The Cinderella Reflex (32 page)

“I wanted to explain things to you. I wrote that letter to you before I knew you were pregnant. And I know I shouldn’t have left it there, the night of your birthday. Not once I knew about the baby. But I was shell-shocked. I didn’t know what I was doing.”

Helene stayed silent, for once resisting the urge to tell him not to worry, that everything would be all right.

“Of course you must have been pretty shocked too,” he continued after a while. “What with the pregnancy and the pressures at work ...”

“And getting dumped by you,” she raised her eyes to his.

Richard looked away. “Yes. And that. And not winning the contest. I’m sorry about that. I know how much you wanted it.”

“There’re lot of things I wanted that I didn’t get,” Helene said flatly. “But now that I am going to be a single mother, I need a job that’s a little less challenging than trying to tune in to the psyche of the nation, or whatever rubbish Paulina had on the press release.

“What sort of a job?” Richard asked.

“Working in a coffee shop, apparently.” She smiled at the thought of it.

“A coffee shop? Are you mad?” Richard was looking at her with astonishment. “You’re an executive editor! Look, you know I will support you and the baby financially. In fact, that’s why I’m here. I’ve got my financial settlement from the station! It all went through a lot earlier than I expected. “

“Well, that’s great for you. And of course you can support the baby,” Helene agreed readily. God knows the child would need all the help it could get, with only her as a parent. “But you don’t owe me anything. I knew the score when we got involved.”

“I’ve told you,” Richard said peevishly, “I wasn’t thinking straight when you told me you were pregnant. There was the stress of the takeover and Louisa being extra-needy and ...”

“It’s in the past, Richard,” Helene interrupted him.

“But how can it be in the past when you’re expecting my baby?”

“Oh, it’s your baby now. The baby you wanted terminated?” There, she’d finally said the words. Her stomach churned at the sound of them.

“Don’t,” he begged. “I’ve had time to think things over. And well – I still want us to be together.”

“You do?” Treacherous hope flared in Helene. She looked at him seriously. “Have you brought your suitcase?”

“
No.
I mean, obviously, I can’t leave Louisa at this precise moment because ... well, I’m sure you don’t care why at this stage. But by the time the baby is born ...”

“You’ll get around to it then.” Helene finished his sentence for him. “Or maybe it will be by the time the first birthday rolls around? Or the first day at school, perhaps? Or maybe university?”

“You don’t seem like yourself, Helene,” he said huffily.

“Things have changed, Richard,” she said wearily. “I’ve changed. Going back to the way we were, with you pitching up whenever you feel like it is not enough any more. Not when I have a baby to consider. And to be honest, it never was enough. You already have a family, Richard – something I should have considered much, much earlier.”

“But having me around part-time has to be better than nothing, surely? It won’t be easy on your own,” Richard warned.

She looked at him. He hadn’t been there for her when she was in trouble, and something had changed in her then, something fundamental. No matter what Richard said now, Helene knew she would never trust him again.

“I think the term ‘too little, too late’ may have been invented for situations like this,” she said sadly.

“But how will you cope?” he demanded. “It’s not as if you have family close by to help. Please, Helene. Think about it.”

“I have thought about it. As soon as the baby is born, I’m going abroad – to New Zealand. To my sister.” There. Another decision made. She’d have the baby here, at home. And then, as soon as it was old enough, she’d set off on her travels.

“New Zealand?” He couldn’t disguise his shock. “But it’s so far away!”

She shrugged. “I need to find out what I want to do with the rest of my life, and I think it would be easier for me to do that if I wasn’t around here. Around you. The further away the better really.”

“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 the stomach. For someone else. She walked over to Richard, leaned up and kissed him softly on the mouth.

“Goodbye, Richard.”

The sound of the phone jangling cut through Tess’s thoughts. She looked up warily. After their showdown in the Travel Cafe, 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. When she thought about how she had moved into Chris’s apartment for that awful week, allowing herself to think they were together again, 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 make 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 while her sister cooked dinner in the kitchen. 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 and her husband, Philip, now enthusing about their shiny new future together 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.

As she filled her sister in on her news, Tess began to relax. Verity 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.

“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. But it hurt almost as much. When he dumped me the first time around I lost all my confidence. 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 love him.” Tess straightened up. “And I don’t know if I ever did. At least I’ve realised that much. 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. “Oh, 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 soon 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.

Later that week, Verity threw a dinner party. She and Philip 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. Just as the evening ended, she turned to Tess. “By the way, there’s a maternity leave vacancy at the magazine for a sub-editor right now. Would you be interested?”

“Me?” Tess was astonished. She had been chatting to Sally earlier 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.”