Past Secrets
The Sunday Times No. 1 paperback bestseller, warm and moving - another gem from the much-loved Cathy Kelly.Keep a secret too long and it will creep out when you least expect it…Behind the shining windows and rose-bedecked gardens of Summer Street, there are lots of secrets. There’s the one that hard-working single mother, Faye, hides from her teenage daughter, Amber. And there’s the one that thirty-year-old Maggie hides from herself.When fiery Amber decides to throw away her future for love, and when Maggie ends up back home looking after her sick mother, their secrets begin to bubble over.The only person on Summer Street who appears to know all the answers is their friend Christie. Wise and kind, she can see into other people’s hearts to solve their problems. Except that this time, the secrets she’s hidden from her beloved husband and grown up sons suddenly reappear.When the past comes alive for Maggie, Faye and Christie, they finally have to face it.
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Past Secrets
Cathy Kelly
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.
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
Copyright © Cathy Kelly 2006
Cathy Kelly asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007268658
Ebook Edition © February 2012 ISBN: 9780007389353 Version: 2017-10-28
Praise for Cathy Kelly:
‘A tear-pricking writer, capable of making you care about her characters.’
Daily Mail
‘Totally believable.’
Rosamunde Pilcher
‘An upbeat and diverting tale skilfully told…Kelly knows what her readers want and consistently delivers.’
Sunday Independent
‘Warm and delightful.’
New Woman
‘An absorbing, heart-warming tale.’
Company
‘Her skill at dealing with the complexities of modern life, marriage and families is put to good effect as she teases out the secrets of her characters.’
Choice
‘Kelly dramatises her story with plenty of sparky humour.’
The Times
‘Kelly has an admirable capacity to make the readers identify, in turn, with each of her female characters…’
Irish Independent
For Laura, Naomi and Emer
Table of Contents
If a road could look welcoming, then Summer Street had both arms out and the kettle boiling.
Christie Devlin had lived halfway up the street for exactly thirty years in a small but exquisite red-bricked house that gleamed like a jewel in a necklace of pretty coloured stones.
Summer Street itself was curved and ran for half a mile from the crossroads where the café sat opposite a house which had once been a strawberry-ice-cream shade and was now a faded dusky pink.
From the moment Christie had seen the graceful curve of the street, where maple trees arched like kindly aunties over the pavement, she’d known: this was the place she and James could raise their family.
Those thirty years had gone in a flash, Christie thought on this beautiful late-April morning as she went about her chores, tidying, dusting, sweeping and wiping.
Today the sun streamed in through the windows, the house seemed filled with quiet contentment and Christie didn’t have to go to work. She loved her job as an art teacher at St Ursula’s secondary school, but she’d cut back her hours recently and was relishing the extra free time.
Her dogs, Tilly and Rocket, miniature dachshunds who had clearly been imperial majesties in a previous life, were sleeping off their morning walk on the cool of the kitchen tiles. The radio was playing quietly in the background and the old steel percolator was making the rattling death throes that signalled the coffee was nearly ready. All should have been right with Christie’s world.
And it was – except for a niggling feeling of disquiet. It had been simmering in her subconscious since she’d awoken at six to the joyous chorus of birdsong outside her bedroom window.
‘Happy Anniversary,’ James had murmured sleepily when the alarm went off at a quarter past and he rolled over in the bed to cuddle her, to find Tilly squashed between them. The dogs were supposed to sleep on their corduroy bean-bags on the floor, but Tilly adored the comfortable little hollow in the duvet between her master and mistress. James lifted the outraged dog and settled her at his other side, then moved closer to Christie. ‘Thirty years today since we moved in. And I still haven’t finished flooring the attic.’
