvian lap dancer half her age. So with her world in tatters, Sally jets off to Turkey for some sun, sea and sanctuary.The Blue Bay resort brings new friends and the perfect balm for Sally’s broken heart in gorgeous Dubliner James. He’s just the birthday present she needs. And when the chemistry between them continues to spark as the holiday ends, Sally wonders if this is more than just a summer fling.But James has scars of his own and Sally isn’t quite ready to turn her back on her marriage. This birthday might have changed everything, but what will the next one bring?
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Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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First published in Great Britain by Harper 2016
Copyright © Debbie Johnson 2016
Cover images © Shutterstock.com
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016
Debbie Johnson 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.
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Source ISBN: 9780008150167
Ebook Edition © January 2016 ISBN: 9780008150174
Version: 2018-02-15
This one’s for Ann Potterton and the Turkey gang – who inspired the whole idea in the first place!
Contents
PART ONE: Oxford – 39 and Counting…
PART TWO: Turkey – The Big 4-0
PART THREE: Heading to Turkey – Almost 364 Sleeps Later…
PART FOUR: Endings and Beginnings
I was online, buying myself a fortieth birthday present from my husband, when I discovered he was leaving me for a Latvian lap-dancer less than half my age.
Now, I like to think I’m an open-minded woman, but that definitely wasn’t on my wish list.
One minute I was sipping coffee, listening to the radio and trying to choose between a new Dyson and a course of Botox, and the next it all came apart at the seams. The rug was tugged from beneath my feet, and I was left lying on my almost middle-aged backside, wondering where I’d gone wrong. All while I was listening to a band called The Afterbirth, in an attempt to understand my Goth daughter’s tortured psyche.
The Internet wasn’t helping my mood either. I knew the Dyson was the sensible choice, but the Botox ad kept springing into evil cyber-life whenever my cursor brushed against it. Maybe it was God’s way of telling me I was an ugly old hag who desperately needed surgical intervention.
The fact that I was having to do it at all was depressing enough. As he’d left for work that morning, Simon had casually suggested I ‘just stick something on the credit card’. He might as well have added ‘because I really can’t be arsed…’
He may be my husband of seventeen years, but he is a truly lazy git sometimes. We’re not just talking the usual male traits – like putting empty milk cartons back in the fridge, or squashing seven metric tons of household waste into the kitchen bin to avoid emptying it – but real, hurtful laziness. Like, anniversary-forgetting, birthday-avoiding levels of hurtful.
Of course, it hadn’t always been like that. Once, it had been wonderful – flawed, but wonderful. Over the last few years, though, we’d been sliding more and more out of the wonderful column, and so far into flawed that it almost qualified as ‘fucked-up’.
It had happened so slowly, I’d barely noticed – a gradual widening of the cracks in the plasterwork of our marriage: different interests, different priorities. A failure on both our parts, perhaps, to see the fact that the other was changing.
With hindsight, he’d been especially switched off in recent months: spending more time at work, missing our son’s sports day, and not blowing even half a gasket when Lucy dyed her blond hair a deathly shade of black. I’d put it down to the male menopause and moved on. I was far too busy pairing lost socks to give his moods too much attention anyway. Tragic but true – I’d taken things for granted as much as he had.
As I flicked between Curry’s and Botox clinics, an e-mail landed. It was Simon – probably, I thought as I opened it, reminding me to iron five fresh work shirts for him. I don’t know why he bothers – it’s part of my
