by Izzy Bayliss
THE GIRL I WAS BEFORE
Lily McDermott Series Book 1
Do you believe in second chances?
by
Izzy Bayliss
Copyright © 2016 Izzy Bayliss
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or other information storage or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the author.
This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This book may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
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 deceased, events or localities is purely coincidental.
http://www.izzybayliss.com
Table of Contents
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
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Recipe for Lily's Heavenly Orange Cake
Read Sample Chapter of Baked with Love (Lily McDermott Series Book 2)
Acknowledgements
About the Author
For my children - my best creations
Chapter 1
The Worst Moment of My Life
It all started after I had just come in the door from work. I’d had a horrible day – a day from hell actually. I was tired and hungry and longed to come in the door and into Marc’s arms where he would instantly make me feel better. I climbed the steps to our duplex, rooted my key out of my bag and with a sigh of relief to finally be home, I let myself in. I dumped my handbag on the console table inside the door and saw that the TV was on, but there was no sign of him. So I walked down the hallway to our bedroom, and it was then that I saw it. Well it was the socks that I saw first. He was wearing his red-soled Paul Smith pair, the ones with the coloured stripes going up towards the ankle. For a man, Marc always did have rather good taste in socks. He specifically co-ordinated his socks to the outfit he would be wearing that day and would happily spend money on designer socks made from silk knits or even cashmere, whereas I would be getting five pairs for a fiver in Tesco. It probably only lasted seconds but it felt as though my eyes were travelling up towards the head of the bed for an eternity. I wish I could say that my first reaction was something witty and clever like, “Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend?” But no. Instead my first thought, I’m ashamed to say was the rather weak, “What a great bottom”. And it was a great bottom. It was smooth and toned with not even a dimple of cellulite, which when you consider all the jiggling she was doing, was pretty remarkable. It wasn’t a bottom like mine – no mine was at least twice the size of this arse. Her olive skin was naturally tanned and her long brown, caramel highlighted hair cascaded mane-like down her arched back. This woman obviously worked out.
I noticed the photos of us from our wedding day were lying face down on the locker. In shock, I dropped my Marks & Spencer's bag containing the meal deal spaghetti bolognese and garlic bread for the dinner that I had planned on cooking him for our three-month anniversary that evening. I had decided to go with an Italian theme to remind us of our honeymoon on the Amalfi coast.
The noise of the bag crashing to the floor disturbed them and they both swung around towards me. Marc’s eyes met mine. I could see panic. He pushed the woman and her long lanky limbs off him and jumped up off the bed with his dangly bits swinging in all their glory before me. He was completely naked except for his bloody socks, which for some reason he never seemed to take off when he was having sex. As an after-thought he cupped his hands over his manhood - as if I had never seen it before!
“Lily!” he said in shock.
It took me a moment, but I recognized the woman who was smiling smugly at me from my Egyptian cotton sheets. She was starting to wrap herself in the throw we got from my Auntie Flor as a wedding present. It was Nadia, Nadia Williams.
“Lily – I can explain. This is not what it looks like – I swear!” Marc was pleading desperately.
“Lily – I’ve been dying to meet you,” Nadia drawled before holding out a long slender hand to shake mine.
Marc shot her a look and sullenly she folded her arms back across her chest again. Marc started to walk over towards where I was standing, reaching out to me with one hand while trying, but failing miserably to cover-up his meat and two veg with the other.
The room seemed to be spinning around me and I thought my legs were going to give way. I knew I was probably doing a good impression of a goldfish right then. Beads of perspiration had broken out all across my forehead and on the back of my neck. I started to back out of the room. Suddenly I was feeling ill. Very ill. And nauseous. The blood had drained from my head and I thought I might pass out. My heart sounded as though it was beating in my ears. I could hear Marc trying to talk to me, but it sounded like he was speaking to me through a very long and far away tunnel. I turned and ran out of the room. Somehow I managed to grab my handbag from the console table where I had placed it just minutes earlier, before racing down the steps of the duplex where we lived. The cool fresh air was a welcome relief as I breathed it in deeply to my lungs.
“Come back, Lily - if you'd just let me explain -” I heard Marc calling from behind me.
I turned around to see him standing in the doorway stark naked.
“It’s not what it looks like, Lily - please!”
But what else could it look like? They were hardly playing Doctors and Nurses in there.
The neighbours' blinds started twitching as they started peeking out from underneath. They had obviously heard the commotion. I put my head down and started to run. Even though normally I couldn’t run more than a hundred yards without thinking I was going to have a heart-attack, somehow the adrenalin kicked in and I kept on running the whole way back down towards the bus stop that I had only just come from half an hour earlier with my M&S bag laden with goodies, full of excitement and anticipation for the evening I had planned for Marc.
