The Cinderella Reflex (34 page)

“How long will you stay?”

“I’m not sure. Long enough.”

“I could come and visit you, you and the baby?” His eyes were bright with hope.

And if Helene had ever wanted revenge on Richard, she had it right then – as she saw the hope fading when she explained she wouldn’t be leaving him a forwarding address.

“I’ll give you details of a bank account where you can deposit money for the baby. But that’s all. I don’t want any more contact with you. Not for a long time.”

He looked baffled then and so utterly defeated that for a few mad seconds Helene almost changed her mind. Because whatever had happened between them, she knew that part of her would always love him. But she needed her energy for other things now, she reminded herself. She folded her hands protectively over her stomach. For someone else. She walked over to Richard, leaned up and kissed him softly on the mouth.

“Goodbye, Richard.”

Chapter Twenty-Three

The sound of the phone jangling cut through Tess’s thoughts. She looked up warily. After her showdown with Chris in the Travel Café, she had simply emailed Helene to let her know she was resigning her position and that she would take her remaining holiday entitlement in lieu of notice. Then Chris had taken to phoning her daily, wondering when she was coming back to work. Even after she’d convinced him that she was definitely finished with Atlantic, he would still ring at all hours of the day and night, looking for advice about his new role.

In desperation she had switched her phone off and spent a week staring at the walls, feeling nine kinds of stupid for getting herself into such a mess in the first place. She felt mortified when she thought back to all the mad stuff Chris had talked her into. Delivering an elevator speech to Jack McCabe. Thinking of herself as Cinema Tess. It had all seemed a bit zany at the time, a bit brave, actually. But in retrospect it just seemed as if an alien had taken over her body, forcing her to do things she would never normally do. And she couldn’t blame all of it on Chris. When she thought about how she had come on to him the night of the reunion, she felt faint with embarrassment.

But, in the end, there was only so much self-incrimination Tess could endure. This morning she had switched her phone back on, grabbed a notebook and sat down to work through her options. But before she’d had time to commit one thought to paper, the phone calls had started up again. She snatched up her mobile.

“Chris!” she snapped.

“Tess?”

“Verity?”

“Where the hell have you been? I’ve been ringing you for the past two days.” Her sister sounded worried.

“Er … it’s a long story. What’s up?” Tess’s heart started to hammer. What if something awful had happened to someone in her family while she’d had her phone switched off, moping about just because she was going to have to start over yet again?

“Are you okay? I was starting to think something awful had happened to you. I phoned your job and they said you didn’t work there any more.”

“I don’t. But I’m fine. Really. As I said, it’s a long story. So what’s so urgent?”

“It’s not urgent. I was just wondering when you’re coming over to see us? I could visit you, but I’m not sure if there’re flying restrictions for very early pregnancy?”

“That’s late pregnancy,” Tess said absent-mindedly. Then as her brain did catch-up, she shouted, “Oh my God, Verity, you’re not?”

“I am!” Verity’s laughter rang down the phone. “You’ll be an aunt and a godmother. And I need help to go through baby name books and look at nursery furniture, and oh, a million things.”

“I’ll be on the next flight,” Tess said immediately. She hadn’t seen anyone in a week and she was going stir crazy in this apartment. In this town. In this
country.
She was so anxious to get going, in fact, that she cut Verity off after another few minutes, saying they could catch up on all the news when she got to London.

As she bustled about the apartment, booking her flight online and packing her bag, Tess felt the sense of excitement she always got when she was about to go on a journey. She had been in Killty for less than a year but she was already feeling stifled and stressed and vaguely victimised by her circumstances. Maybe she wasn’t meant to settle down? Maybe she could just keep on travelling. Forever. Where was the law anyway, she argued with herself, that stipulated you had to be on a corporate career ladder just because you were thirty?

