The Problem with Perfect

by Megan Mayfair

  The steering wheel received another whack from his fist as he tried to force her from his mind. He knew it wasn’t simply frustration about losing a client, it was the fact that he might never get to see her again. Annoyingly, that fear was stronger than he had thought it would be.

  He looked back at her house. Should he go in and apologise? He had been out of line with some of those comments, but the anger in her voice and coldness of her eyes made him pause.

  He exhaled as he turned the ignition over. Perhaps it was for the best. If he was starting to develop feelings for her, perhaps it was best to say goodbye to the Doyles and put this chapter behind him.

  As he drove, he considered his other clients. There was work to do for them. One, in particular, he’d been ignoring a little lately, but he needed to get back on track with that, especially if Marigold’s threat materialised. And why wouldn’t it? That fight had been awful. You didn’t speak that way to a client, and it was hardly as if another security consultant wouldn’t give a kidney for the opportunity to take his place.

  It was definitely time to sever ties with the Doyles, cut his losses and move on. And try his best to put Marigold from his mind.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Marigold

  Marigold unlocked the apartment and walked in. This apartment, that had caused her so much pain. This damned apartment, that if Julian had never taken, perhaps she’d never have known about Sasha or the blackmail or any of this pain. The apartment he’d hidden from her. Snuck off to in order to escape from his horrible wife. The house that she’d commandeered and made all the decisions about. The company that she loved more than anyone or anything.

  She looked at the sofa. Finn had said it was comfortable. Had Julian especially bought a comfortable sofa compared to the one at their house? Was it an act of rebellion against the lovely designer one she’d picked out, or was it a sign of freedom for him – freedom from her, freedom from uncomfortable furniture?

  Did he kiss Sasha on that sofa? Did he talk about his feelings there? Feelings that she never listened to? Or did he just sit there eating the foods she’d banned, while reading spy novels and watching television?

  That bloody sofa.

  She walked over to it and kicked it. And then kicked it again. It failed to do any damage. She gave it another kick, this time stubbing her toe on it. She hopped up and down, holding her toe, wincing in pain.

  And still, the sofa sat there. No damage. No pain. She started hurling her fists at it, screaming abuse at it at the top of her lungs.

  Hanging her head, she leaned against it. Her heart was beating quickly, yet she didn’t feel better. It was still no good. It wasn’t helping. She looked around. She needed revenge, and this was the only way she could think of to get back at Julian.

  She spied the light fitting. It was hideous. IKEA-ish. Taunting her. She picked up one of the cushions from the sofa and started hitting at it like a piñata. Except instead of candy, out came shards of glass as she hit.

  A voice interrupted her. “What the hell is going on here? What’s all this screaming and yelling?”

  Marigold turned. Oh great. Active Wear Leonie. She should have locked the door behind her.

  Did Julian sleep with her too? Maybe he did. And who could blame him? Clearly Marigold was a cold fish who treated him like a business partner compared to all these lovely women he had at every turn, even if this one did wear active wear.

  “None of your business,” she said sharply.

  “This is Julian’s apartment. What are you doing in here?” Leonie demanded. “Who are you?”

  “Julian was my husband. He’s dead.”

  “What?” Leonie brought her hand to her mouth. “When did this happen?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Can you leave me alone?”

  “Leave you alone to do what? Smash the place up?”

  “Yes.” Marigold took another swing at the light fitting with the cushion, a shard of glass falling down.

  “Stop it! You’ll hurt yourself!” Leonie tried to grab her arms. “Look, you’re bleeding!” she gasped.

  Marigold looked down, and watched as blood trickled to the floor, before the world went black.

  Chapter Fifty

  Finn

  “I hear you brought a woman over to meet Mum.” Finn’s sister, Gretel, poked him in the ribs.

  Finn looked over at his mother, who was in the kitchen, stirring something on the stove. He suspected she was deliberately applying an extremely high-level extra focus to the task to remove herself from the conversation.

  “Why did you tell her? She’s not my girlfriend, she’s my client.” Or was his client, until she sacked him.

  “Oooohhh, client. Some rich housewife whose husband is playing away and getting you to photograph it all?” This was no better than when he was a teenager and his sisters would poke fun at him about some girl in his class who had a crush on him.

  “What exactly do you think I do?” he asked. “I’m a security consultant, not a Peeping Tom.”

  “Who was it?” Gretel pushed.

  “Marigold Doyle,” he muttered.

  Gretel’s mouth fell open. “She owns that transport company, doesn’t she? Aren’t her family, like, billionaires?”

  “Not quite. Look, it’s none of your business. I’m not discussing it.”

  “She was beautiful,” his mother chimed in.

  He shot his mum a glare.

  Gretel gasped. “So your new girlfriend is rich and gorgeous? Jackpot!”

  “She’s not my girlfriend. She’s my client. Can you please stop? What’s wrong with you?” His sister was married, had a job, a mortgage and children, yet she was behaving like a teenager.

  “Why did you bring her here? Is Mum your new business partner? You could send her on a stakeout!” Gretel laughed.