My mind was whirring from everything as it tried to process what had just happened. In our house. Our home. I tried to tell myself that this wasn’t happening, that it was just a dream - an awful, terrible dream. I prayed that I had imagined it and I even tried pinching myself. But it hurt, so no, I was de
finitely awake. What was I going to do? It felt as though Marc had taken my heart in his two hands and twisted it dry. How could he do this to me? I was his wife! We were newly-weds for God's sake, didn’t that mean anything to him? I thought we were rock solid. He had said he could explain, but I couldn’t see any explanation that he could offer me to make this okay. I felt the weight of big fat tears building in my eyes, and it wasn’t long before they were spilling over and running down my face as the shock of what I had just witnessed started to sink in.
The sky was full of inky blue clouds that threatened to burst at any moment. I prayed it wouldn’t rain, because all I had on me was a cotton vest top with a light cardigan over it and a pair of linen trousers. In the shock of everything that had happened, I hadn't thought about grabbing a jacket. As I waited for a bus that would take me back towards the city centre, I wasn’t even sure where I was going to go; I didn’t want to go to my Dad’s - he would only worry. I could have gone to my sister Clara’s but I really couldn’t face her in those circumstances. So I decided that Frankie was my best bet.
Soon the heavens opened and it began to pour rain. I stood there getting soaked as my hair began to cling to my face in rat’s tails and the water dripped down from my fringe and into my eyes but I didn't feel any of it.
There was only a skeleton service operating to Ballyrobin at that time of the evening, and I must have stood waiting in the rain for nearly an hour, by which stage the water had seeped up through the thin soles of my flimsy ballet pumps, which threatened to fall apart at any minute.
Marc and I had bought this “two-bed-in-the-middle-of-nowhere-but-commutable-to-Dublin” duplex at the height of the market because it was all we could afford. I had wanted us to buy our own place for ages, but Marc had held out, saying the housing market was going to crash. But we had kept on watching as prices rose and one by one our friends all bit the bullet and became mortgage holders. Of course when I did finally convince him to take the plunge, the housing market did collapse, six months later. So in fact he had been right all along.
Finally I caught sight of the red and white bus snaking its way along the road in the distance. When it pulled up, its wheels sent a shower of muddy water over me. I didn’t care at that stage because I couldn’t have been any wetter. I climbed aboard, wiping the dirty water from my face, and through tears and snot and grit, paid the fare and made my way down the back of the bus to where a gang of teenagers had taken over the entire back seat. They were all dressed the same, wearing hoodies pulled up over their heads and jersey tracksuit bottoms that gathered just above their ankles, to reveal white sports sock and trainers. I sat in a seat about midway down the bus.
“What’s wrong wit yer’ one?” I heard one of the gang grunting, ignoring the fact that I could obviously hear him.
“Ah she’s probably just a psycho or somethin’,” one of the others replied to him.
I stared straight ahead, pretending I couldn’t hear them.
“Yeah I’d say you're right, Aido - look at de state of her. She’s like a bleedin’ banshee!” They all started laughing at that.
As I sat there, listening to them, the tears kept on coming until soon my whole body was shaking with sobs. I kept thinking about the scene I had just seen in my own home. It was so hard to take it in. What had happened to me that evening was bad enough without having to endure the humiliation of these teenagers too.
When we finally reached the city centre, I got off at the quays and was glad to leave the teenagers behind me as I made my way towards Frankie’s apartment. Frankie is my best friend in the whole wide world. Chalk and cheese we are, but I think that’s why it works. We met on our first day in junior infants when Mrs Trevor put us sitting beside each other on the Blue table. My first memory of Frankie is of a tall, skinny child with Pippi Longstocking style pigtails, screaming “Don’t Leave Me Maaammy” and running back out the classroom door after her mother. She was always dramatic even at five years of age. She was christened Francesca, which is what I knew her as all through school but at the age of fifteen she declared she wanted to be known only as Frankie from then on. Stubbornly she wouldn’t answer to anyone who dared to call her Francesca anymore, even teachers.
Frankie worked for herself as a very successful freelance fashion stylist. She had a knack for pulling outfits together, things that look nothing on the hanger work when Frankie puts them on. But alas, despite having been her friend for almost the last thirty years, it has had absolutely no effect on my own dress sense.
“Lily? What’s wrong?” Frankie exclaimed when she opened the door to me. “Are you okay? You look desperate!”
