I closed my eyes against the filtered glare of the office in Sydney, desperately trying to find memories of her fingertips pulling lightly at my hair or her spontaneous hugs. What came, though, were not the happy recollections of our holiday, but her shattered expression from that horrendous meeting. Her whispered plea, ‘Nick.’ I’d never heard her voice sound like that before.
Holiday Abbey was happy and confident. She was easygoing and the most honest person I’d met. I could not reconcile it with the shattered woman from today. But neither could I understand how Eric Linden had pulled off fraud of this magnitude without help. I swallowed the emotion. Acquisitions were tough at the best of times. I was probably jet-lagged and just three days ago I had woken to her warm body wrapped around mine.
My brother made his way into the office. He’d turned into a man before my eyes and it sometimes surprised me, even though I see him every day that I can, that he was no longer a boy. He’s a handsome lad. He looks like our mother. Her sandy hair, blue eyes and olive skin. He was clearly agitated. He almost ripped the heavy door off its hinges and his hands were balled. In fairness, he had spoken to me about Alana before we started, and he had specifically told her that he did not want to piss everyone off.
‘Itwasyour Abbey.’
‘She’s notmyAbbey, Ollie.’ I was annoyed with myself that my tone was so defensive.
‘I’m not happy with that meeting, Nick. I couldn’t let Alana not pay her. She has a daughter and a mortgage; we both know that.’
I’m not certain when my brother became wise and emotionally mature. It’s a recent acquisition. I looked at him with suspicious admiration.
‘I know. I agree.’ I agreed so much that I had fired Alana on the way to the lift.
‘There is no way on this earth Abbey had anything to do with this. I thought she was going to pass out in that room. And Alana accusing her of sleeping with her boss was well out of line – it wasn’t anything we discussed. It was wrong and unprofessional. She risked our reputation in that meeting. The last thing we need is a wrongful dismissal with the addition of discrimination on our first bloody week here.’ My younger brother’s blue eyes flamed with his impassioned defence of a woman we barely knew.
‘I know.’
‘Nick, we need to fix this. We both know her.’
‘I said, I know. I’ll take care of it.’ My legs were twitching under the table. I had the urge to get up, stop what was happening and go sit beside Abbey and hold her hand. The urge to protect her, it made my heart pound, and it fucking terrified me.
I would fix this. I told myself it was for the business; it was for Ollie. It was important to find out what happened, so the company could move on. It was important for his future success because Delacqua would be his one day. It had absolutely nothing to do with that shattered woman. Nothing to do with what I’d felt when her hand had touched my chest. Not a thing to do with the internal struggle I’d had of being in the same room with her and not taking her in my arms.
She did not need rescuing.
Chapter Five
Abbey
Ella’s keys jingled in the door at a quarter to four, and it was literally the first time I had moved since arriving home, box in tow, at eleven. I had been catatonic on the sofa all day. My box sat next to my suitcase on the floor of my bedroom.
But when I heard my daughter arriving home, Mum mode kicked in, making me jump up and pretend to be my usual self. Like an American mother on a sitcom, I went into overdrive, fussing over after-school snacks, listening to Ella’s endless story about her new best friend Bella.Ella and Bella, Ella and Bella … Jesus Christ.I opened a bottle of red ‘to make dinner’ and drank the contents before ordering a pizza. Kate was on a date after work so, mercifully, I was spared having to run through the day’s events.
That morning, before the absolute train wreck of a meeting, Kate’s message had been to tell me that Eric had (very publicly) been arrested. When I told Kate I knew, and about the meeting I’d had, it freaked her out enough to start making calls to lawyers, hoping to find someone reasonably priced to ensure her innocent sister did not go to jail.
‘I mean, you don’t know her, but I can assure you she is borderline naïve,’ I heard her saying on the phone to one lawyer. ‘Takes people at face value, does not have social media …’
After pizza, I walked to the kitchen to open another bottle of wine, thankful my membership from a Hunter Valley vineyard (currently being paid for on Peter’s credit card) had arrived at my door. The happiest of deliveries, only made awkward by me hugging the delivery driver.
***
Kate and I met with a lawyer on the Friday, a slimeball named Rutherford Milson, who stared at my boobs and asked Kate out at the end of the meeting. He advised a wait-and-see approach, given there was no knowing if the new owners had any evidence of any wrongdoing on my part. He advised me not to answer calls from the Lindens, which I hadn’t anyway. They had not called.
My belief in Eric’s innocence vanished that night when I heard on the news that Lynne and Libby Linden had made the trip to a non-extraditable country and that Eric had arranged for all their assets to be transferred to Libby before being arrested.
When Pete picked up Ella from school on Friday night, sensations of relief washed over me, closely followed by guilt. But I was honestly just happy to be alone. Happy that I could be as sad as I wanted to be, free to wallow in my unemployment and my apparently imagined holiday romance.
I wallowed for approximately four hours and then I pulled my shit together. A visit to Grandma Iris would result in the restoration of my gumption, so I arranged to take her out for a coffee at a beautiful café just down the street from her nursing home the next morning.
My grandmother had never mastered the concept of casual dressing and she looked at my jeans and Fleetwood Mac T-shirt disapprovingly while she sat resplendent in her wheelchair in wide-legged slacks and a white shirt with the collar up. The shirt was so crisp, the collar standing so firmly, I could only stare at it in amazement. Gran’s still-long hair was gathered up in a sleek bun. She had once modelled her look after the ‘Great Kate’ – Katherine Hepburn – and, honestly, she still looked like an ageing Hollywood icon.
‘Mrs Cavendish!’ The café owner had marked Iris a VIP at some point over the last few years, and so she escorted us to Iris’s favourite table in the window.
Gran had visibly aged since I’d been away and my heart clenched as I wondered how many more trips to the café there would be.
‘Good morning, Cherie. It is a lovely day. We’ll have the usual.’ My grandmother liked English loose-leaf tea in a pot, and scones with jam and cream. ‘Oh, and how did you go with that book I recommended?The Duke’s Dark Desire– wasn’t it marvellous?’