  “I was helping her with something when Mum texted me about the kitchen tap. It was quicker for me to bring Marigold with me while I fixed it as we weren’t far from here. Besides, I won’t be seeing her again.”

  “Was it just?” Gretel looked at him sceptically. “Would you bring all your clients home to meet Mum while you fixed a tap?”

  He wouldn’t. And that was the problem.

  Thankfully at that point a high-pitched disagreement between his niece and nephew erupted from the living room, and Gretel rose to sort it out. He stood up and started to pull bowls and spoons from the cupboards and drawers ready for dinner.

  “I’m sorry, Finn. I shouldn’t have said anything. I forget how your sisters loved to tease you when you were younger, and clearly still do.” His mum sighed. “What do you mean, you won’t see her again?”

  “Job ended.” He wasn’t lying exactly.

  “But you could still see her. She liked you, I could tell.”

  “She’s just lost her husband. She’s not seeing anyone, I wouldn’t imagine. Besides, she wouldn’t be interested in me like that. Do you want me to dish that up for you?” He pointed at the soup his mother was stirring.

  She handed him the ladle. “You deserve some happiness.”

  “So does she.”

  “And she couldn’t get that with you?”

  Finn spooned soup into a bowl. “No. I don’t belong in their world.”

  “Because they’re wealthy? That doesn’t make them better.”

  “No, but she would never see me like that. Can you hand me another bowl, please?”

  His mother gave a reconciled nod and looked at him with those sad eyes she made at him sometimes. The same ones as when he’d told her that things were over with Zara, or the same ones as when he’d told her about the inquest being re-opened. The look he knew that she gave him when she worried about him but there wasn’t anything she could do.

  There was no way on earth that anything could ever happen with Marigold. She’d made that clear, and it was for the best.

  ***

  Driving home after dinner, he heard his phone ringing. He hit a button on his dash to ac
tivate the Bluetooth.

  “Oh, Finn? It’s Leonie. We met a little while ago when you were trying to find out about your friend, Julian? I’m so sorry to tell you this but I’ve just heard he’s passed away.”

  Finn considered this for a moment. He’d not run into Leonie during any of his latest visits. The neighbours still must not have realised Julian had died. Until now. How did Leonie find this out?

  “Oh, no. What happened to him?” He kept up the pretence.

  Leonie exhaled. “I don’t know. I haven’t seen him in ages, but I heard all this yelling and swearing and commotion from his apartment. I went to the door and it was open, and inside was that woman. Remember the one I told you about? The thin one in the expensive clothes? She was there.”

  She must mean Marigold. She’d told him Marigold had knocked on her door.

  “And she was destroying a light fitting, smashing it to smithereens – there was glass everywhere.”

  Finn nearly veered off the road. Fearing for his own safety, and those of other motorists, he pulled over into a side street and parked. “She what?” he asked in disbelief.

  “I managed to stop her, but she fainted. I called an ambulance as there was so much blood and they took her to hospital.”

  “Which one?” Finn’s heart was in his mouth. He shouldn’t have left Marigold like he had earlier. She’d been emotional and distressed and her world had been turned upside down. What had he been thinking, starting a fight with her and then walking out? Shame engulfed him. He’d let her down, and he’d let Peter down.

  “The Alfred, I think.”

  “Thanks Leonie.” He hung up despite the fact that Leonie was still talking about how shocked she was to hear about Julian.

  He didn’t care. He had to get to Marigold.

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Marigold

  Marigold woke with a start, and for a moment had no idea where she was. The room was cold and the bed was hard, but when she saw the blood pressure cuff, she realised she was in hospital.

  Hospital? What was she doing here? She sat up, a slight dizziness hitting her head and she lay back down again.

  “Hello?” she called out. “Hello?”

  A nurse appeared. “Ms Doyle. How are you feeling?”

  “Confused. Why am I here?”

  “You bumped your head. Your husband is here.”

  “My what?” Marigold asked. Was this a cruel joke, or had she just dreamt the last few months? “I don’t have a…” She looked up to see Finn standing there. “Husband.”

  “I’ll get a doctor,” the nurse said and left.

  “I’m sorry, it was the easiest way to get to see you,” Finn said. “Are you ok?”

  “What happened?” she asked tentatively. “What am I doing here?”

  Finn sat down in a chair next to the bed. “There was an incident at the apartment. You cut yourself pretty badly, you passed out and hit your head, and you were brought here by ambulance.”

  A flood of memories came streaming back to her. The disagreement with Leonie. Trashing the light fitting. It was like watching some crazy movie. But it was her life. “Oh.”

  Finn frowned and looked down at his hands, before suddenly looking back up to her. “I shouldn’t have stormed out of your house and left you like that. You’d just had an enormous shock, and I fought with you and then took off. That was wrong.”

  She looked down. “No, I lost the plot. It’s not your fault.”

  A nurse bustled in, disrupting their conversation, with a doctor in tow. Finn excused himself while they undertook a series of checks.

  She asked when she could go home, but they wanted to do further checks. Between them, Finn would pop back to her, and a stern-looking police officer stopped by to issue her with a warning over her behaviour at the apartment. She wondered if a warning was all she was going to get, had she not seen Finn discreetly chatting to the officer beforehand.

