He shot Will a look of triumph.
Will stepped back.
‘Is this wise?’ he asked Ginger, and she felt herself grow furiously angry.
‘That ceased to be any of your business some time ago,’ she said, steering Zac away from him. ‘Bye.’
Ginger ordered a cab and when it arrived, she and the driver manhandled Zac in. He was definitely drunker than she’d thought. He must have thrown back some more champagne in the past few minutes. The gorgeous dark eyes were crossed now, but he was gazing at her breasts like it was Christmas and she had a stocking full of presents hidden in the front of her dress.
‘It’ll cost extra if he gets sick in the back of the cab,’ the driver warned.
‘I know,’ said Ginger.
Slowly, she extracted Zac’s address from him. He kept trying to kiss her, but she held him off and gave him her award to hold.
‘His place first,’ she said, leaning forward to talk quietly to the driver. ‘Then can you wait till I get him into his place, and I’ll come out and go home.’
‘Fine. On your credit card, love, we can drive all night.’
It took a while to get Zac into his rented apartment, which was a total man cave with lots of boy toys and a TV the size of a cinema screen. Zac had by now moved from happy drunk into sleepy drunk. Somehow, she got him onto his bed, loosened his bow tie, left a glass of water by the bed and left to get the taxi the rest of the way home.
‘Look what I won!’ she said to Squelch and Miss Nibbles, and then she sat down on her couch, still in her gorgeous dress, and started to cry. She’d won an award, everyone loved her and she was back in her apartment with her guinea pigs. Where were Will and Carla going? she wondered miserably.
Was this her life for evermore? Always the one home alone, thinking about other people having fun.
PART FOUR
Three months later
Callie
Freddie was being shifty. ‘It’s a surprise,’ he said, ‘a weekend away.’
‘Why?’ asked Callie suspiciously. She’d gone right off surprises.
‘What’s the big deal?’ Freddie demanded. ‘Can’t I treat my mother, my sister and my niece to a nice weekend away?’
The mention of Poppy did it. Callie somehow relaxed.
Over the past few months, Poppy had decided exactly what she wanted to do with the rest of her life. She loved art and she loved make-up.
‘I’m going to be a make-up artist,’ she told her astonished mother. ‘It makes total sense. I’m really good at it and I have lots of brushes and stuff, things that lots of other girls in school wouldn’t have.’
Her new school was nothing like the school she’d been in originally, but she’d made lots of friends. Poppy still talked to some of her old friends on the phone, and she’d been invited to Dublin for weekends, but Callie was putting that off for the moment.
‘I think it’s too soon,’ she said to Mary Butler on Skype. ‘What do you think?’
‘I agree. Give it time,’ said Mary, her lovely face filling the screen of the tablet Callie had bought for Poppy. ‘Imagine if she heard something horrible about her father ...’
‘Yes,’ winced Callie.
She’d spoken to her daughter about Jason and discovered that Poppy knew a lot more than Callie had thought.
‘Me and Lauren looked him up on Lauren’s phone in her house,’ Poppy revealed. ‘I’ve seen all the stories, Mum.’
She looked guilty but Callie felt like the guilty one.
‘Honey, I never wanted you to find it all out like that,’ she said.
