Canada Square (Love in London #3) (26 page)

I knock again to no response, and the disappointment is enough to weaken the muscles in my legs. I sit down heavily on the stone step, resting my elbows on my thighs.

Where is he?

It’s gone seven. The sun is free falling like a pebble into an ocean, leaving a trail of pink and red mist in the dark blue sky. As the shadows descend, so does the cold air, and I pull my thin cardigan closely around me to stave off the evening chill.

“Amy?” A voice makes me lift my head. Jonathan’s standing at the end of Callum’s path, holding a set of keys in his hand. He twirls them around with his fingers.

I stand. “Do you know where Callum is?”

He clears his throat noisily. “Um, I just took him to the airport.”

I open my mouth but nothing comes out. Dizziness overcomes me, and I reach out for the wall of the house to steady myself, but instead of bracing me up, I collapse, my head knocking the corner of the brick.

“Amy, are you alright?” Jonathan leaps forward to catch me, dropping Callum’s keys as he holds me up by my waist. I lean into him with all my body weight, and he staggers, before regaining his equilibrium.

“Amy?” he says again, this time placing a finger beneath my chin to bring my face up. I see concern in the depths of his eyes.

“He’s at the airport?” I whisper. “Why?”

“He’s on a plane to Edinburgh,” Jonathan slides his gaze away. “It should be in the air by now.”

“When’s he coming back? Tomorrow? I could meet him at the airport.” I calculate how long tomorrow’s meeting will take. If it finishes in an hour I could easily get to Heathrow for the afternoon.

“Amy,” Jonathan’s voice is gentle. “He’s not coming back.”

The words don’t sink in straight away. Instead they dance around confusingly.

“What?”

“He’s been transferred to the Edinburgh office. There’s a project that needs immediate help, so he had to leave straight away.”

“But he didn’t tell me.”

“No, he didn’t.”

I take a step back and try to force some air into my lungs. “But why? Why’s he gone? Why didn’t he tell me?” My voice wobbles on the last bit. I’m five words away from tears.

“He wanted to,” Jonathan says. “He wanted to call you, but he couldn’t. He had to get up there right away, it was important.” He shifts awkwardly, kicking the paving slab with the front of his polished shoe. “I can’t really tell you any more than that.”

“You can’t or you won’t?” A feeling of anger starts to build from the bottom of my stomach, joining the fear that’s already resident in my chest. The cocktail makes me jittery, almost punchy.

“Amy.” A look of pity washes over his face. “I can’t…” He reaches out for me and I back away, putting my hands up in front of me.

“Don’t,” I say in a low voice. “Don’t touch me. Just tell me where he is.”

“In Edinburgh.”

“At his apartment?”

Jonathan nods.

“Then I’ll go there.”

Jonathan grabs me by the top of my arms, his fingers digging into my skin. “Amy, he doesn’t want you there.”

28

Ellie pours the last of the wine into my glass, shaking the bottle until the final drops fall into the pool of red. She and Lara have been force-feeding me Merlot all night, telling me that for the next few hours I’m going to forget about the shit storm that’s my life.

Of course, it doesn’t work. Nothing does. All that happens is the wine makes the tears flow a little freer, and my wails a little louder. It also loosens my tongue, until I’m regaling them with the entire, sordid history of my relationship with Callum.

Girl sleeps with her boss and then he disappears, leaving her to mop up the mess he’s left behind. While I’m due to meet with the Conduct Committee tomorrow, he’s starting a new job in the Edinburgh office, far away from the knowing leers and sly looks I’ll be getting.

It always ends up this way. The man gets off scot-free while the girl is the scapegoat. Where’s the justice in that?

“You don’t know what happened,” Lara says gently, after another of my alcohol-fuelled tirades. “You need to talk to him, find out what’s going on.”

“Of course I bloody do,” I snap. “But the bastard isn’t answering his phone.”

“There could be a good explanation for that,” she says, “give him a chance.”

Ellie coughs into her wine glass. “Yeah, a good explanation like he’s saving his own arse.”

Lara snaps. “That’s not helping.”

I put my glass on the coffee table, being careful not to smear the wooden surface. “He isn’t answering and hasn’t tried to contact me. I need to face the fact that he just isn’t into me.” Though I try to smile, the tears are pouring down my cheeks. “I’m on my own, as usual.”

Lara hugs me, rubbing my back as I bury my face into her shoulder. She’s warm and comforting, but it’s a poor substitute for what I really want.

I’m in the wrong arms. It should be Callum consoling me. We should be discussing the situation, making plans, moaning about our terrible luck. Instead I’m confused, lonely and starting to resent the way he’s making me feel. There’s no excuse for this lack of communication.

I want to hate him, but I can’t, and that thought alone makes me want to throw something against the wall.

