Helen

Helen watched Emily walk away from the table and across the dining hall. Emily thought she was being a good friend, but Helen was a horrible friend. If there was a secret to getting Dominic Collins to fall in love with you she patently hadn’t discovered it. She was in no position to offer advice to anyone else.

She closed her eyes for a second. She needed to think. Emily’s argument was perfectly sensible. Helen and Dominic were friends. They did get on well. Maybe she did know what he liked and what made him happy. What she had to accept was that there was more to someone being in love with you than that. There was a certain je ne sais quoi, that Emily apparently possessed and Helen didn’t. That had always been the way. Plain Helen. Clever Helen certainly, but she’d never been the girl that boys gravitated towards, and she’d honestly never cared. She’d seen friends lose all sight of who they were in pursuit of a man, and then have the same man squash their hopes and dreams. Helen would never do that. She knew exactly who she was. That was the beauty of unrequited love. It was stable. It hurt, but it hurt a consistent, manageable amount. Of course, if Dominic did get serious about Emily, that would have to change. The relationship was common knowledge at work and she’d heard more than one colleague speculate that Theo wouldn’t be the only Midsomer getting married soon. And Dominic hadn’t denied it, had he? He hadn’t confirmed it either. Helen closed her mind to the faint voice of optimism. He’d been seeing her best friend for over a year. At some point, even the most ardent devotee had to accept that hope was lost.

That implied moving on. It implied not thinking about him last thing at night, and first thing in the morning. It implied not coming into the office when she wasn’t working, on the off chance of seeing him. It might even imply going out on dates with Other Men. The thought turned Helen’s stomach. She had a flashback to her most recent date. Four years ago with a civil engineer from Leighton Buzzard, who’d been foisted on her by Susie. They’d established over appetisers that he loved speedway and she loved Katherine Mansfield and Vita Sackville-West, and they shared no obvious common ground in between. Nonetheless, he’d ended the evening with an enthusiastic two-handed boob lunge. Nothing about the experience had made her think the hunt for requited love would be any less soul-destroying then staying at home and keeping the candle she held for Dominic burning brightly. Well one step at a time, she thought. Helping Emily could be the start of moving on. There was no need to rush into the rest of it.