In less than twenty-four hours she was sitting in Verity’s stylish Kensington home, enjoying a glass of chilled white wine. Verity worked as a self-employed interior designer and, looking around her elegant living room, with its white sash windows and Scandinavian furniture, Tess felt a sharp pang of envy. It had always been that way, ever since they were little girls. No matter how hard Tess tried, Verity had always achieved more. She effortlessly took the gold medal, while Tess had to work like crazy for the bronze. In fact, Verity was the reason Tess had chosen to study journalism in the first place, over her first choice of going to art college. She knew she would only be setting herself up to forever trail in Verity’s ultra-successful footsteps if she had gone into the same area.

Listening to Verity now, enthusing about her shiny new future was lovely, but it was also dredging up that old, uneasy feeling Tess had – that she would always be an also-ran compared to her sister.

But when she started to fill Verity in on her own news, Tess began to relax. Her sister found the details of Chris Conroy’s career-coaching hilarious – the way she’d imagined Andrea should have – and by the time she got around to explaining about her elevator speech, tears of mirth were pouring down both their faces.

“God, I’ve missed you,” Verity said finally, drying her eyes.

“To new beginnings!” Tess raised her glass in a toast.

“New beginnings!” Verity raised her glass of sparkling water. “But come on! You must have known that Chris was an idiot?”

“But that’s just it. I didn’t!” Tess exclaimed. “I
still
can’t believe he was using me to get insider information about Atlantic.”

“Well, I can,” Verity said bluntly. “Nobody ever knew what you saw in him.” She looked at her sister shrewdly. “Did he break your heart again?”

“More like dented my pride this time. Getting back with him was nothing like I’d dreamed it would be. It was like I was seeing him without the rose-coloured specs this time around. But when he dumped me that first time around? I lost all my confidence and I swore then I would never let that happen to me again. And yet somehow I did – with the same
guy
! Did I tell you he has a fiancée?”

“Three times.” Verity raised her eyebrows. “Look, it’s not you, it’s him. He’s a philanderer and a user.”

“But how come I didn’t see that?” Tess persisted. “How come I was – am – such a bad judge of character?”

“Love is blind, I suppose,” Verity said matter-of-factly. “We’ve all been there.”

“Except I don’t know now if I ever loved him.” Tess straightened up. “Staying hung up on him for all that time – cyber-stalking him and checking out his career – it all meant I didn’t have to commit to another relationship, and risk getting hurt all over again.” She looked away. “I’ve been such a coward about life, Verity.”

“And here was me envying you all this time,” her sister said calmly. “The way you took off on your own like that, travelling wherever the wind took you. I would never have the courage to do that. I need everything in my life to be planned and predictable or else I become stressed and cranky.”

“Really?” Tess was shocked. She had never for a moment thought that her sister might envy
her.

Verity smiled ruefully. “And now that I’m pregnant, backpacking around the world is a ship that has definitely sailed for me. Shopping for the baby is my biggest thrill these days.”

It was Tess’s biggest thrill now too, and her days in London fell into a pattern of preparing for the new arrival. When Verity had time off they shopped for baby paraphernalia and when she had to visit clients or disappear into her office on the top floor of the house, Tess went out to enjoy the city by herself.

One sunny afternoon she was strolling along Kensington High Street and saw a man coming towards her with a long, loping gait, pushing dark hair off his forehead in a familiar, impatient gesture. Her pulse quickened. Was it Jack McCabe? But as he drew closer, Tess found herself staring into the face of a perfect stranger. She stopped walking, taken aback by the sheer force of the disappointment which swamped her.

She had refused to think about Jack at all these past few weeks. The only way she could deal with her feelings about him was to banish them to the furthest recesses of her mind. She had been so hurt when he’d laid the blame for the debacle of the relaunch party at her feet, automatically assuming she had been drunk, when she had been trying to save Ollie from himself.

But then, wasn’t that what she had spent the majority of her time doing since she had taken the job? Trying to manage Ollie, figuring out what mood he was in, how she could make him happy so he might become bearable to work with? She had been so focussed on him that she’d stopped taking her own feelings into consideration. Even if she’d won the contest, it would have meant months, maybe even years, of trying to shoehorn herself into a position that didn’t suit her. At least she’d faced up to that much.