“You should probably try to get some sleep,” Lara suggests, still holding me tight. “You need to be at the meeting tomorrow, plus you have a bit of alcohol to burn off.”

The prospect of a hangover doesn’t even phase me. I couldn’t care less if I walk into the meeting tomorrow with vomit spewing from my lips and mascara dripping from my red eyes, because
he’s
not going to be there. Is there really any point in bothering at all?

It would be easier to hide in my bed and pretend I haven’t messed everything up. My job, my degree, and most definitely my relationship. In a few short months I’ve gone from a woman who wanted to make something of herself, to someone proving that you can take the girl out of the East End, but you can't take the East End out of the girl.

I’m a walking cliché. I thought I was better than this, I believed Callum was better than this, but all that’s happened is I’ve slept with my boss and been burned.

Stupid, stupid, Amy.

“I won’t be able to sleep, anyway,” I mutter. Nevertheless, I pick up our glasses and carry them out to the kitchen. Lara throws the empty wine bottle into the recycling bin, and goes to grab her coat. After another long hug, she and Ellie take a cab home, leaving me alone in the house that seems more of a prison than anything else.

Being me is a life sentence.

Like a glutton for punishment, I send him another text message before walking up the stairs. It’s short, but surely he can’t ignore the plaintive tone.

Call me. Please.

I don’t expect a reply and I don’t get one. Instead I ready myself for bed, brushing my teeth and scrubbing off my makeup while refusing to look in the mirror that hangs over the basin for fear of hating the person I see staring back. By the time I crawl into bed my skin feels red-raw from a combination of astringent cleanser and salty tears, and I’m completely wide-awake.

At some point in the night the tears disappear, leaving my eyes painfully dry. I stare into the darkness, seeing the shapes of the furniture form in the shadow of the gloom. The only light comes from the shafts of moonlight that fight their way through the gaps in the curtain.

The clock on my phone counts the hours until morning. When there’s only two left to go, fatigue wins out, pushing me into a series of half-lucid dreams that all end up in the same way—I am alone. Callum leaves, Callum dies, I see him sailing away while I wail with my arms flung open. He’s always out of reach.

I wake at seven with a start. There’s a blissful moment of half-awareness before all the facts come crashing back into my consciousness.

By the time I make it into the office, I’m running on autopilot. I don’t remember showering, or getting dressed, or whether I’ve put on any makeup. When I sit at the table in the directors’ conference room, staring at a glass of water that has been placed in front of me, I don’t care whether I have a job or not.

The door opens and Jonathan walks in. He takes one look at me and his expression softens. Breathing in deeply, he grabs the chair next to mine and sits down.

“How are you?” he whispers. When I shrug, he carries on. “I’m here to support you. If you want to stop at any time, or to ask any questions, just give me a nod. I’m not going to let them walk all over you.”

I couldn’t care less what they do, and my lack of response is probably all the answer he needs. He reaches out and squeezes my hand.

A minute later Diana Joseph walks in, followed by two men who I’ve seen before but never spoken to. They’re senior partners with offices on the top floor; the ones with views across the river that turn the rest of us green with envy.

“Amy, this is Sam Haken and Dominic Shaw,” Diana says, taking a chair on the opposite side of the table. “Sam, Dominic, this is Amethyst Cartwright, one of our interns.”

For two men who are usually wining and dining, they look surprisingly chipper. Sam reaches across the table and shakes my hand, while Dominic flashes me a toothy smile. “Amy, it’s good to meet you.”

Still mute, all I can do is nod back.

Dominic continues, “We wanted to come and talk to you today to see how you are doing. Once we’ve had a chat, we’d like you to meet with Lucy Minor, the head of our legal department.”

“What about?” Jonathan asks.

“Maybe we should start from the beginning,” Sam says. “First of all, we’d like to offer you a sincere apology.”

I do a double take, my eyes wide. “An apology?”

There’s another squeeze from Jonathan, as though he’s telling me to be cool.

Dominic clears his throat loudly, pushing up the sleeves of his jacket to reveal tanned arms. “We pride ourselves on our intern program, Amy. Not only do we believe that providing training to young people is important, but it also allows us to build our reputation in the City. We want to be the go-to company for graduate applications.”

“That’s why we were so concerned when we heard what happened to you,” Sam says, a lock of his grey hair flopping over his forehead. “I was aghast to hear that any employee of Richards and Morgan could be subject to such treatment.”

“What treatment…” My words are cut off by Jonathan. This time he grabs my thigh. It isn’t a sexual move, nowhere near it, just the act of a man who clearly wants me to shut up.

Sam continues as if I haven’t said anything at all. “We take harassment very seriously, Amy, especially sexual harassment.”