She was never one to beat about the bush. I shook my head and the tears started again.
“What’s after happening – here come in.” She shooed me inside and I plonked down on her red velvet seventies bowl shaped sofa, the one that just happened to be thrown into a skip on a shoot she was working on. She thrust a box of tissues into my hands.
“Okay now speak -”
“I-I-I . . .”
“It’s okay, take your time, deep breaths now. In and out, in and out.”
“I - I . . . Marc -” was all I could manage to get out through the sobs.
“Marc, what? Did you have a fight, is that it?”
I shook my head and blew my nose into the tissue again.
“I caught him -” I couldn’t say the words.
“You caught him what, Lily?”
“I caught him . . . in bed with someone else -” My voice had lowered to a whisper as if saying it out loud would completely break my heart in two. Suddenly I felt my mouth begin to water and my body broke out in a cold sweat. I ran into Frankie’s bathroom and threw my head over her toilet bowl to be sick.
When I was finished I sat on the cool floor tiles with my back against the bathtub. Frankie was perched on the tub beside me.
“Here,” she handed me what I thought was a glass of water and I gulped it back quickly but the liquid burned my mouth and throat.
“Jesus Christ, Frankie – you could have warned me!” I spat the neat vodka straight back out again.
“Sorry – it’s for the shock,” she said apologetically. “You okay?”
I nodded and started to sip on the vodka even though it tasted awful.
“I can’t believe it, Lily!”
“Me neither,” I sobbed as she pulled me into a big hug and stroked my hair.
“I had wanted to surprise him for our three-month anniversary – I was going to cook him an Italian themed dinner to remind us of our honeymoon. I had bought loads of stuff in M&S and I even stayed up late to make a tiramisù last night. I worked through my lunch-break so I could finish an hour earlier and go home to surprise him. But it turns out the anniversary surprise was on me. It was horrible, Frankie - seeing them like that in our bed . . .”
“Do you know who is she?”
I nodded my head weakly. “It was Nadia.”
"Nadia - as in Nadia Williams?"
"Yes," I whispered.
Her hands flew up to her mouth and I think the normally unflappable Frankie was just as shocked as I was. "I can't believe it, Lily."
Nadia Williams was an actress; she was Ireland's golden girl of the moment. Having appeared in a few relatively low-budget films, her most recent role as a domestic abuse victim had garnered her a best-supporting actress nomination in the Oscars, and had catapulted her to international success. She was currently one of the most sought-after actresses in the world, and the Irish media had really taken her to their hearts. Marc, also an actor, had had a minor role in the latest movie that Nadia was starring in, which was being filmed in a remote part of the Wicklow Mountains. Nadia was playing the character of a reclusive writer, and Marc was playing the part of a village man who delivered firewood to her. But although I had known they were filming a few scenes together, Marc didn't even have a speaking part, so never in my wildest dreams would I have thought that they would be moving in the same
circles, let alone sleeping together.
“Well, if I saw that wanker now, what I wouldn’t do to him – I’d string him up by the goolies, I tell you!”
“We’ve only been married for three months. Three months!” I wailed. “Oh, Frankie, what am I going to do?”
Chapter 2
That night Frankie tucked me up into the bed in her spare room. But even though I was exhausted, I still couldn’t sleep. I tossed and turned, watching the hours change on the LED alarm clock. I was thinking it all over and playing the sequence of events over and over in my head. The pain of seeing my husband in bed with another woman was almost physical. I felt like someone had kicked me in the chest and knocked all the air from me.
I must have eventually fallen asleep at some stage because when I woke up, I didn’t know where I was. I looked around the unfamiliar room where fuchsia walls, clashed with orange accessories, and then with a horrible sinking feeling I remembered where I was and what had happened. The events of the night before came rushing back to me with full horror – I had found my husband in bed with another woman. This was the stuff of films - I couldn’t believe it had happened in real life – to me.
With trepidation I reached for my phone on top of the locker. I wanted to see if Marc had tried to get in contact with me to explain himself but I was shocked to find that there were no missed calls or even messages from him. My heart sank even lower. At the very least he should be trying to track me down and begging me to come back shouldn’t he? I put the phone back up on the locker and sank back down onto the pillows. The tears started up again. How could he do this to me?
Frankie knocked softly on the door soon after. “You awake yet, Lily?”
“Come on in.”
She entered the room with a cup of tea and some toast on a tray. “I thought you might be hungry,” she offered, setting the tray down beside me on the bed.
I shook my head, for once in my life the very idea of food made me feel like being sick again. This really was serious, I never refused food.
