‘I’m not in Cork. We’ll talk soon,’ she said, thinking that this promise might be fake because she really had no idea what she wanted to do next.
She hung up and decided that there was nothing for it but to make all her phone calls. She rang Cormac.
‘Where are you, Coop?’ he said, answering on the second ring.
‘Sicily.’
‘Sicily? Seriously? You on holiday or on the scoop of a lifetime? Is it nice at this time of the year?’
‘Fabulous. We’re in the middle of a heatwave. I can see a swimming platform from here and everyone is flinging themselves into the sea with wild abandon. But I’m not swimming, Cormac. I came here with my sister, actually. It’s a personal thing.’
‘Lots of personal stuff coming up in your life, Coop,’ he remarked.
Toni laughed. ‘You have no idea,’ she said, managing to keep the bitterness out of her voice. ‘Can you talk?’
‘Gimme a minute. I’ll go out into the corridor. The walls have ears around here.’
She waited, hearing the familiar sounds of the office with people on the phone interspersed with ‘Hello, how’re you doing?’ remarks as Cormac made his way somewhere private. The whole open-plan office space was detrimental to secrets, no doubt about it. Toni herself sat in the car if she needed a private conversation. Open-plan offices gave one no place to vent, talk to a loved one or get the result of a worrying blood test. Unless one wanted it all round the office.
‘Right. I’m alone. Spill.’
Toni finished her coffee and, despite the caffeine buzzing through her veins, felt a hint of a deeper unwinding begin somewhere in her solar plexus. She could trust Cormac Wolfe with her life. Her gut knew it and the gut was always right. If only her gut had tuned into Oliver’s gambling.
‘Where do I start? When Lanigan got me in the car park, I’d had bad news the night before.’
‘I thought you were off that afternoon,’ Cormac said sagely. ‘You were still good, obvs, but quiet.’
Toni felt a vague hint of pride. At least she’d been able to hold things together at work.
If she wrote her memoirs, she could add that: ‘My world collapsed but hey, I kept smiling and waving!’
‘Oliver told me that he’s addicted to gambling,’ she said in a rush. ‘He told me he’s lost all his money – and all my money too.’
‘Shit! No wonder you went off the rails. I wonder you didn’t throw a punch at him.’
‘Oliver or Lanigan?’ joked Toni.
‘Both of them.’
‘Both of them deserve someone hitting them over the head with something solid,’ agreed Toni, ‘but it better not be me. I don’t want to add attempted murder to my current problems.’
‘That wouldn’t be a good plan,’ agreed Cormac easily. ‘Lanigan’s a nasty bastard, but Oliver ...’ He paused. ‘I didn’t see that coming.’
‘Neither did I,’ admitted Toni, and allowed herself to talk freely. ‘I had no idea, Cormac. None whatsoever. He’s been lying for years.’
Who knew how many years. Addictions could take time to grow. How many years had he lied to her, and how would she ever forgive him? Could she?
Toni closed her eyes at the thought of all the money she’d had in investments and how long it had taken to grow it. She’d worked so hard, had done endless shifts and back-to-back weekend corporate gigs to build up that money, working without a day off for weeks at a time because she knew her earning power years were limited. She would never be able to make that much money again. Her security was gone and her marriage too, she felt.
‘I’ve lost everything,’ she said, eyes still closed.
‘Shit,’ said Cormac again. ‘I am so sorry, Toni. How much is gone?’
‘I don’t know how much, but we have joint bank accounts, joint investments ...’ She couldn’t mention the money lenders, not yet.
Cormac was uncharacteristically silent for a beat.
‘There’s a lot to be said for not being attached,’ he said finally.