I frown, turning to look at Jonathan. His expression is as bland as he can possibly make it, and when our eyes meet he gives absolutely nothing away. Deliberately, I lift his hand from my thigh and drop it away.

“I haven’t harassed anybody,” I say, my voice much stronger than I feel. “I don’t understand.”

“Of course you haven’t,” Dominic says, laughing lightly. “Mr Ferguson came to see us and admitted everything. He told us he’s been harassing you for months.”

My jaw drops, and it’s as though everybody in the room disappears. Confusion turns my brain into cotton wool, my thoughts failing to penetrate the fuzziness.

I push my chair back and stand up. “
What
?”

Jonathan stands next to me, positioning himself slightly in front, as if to shield me. “Maybe we should stop it here, Miss Cartwright is clearly too upset to discuss this.”

His voice is calm, reasonable, and his lack of shock makes me realise he knows more than he’s letting on. Jonathan knew what Callum had told them, and he yet didn’t even bother to warn me.

“I understand that this must be very stressful,” Diana says. “But we want to try to make things right. Obviously we’ll be dealing with Mr Ferguson separately, but in the meantime we’d like to offer you a financial settlement to compensate for the distress that he’s caused.”

My previous lethargy disappears, overcome by the adrenaline that starts racing through my veins. I push Jonathan to one side before placing my hands on the table, leaning forward.

“You want to pay me off?”

Diana laughs awkwardly. “It’s not like that. We just want to show some goodwill. We know how upsetting this situation must have been. There’s only three months until the end of your placement, and we’d like you to put this behind you and concentrate on that.”

It’s getting harder to breathe; the muscles in my chest lock. “I don’t want your money,” I whisper. “I want to know what you’re going to do to Callum.”

“He’s being dealt with,” Dominic says, “Don’t you worry about that. As I said, we take this type of thing very seriously.”

The injustice hits me like a sharp slap on the face. Callum’s being ‘dealt with’—disciplined I assume—while they’re offering me money. Don’t they know we both walked into this with our eyes open?

“No.” I look down, unable to meet their gaze. “You can’t do that.”

“Amy,” Jonathan grabs my hand again. “You need to be quiet now.”

“Why?” I turn to him, my face creasing into a frown. I want to shout, to tell them how stupid they’re being.

He didn’t harass me. He loved me. Maybe he still does.

“Because Callum’s told them what happened.” Jonathan’s voice is low. “And he’s willing to accept the consequences.”

Jonathan’s stare doesn’t waiver. He’s trying to send me another message. Telling me to back the hell off, that Callum knows what he’s doing, and I just have a part to play.

But I don’t want to act the role. I want to see my boyfriend. I want to run into his arms, I want to hear him whisper my name as he holds me. The last thing I want is their blood money.

“It’s not right.” Finally, I turn to look at Dominic and Sam. When they glance at each other I can see genuine concern. Sexual harassment is serious; it could ruin their reputation.

“I’ll sign your settlement agreement,” I tell them, the words escaping almost as soon as the decision is made. “But I don’t want your cash.”

I grab my jacket and stalk out of the room, barely able to stop the tears from rolling down my face.

* * *

“What the hell was that about?” I ask, as soon as Jonathan finds me in the corner of the canteen. A cold mug of coffee is in front of me. The sheen forming on the surface is a testament to my lack of appetite.

“I’m sorry, I should have warned you.” Jonathan slides into the chair opposite. “But to be honest, the element of surprise worked well.”

The fury I managed to suppress in the meeting rises to the surface. “Is this a fucking game to you? We’re talking about people's careers, about their lives. The element of surprise?”

Jonathan leans back. “It isn’t like that. Do you think I wanted to sit there and hear all that? One of my best friends has just sacrificed his bloody career and I had to nod and agree with them.”

I take a deep breath, but fail to find much equilibrium. “Why did he do it? What did he do? I need to know what’s going on.”

Jonathan’s shoulders relax. “I’ll tell you what I know. But you need to understand I made a promise to Callum that I’d do everything I could to protect you. I intend to keep that promise, even if it pisses you off.”

“Tell me,” I demand. “Tell me what he’s done.”

“The first thing I knew about this—the first time I heard you were in a relationship—was when he called me yesterday morning. I was in a teleconference and ignored the phone initially, but the fact he kept calling made me realise something was wrong.”

He shifts in his seat. “Callum was about to go into a meeting with the partners. By that time he’d been told about the accusations, and realised that you were going to lose your job. They’d made no bones about that. So he came up with a plan to protect you. It was the only way.”

My throat is so tight I can barely speak. “What plan?”

“He told them he’d been harassing you. That you’d turned him down a number of times but he couldn’t help himself. He said he knew it had been an act of gross misconduct, and he was willing to pay the consequences.”

Tears sting my eyes. “He sacrificed himself for me?”