Amy stared blankly at the computer screen, barely able to work. She couldn’t concentrate or even think about what she was meant to be doing. She was sitting at her desk, but her mind was a hundred miles away.
She had stayed out of work for four days. Any longer and she would have needed to get a doctor’s certificate to say she was sick. Somehow, with her parents’ and Jess’s help, she had managed to pull herself together enough to get into the office and look presentable.
‘I look awful,’ she had grimaced, studying herself in the mirror.
‘You are meant to have been off sick,’ Jess had reminded her before she left for St Brigid’s. ‘No one is expecting you to report back into the office glowing with health and looking good.’
The past few days had been a total blur of being at home at her parents’, and then at Jess’s, and Amy felt like she really had been hit by some awful illness that had absolutely floored her and left her barely able to stand or talk or function like a normal person.
‘Just thank your lucky stars that you don’t have to face twenty-seven curious eight-year-olds trying to prise information out of you about why you were sick, and asking you if you had chicken-pox or worms!’ Jess said.
Daniel had texted her, saying ‘THINKING ABOUT YOU’.
‘ME TOO!’ Amy had answered, but there had been no more communication. She longed to phone him or email him but her pride just about stopped her. If Daniel wanted to talk to her he knew where she was!
She’d gone into work slightly early, as she couldn’t face the thought of crowded rush-hour buses, and had slipped behind her desk, then checked the raft of company emails that awaited her. She put the photo of Daniel in a pair of Hawaiian-print shorts and with a cheeky grin on his face, taken in Dingle last summer, into her drawer alongside two copies of Beautiful Bride that she had been reading. She watched from the corner of her eye as her boss Norah arrived into her office and got on the phone straight away. Hopefully she would manage to keep off Norah’s radar until lunchtime at least.
Amy took out the Gordon’s file and began to go through it. They were a family of a father and three sons who ran a chain of busy garden centres in the suburbs, and had come to Solutions with the idea of trying a coordinated marketing campaign to attract more customers and tell them about the landscaping services they offered. Fintan Gordon was a nice man, and he’d insisted on giving Amy a beautiful potted magnolia tree the first time he’d come to the office for a meeting. It had pride of place on Dan’s balcony and was just about to come into bud.
Amy looked at some of the design work that Jilly had done on the campaign, and really liked it. She herself still had to work out the costing on various avenues of the promotion, which included advertising banners on the back of local buses. What a triumph it would be, too, to get a piece on the family business in the Sunday Times! And a lovely double-page spread about the firm in the new The Gardener magazine – if they took out an ad on the back page. It would be money well spent as far as she was concerned. She’d noticed that her dad had a copy of the magazine, and had spotted one in the hairdresser’s and the dentist’s in the past few weeks. It had a perfectly targeted circulation! She rang a few places to get rates, and was busy writing up her proposal when Norah came down to the desk with her usual mug of black coffee in her hand.
‘Good to have you back, Amy.’
‘Thanks.’ Amy glanced up from what she was doing.
‘You’re still looking a bit peaky.’
‘I still feel it,’ Amy said slowly.
‘Hope that boyfriend of yours is taking good care of you.’
Amy didn’t trust herself to speak and just nodded dumbly.
Norah hesitated for a second as Amy stared fixedly down at her keyboard, wishing that her boss would disappear.
‘Everything OK?’ Norah said.
‘I’m fine.’ Amy smiled, trying to avoid Norah’s scrutiny.
She breathed a huge sigh of relief when Norah passed along and turned her eagle-eyed attention on Gary Cole, the new guy who had come to work with them last year. He was getting a lot of the crappy jobs, but everyone had to start at the bottom, that’s how it worked. As Norah pulled a chair up at his desk poor Gary’s pimply skin flushed a deep red.
At lunchtime Amy left early and escaped to Grafton Street, moping about on her own in Marks & Spencer’s and BT’s and grabbing a quick sandwich and a smoothie. The afternoon was spent going over the figures on the Chippos crunchy corn snack campaign with Jackie from their accounts section, and sending replies to about six new potential customers telling them about the services that Solutions offered.
‘Hey, won’t be long till your wedding,’ teased Jackie, who had got married last year in Clare. ‘Where are you two lovebirds off to on honeymoon?’
‘Not sure yet, but I expect it will involve surfing and snorkelling,’ Amy fibbed, feeling herself redden as much as Gary had. She printed out another sheet of figures quickly to distract Jackie from asking any more questions.
She was wrapping things up on the predicted spend on the Chippo’s snack account when Norah called her into her office.
‘I just want a word, Amy.’
What the hell did her boss want?
‘I couldn’t help noticing you weren’t yourself today, Amy,’ said Norah, gesturing to the seat across from her big oak desk. ‘Is everything all right?’
Amy swallowed hard. ‘I’m fine,’ she lied. ‘Just a bit tired after being sick, that’s all.’
‘Are you sure that is all it is?’ asked Norah kindly, coming over to sit near her, perching on the corner of her desk in her classic black shift dress and black opaque tights.
Damn her boss’s perceptiveness! Nothing could get by her.
‘I noticed that the picture of your fiancé seemed to have disappeared from your desk.’
‘My fiancé Daniel?’
‘Yes. He’s a pretty cool guy, judging by that photo of yours. Besides, I didn’t spot you up on any wedding or honeymoon websites even once today.’
Amy sighed. The woman really did have eyes in the back of her head. Jackie and Nadia were right: she must have cameras hidden all over the place.
‘Is everything OK between the two of you?’
Amy heard a sob, and realized suddenly that it had escaped from her mouth. Was she mad, letting her guard down in front of Madame Perfect, her boss Norah Fortune?
Norah, the forty-year-old head of Solutions marketing, with her immaculately styled shoulder-length blonde hair, manicured nails, and round face with piercing blue eyes, was staring at her inquisitively.
‘No, actually, it’s not,’ Amy admitted, her voice breaking. ‘We’ve split up. Daniel doesn’t want to get married.’
‘Oh, Amy,’ said Norah softly. ‘I’m sorry. How awful for both of you!’
‘Yes,’ said Amy glumly. ‘AWFUL!’
‘I remember when I broke up with my fiancé, I thought that I would die and that nothing would ever go right again in my life,’ confessed Norah. ‘It was about four weeks before my wedding, and there was uproar in the family about George and me splitting up and everything having to be cancelled.’
Amy was confused. What was Norah talking about? She was married to a composer called George, a gentle bald-headed man with glasses who was said to have written the music for a big American airline advertising campaign that had netted them enough money to buy a massive house out in Dalkey. They had eight-year-old twins called Charley and Henry who’d been born with the help of IVF. Norah made no secret about it.
‘But you’re married to George!’ Amy said, incredulous.
‘Now I am, but after we broke up I went out with other men. First of all there was a disastrous two years when I was involved with a charming French lawyer called Marc, who slept with every legal apprentice who crossed his desk; and then I had an ill-advised fling with a client. Then, luckily, fate intervened and George and I met up again, when we weren’t so scared and stupid and both knew what we wanted. I adore that man, and he is a wonderful father.’
Amy sighed heavily.
‘I guess what I am trying to say,’ explained Norah, ‘is that you should believe in fate! That in the end we marry the people we love and, if we are lucky, get to spend the rest of our lives loving them. Wait and see what happens. It’s called LIFE! You and your Daniel are both so young.’
All the way home on the bus Amy thought about her conversation with Norah. She didn’t want to be like Norah, and wait years, and waste half her life, with only a slight chance that she and Daniel would ever find each other again. She wanted Daniel now!