“Yeah, I’ll get to that this afternoon.”
“It’s not done?”
She stiffened. “We’ve had other things to prioritize. The trend forecast, for starters.”
“I want the customer survey report by noon.”
When she didn’t move, I bit back my irritation. “Now, Liza. Please and thank you.”
She shot David a petulant look and then moved past, avoiding my gaze. “Whatever,” I heard her mutter under her breath.
It was loud enough for David to hear because he gave me aWhat the hell?look.
And all I could think was:Fuck my life.
Seriously. Fuck. My. Life.
CHAPTER FOUR
MAIA
Ididn’t know how I made it through work that day. Autopilot switched into gear, and I tackled tasks while my mind cooried up in the corner in panic mode. How the hell was I supposed to get out of this idiotic campaign without losing everything? I’d chosen not to tell Hilary the truth about Will just yet because I had to believe there was a way to get out of it without humiliating myself in the process. One positive was that it did, for the first time in a month, distract me from the hurt in my heart.
Liza, thankfully, emailed the report I wanted, but I could feel the frost even in her three-sentence email.
Becky approached during my lunch hour to congratulate me. I could tell by the smug gleam in her eyes that she knew I was miserable. The urge to unleash the past month of emotions on her was real, but ever the professional, I nodded along to whatever she said, dissociating so I wouldn’t claw off her face.
By the time I’d walked up through the wide, perfectly symmetrical Georgian streets of New Town and thendownward onto Hart Street, my pulse raced as my mind whirred with possible solutions. Hart Street was two rows of Georgian terraced homes and black wrought iron gated facades. There were a couple of new architectural additions to the street. Near the top of the road, there was a lane between the buildings called Hart Street Lane. Unlike the Gothic, creepy alleyways up on Old Town, this narrow lane was a well-lit, flower box–laden pathway into the back of the homes.
It had a tree-surrounded courtyard and in the middle of the clearing what had once been an old schoolhouse was now four flats. There was a main entrance, with two flats on the ground floor. My flat was on the top floor across the landing from my neighbor Geri Mills. Geri was a seventy-eight-year-old artist and self-proclaimed spinster. She saidspinsterhad always been a filthy word, but she took pride in the fact that she’d lived a happy, sex-filled life without being “bogged down by the terrible business of marriage and cohabitation.”
“That’s what spinsterhood really is, my dear. Happiness,” she’d told me a few months after I moved into my flat. “A beautiful girl like you ought to have lots of sex, but never tie yourself down to one person.”
Suffice it to say, Geri did not congratulate me when Will and I got engaged.
She probably would once I told her the engagement was off.
The thought made my stomach drop as I glanced at her door before unlocking mine.
It was a two-bedroom flat, it had high ceilings and a bay window that mostly looked out at tree branches, making me feel like I was anywhere but in the middle of the city. It was a little dark because we were surrounded byfoliage and buildings, but it was cocooned away from all the hustle and bustle.
As I pressed a hand to the hallway wall for balance to loosen my ankle-strapped high heels, my attention snagged on my photograph wall. For years, I grew up in a home with no family portraits.
With no family, really.
When I moved in with Dad and Grace, I’d become almost obsessive about cataloguing life and displaying my happy memories. Will called my wall of photographs “clutter.”
It wasn’t clutter to me. It was the visual representation of a life I was grateful for because it hadn’t always been this way.
My handsome dad and beautiful Grace. My wee brother Lachlan who grew up so fast across those pictures on the wall. A baby in my arms when I was seventeen. A teenager last Christmas, his arms crossed over his chest as I squeezed him into my side for a cuddle for the camera. My face was lit up with laughter because he was so annoyed by the affection.
I didn’t see enough of him. Lachlan, or Lockie as we called him, would be a man before I knew it.
I was thirty years old and having to start my romantic life all over again. There was no way I could face my career being wiped out too.
My misty eyes moved over the wall as I stretched my sore feet into the hardwood floors. There was a photo of my extended family, all the amazing, kind people who’d welcomed Dad, Grace, and my dad’s sister Shannon into their lives. It was from my sixteenth birthday party at the Italian restaurant D’Alessandro’s. The restaurant was owned by my uncle Marco’s family.
Marco wasn’t really my uncle, but he was close friends with Dad and Aunt Shannon through his wife Hannah, a member of the Carmichael clan. Her best friend was Cole, and Cole was married to Aunt Shannon. Cole’s sister, Aunt Jo, was best friends with Joss Carmichael, my pseudo-cousin Beth’s mum. And there were a lot more of us than that.
