The Near Miss by Lily Joseph EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Authors: Lily Joseph
- Language: English
- Genre: contemporary romance
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2.4 MB
- Price: Free
WREN
Before Wren could take a second step from the doorway of the bookshop,
she felt a rush of air from above, followed by an ear-splitting, thunderous
crash. A plate-glass window fell from a great height and shattered onto the
path no more than five paces in front of her. There was a spattering, like
rain, over her clothes, and she looked down to see cubes of safety glass
sprinkled over her jacket, balanced on the creases, along the top of her
breast pocket and in the slight upturn of her shirt hem. Some had gathered
on the top of her black loafers. She thought, as she stared at them, that they
looked like diamante-encrusted shoes that she would never normally buy.
It took a second for a cold feeling to wash over her. The crumpled
remains of the window frame lay on the path in front of her, pieces of wood
criss-crossed like kindling, a sea of little blue-green glass cubes sprayed out
from its edges. Just seconds. If she’d left Cravenwick Pages just two
seconds earlier, the window would have come directly down on her head –
if she hadn’t paused in the doorway to check that text from Alex asking her
to buy milk.
The thought made her freeze on the spot, dimly aware of a handful of
early-morning passers-by looking over with concern. Then slowly,
robotically, and in more than a little shock, she brushed the glass off her
jacket, kicked the fragments from her shoes and numbly walked forward
around the wreckage in her path.
A man’s voice came from above. ‘Jesus, are you alright? I’m sorry
about that.’
Wren didn’t look back; she just continued walking, in a daze, until she
arrived at work.
Wren sat at her desk, chewing her pen and staring into space. The office at
the Northumberland Echo was beginning to wake – the other ‘at the desk by
ten’ workers wandering in holding takeaway coffees, the low electronic
hum of computers being switched on, murmurs of good morning. She’d
arrived first to the empty office, just after half past nine, and had taken
some time to settle from the shock of what had just happened.
Even after she’d picked the last cube of glass from her clothes, she still
felt covered in something. Maybe it was a fog of adrenaline slowly lifting,
or maybe it was the feeling that she wasn’t as invincible as she thought, but
she hadn’t fully shaken it off. Derek and Gary eyed her shrewdly from the
opposite desk then glanced at each other. The office’s most experienced
reporters always smelled a story in the air.
‘You alright, Wren?’ asked Derek, a sturdy man in his fifties who could
do with going up a shirt size and had yellow fingers from years of chainsmoking.
Wren blinked, roused from plumbing the depths of her dark thoughts.
‘Just having an existential crisis about fate versus chance. How about you?’
‘Er, I’m alright thanks. What’s that now?’
‘I’m thinking… are we meant to be where we are at all times? Or is it
just random? Like we just stumble around and sometimes good things
happen and sometimes bad?’
For More Read Download This Book
EPUB