  The hours passed. Finn waited next to her, but finally she was given the all-clear to go, on the provision she had someone to take her home and stay with her for a few hours in case she became dizzy.

  “Do you want me to call your parents?” Finn asked.

  Marigold shook her head. “I don’t want them to know about any of this. May I ask you to take me home, please?”

  He nodded and he drove her home. “I’ll get your car from the apartment later,” he said as she settled onto the sofa at her house. “You shouldn’t be driving for the next day or so, to be on the safe side.”

  She nodded. It was strange how ok she was with him taking charge of things for her. It was getting late, so he ordered some take-away for them. She was surprisingly hungry.

  “This is good,” she said, twirling noodles around her chopsticks. “Really good, actually. I’ve never had anything from that restaurant before.”

  He expertly moved his chopsticks around his plate, scooping up a snow pea. “I got addicted last year when I was tailing you and Julian.”

  She let out a sigh. It was still hard to reconcile the fact that she’d been in danger and never known it. Her father loved her so much that he’d clearly wanted her protected. She glanced over at Finn. And when it came to protecting her, Finn was expert.

  “I can’t believe we never saw you,” she said. “How long did you watch us for?”

  “Weeks. Maybe I’m better at my job than I thought.”

  “You’re very good at your job. You’ve been very good to me.” She hesitated. “I’m sorry about our fight. I didn’t mean what I said about Sasha.”

  Finn shook his head. “I took it the wrong way, and I didn’t mean to have a go at your family. You know how I respect all of you.”

  Marigold placed her plate to the side and pulled her knees up to her chest. “No. You made some good points. We don’t always communicate that well with each other, and we do try to figure out what’s going on in each other’s lives far too much. Perhaps we’re all a little insane, including me. Especially me, given recent events.”

  “You’re not insane.” He put his plate on the coffee table and turned to face her.

  “Oh, let’s see.” She held up a hand at him and began counting on her fingers. “Kissing my Pilates instructor, turning up to work and making a big scene, trying to trash an apartment…”

  “Your husband, who was thirty-four years old and fit and healthy, died,” Finn interrupted. He clasped his hand over hers, ending the counting. “And then you found out he was keeping a secret. A lot of secrets, in fact. I think you need to cut yourself some slack.”

  “I just want things to be normal.”

  “What’s normal?” he asked.

  She tilted her head towards him. “What do you mean?”

  “That’s exactly what I mean. What is normal? I don’t know. After the siege, I kept on thinking that things would get back to normal but they couldn’t. The world had changed, or at least it had for me. I couldn’t resume things with Zara, I struggled at work without Simon, these migraines started becoming more common – everything was different. Even food tasted different. How strange is that? But it did.”

  “Zara?” Marigold asked. Who was Zara? Was this the ex he mentioned that day in the apartment? As much as meeting his mother had been curious to Marigold, a potential ex-girlfriend was even more intriguing.

  “Zara was my girlfriend. Well, she was a bit more than that. Not long before the siege I was going to ask her to marry me. I’d bought the ring and was waiting until her birthday.”

  “And you never asked her?”

  He shook his head ruefully. “It all fell apart after the siege. It wasn’t the same. Nothing felt the same. I’d sit there with her – she was the same, exactly as she’d always been – but I couldn’t love her like I once did. It felt like I was with a stranger. But she wasn’t the stranger; I was.”

  “What happened?”

  He leaned back on the sofa, his head resting against the top. “I struggled on for a bit. I guess I was waiting for thi
ngs to be normal again, but after a while I realised that things weren’t ever going to be the same. I ended things, and she went overseas. I’ve not spoken to her in years.”

  “Did you love her?”

  “Yeah. But it was a long time ago. She’s marrying someone else.”

  “I’m sorry.” One moment of horror had such a ripple effect on so many lives. Finn’s friend killed. His relationship not the same. How many other people were impacted? Witnesses? Survivors? Other police officers? How many lives had been thrown so far off course by one decision by one man?

  “Don’t be. She’s a great girl, but I’m long over her. And she’s getting married to some new guy so she’s getting the happy ending she deserves.”

  “Is this why you quit the police and moved back to Melbourne?” she asked.

  “I needed a fresh start. There was nothing ‘normal’ about my life any more, and I didn’t much care for what I had left. I had no girlfriend, no best mate, and I was in a job I was beginning to loathe, so I thought it was time to come home and reset.”

  Marigold rested her chin on her knees in front of her, hugging them more closely to her. Maybe nothing was normal any more. But everything felt so strange at the moment – so completely away from her reality. “It’s just so different. A few months ago, I was on track with things at work with the merger and looking to take over from Dad. Julian and I were happy. Well, I thought we were happy. He clearly wasn’t.”

  “Maybe something changed in his world too. Maybe that flight changed what was normal for him. Or maybe the blackmail. That might have shaken him to the core. I imagine he liked being a barrister.”

  “Loved it.”

  “Maybe things were changing in his world that weren’t normal either, and he didn’t know how to handle it.”

  Marigold looked up at him. “You think?” Had it had that big of an impact on him?