Then Verity threw a dinner party. She and her husband had built up a good social life in London and were eager to introduce Tess to some of their friends.

Tess was sitting beside a woman called Sally, a tall, skinny redhead who worked as an editor with one of the top monthly magazines.

After dinner, everyone brought their drinks out to the conservatory. Tess tilted back her head to look at the stars through the domed glass roof and wondered what the future held for her.

“By the way, there’s a maternity-leave vacancy at the magazine for a sub-editor right now. Would you be interested?”

“Me?” Tess turned to Sally, astonished. She had been telling her over dinner about some of the freelance work she’d done over the last few years as a way of financing her travels. But she had no experience of working for one of the top glossies.

“Yes – you’re a trained journalist, aren’t you? And there might be some writing opportunities for you too, if you come up with suitable ideas. Your extended gap year would make a great feature for our readers, for a start.”

“Thanks. I’ll certainly think about it.” Tess was thrilled with the tip-off.

Later on, Verity explained that she’d recommended her to Sally earlier in the week. “I bigged up all your freelance work, and your journalism degree, and told her you were a producer on a top national radio station in Ireland.”

“
Seriously?
”

“Well, it’s all true, isn’t it?” Verity frowned.

“Er …
no
. Atlantic 1FM was a small local station when I was there.”

“But it’s a national station now,” Verity pointed out. “Anyway, it’s only to cover someone’s maternity leave. Of course, you’ll have to go through an interview and impress the hell out of her bosses, but Sally seems to think you’ll walk it. What do you think?”

Tess thought it sounded like an opportunity offered to her on a silver platter. It would be a chance to reinvent herself at a stroke, an opportunity to redeem herself – in her own eyes at least. But then she remembered the last time she thought she was getting a dream job – it had been at Atlantic, and look where that had got her.

“I don’t want you to go for the interview unless you’re serious about the job. It will reflect badly on Sally if you do,” Verity warned, noticing Tess’s hesitation.

“I understand. When does she need to know?”

“Her boss is out of the country at the moment apparently, so the interview won’t be for another couple of weeks at least.”

It was the breathing space Tess needed. She could think about whether this was the right move for her and, while she was weighing that up, she could go back to Killty. She needed to tie up loose ends.

She needed to go back and give up the apartment, pack her stuff, say her goodbyes. She had been in London almost a month now and the time and distance had allowed her to put her troubles at Killty into perspective. Except for the feud with Andrea. That was her biggest regret. The most important thing she needed to do was to try to fix things between them. Before she left Killty for good.

Chapter Twenty-Four

As it turned out, Andrea couldn’t have been more delighted to hear from her.

“I thought I was never going to see you again,” she said softly.

They were sitting in the Travel Café. Tess was dressed in her oldest faded jeans while Andrea was dressed for success – navy business suit, white shirt, dotted scarf and a big briefcase by her feet. “I did try to contact you the day after those pictures were in the
Killty Times
, but your phone was switched off. The paper made it look like Ollie was fighting you on the floor for
It’s My Show
!”

Tess laughed. “Of course it did. Gai Gordan Ryder actually said something to that effect in his report, if I remember correctly.”

Andrea sighed. “Jack and Paulina set us all up to compete with each other and we went for it like obedient nodding dogs, didn’t we?”

“I suppose we did.”

“I convinced myself that winning the contest was the most important thing in my life. I focussed on it so hard I couldn’t see anything, or anyone, else. When I heard you were getting coaching from the hotshot Chris Conroy
and
going to dinner with the boss – hands up – I was jealous and resentful.”

Tess gave a rueful smile. “And you had so little to be jealous of as it turned out. By the way – did you ever find out who Terry was?”

Andrea’s face closed over. “Paul still insists she was just a work colleague. But to be honest, I don’t know if I believe him. I mean, why did he let me think
she
was a he if it was all so innocent?”