“What are you doing here?” Sophie asked him. “You’re not going to the divorce party too, are you?”
“The what? No, my fiancée is staying here. I’ve been out of town today, but I promised I’d take her to a late dinner when I got back.” He gazed into her face. “You really look stunning. Sea air, love, and kids—it really suits you, you’re glowing.”
Sophie felt a hot flush sweep across her chest. Jake always did have a way of looking at her that made her feel desirable.
“I think that’s probably just because it’s a bit hot in there,” she said, nodding in the direction of the bar. She beamed at Jake, surprised by how pleased she was to see his familiar face in this familiar place. For a second it felt as if the wheel of time had turned backward and she was where she had been a year ago, working on an unrequited crush on Jake and desperate to get the promotion that would take her to the top of her profession. It felt almost as if her old life had been waiting in suspended animation, holding its breath until she returned, ready for her to pick up where she had left off in such a hurry. But she knew that wasn’t true. Jake might have wanted her once but that was many moons ago and now he was getting married, and so—she reminded herself a little belatedly—was she.
“So what are you doing now?” Jake asked.
“Oh, well, I’ll probably go back to the party for a bit.”
“Come to dinner with me,” Jake pressed her.
“But what about your fiancée?” Sophie asked him. “I don’t suppose she’s expecting a threesome, unless there’s something you’re not telling me.”
“Sophie Mills, are you flirting with me?” Jake chuckled.
“I don’t know, am I?” Sophie asked, surprised. One thing her life with Louis had changed for sure was how she felt about herself. Now she felt beautiful and desirable. Even if Jake had fallen for another woman, she was sure he could see that in her.
“So how long are you in town?” Jake asked her.
“I’m not sure, I’m visiting my mum so—”
“Have lunch with me then? Before you go back. Promise?” Jake’s smile was a perfect balance of boyish and dashing.
“Yes, yes I will—that would be lovely,” she said.
“God, you look great,” Jake said again as he slowly seemed to take in every millimeter of her face. “Stunning.”
“Stop it, you’ll give me a complex,” Sophie said and grinned. “Another one!”
For a second the two of them stood there smiling at each other.
“Jake, I thought you were going to come up to my room to pick me up!” a woman called out across the foyer.
“Oh, there’s my girl,” Jake said, his smile dimming just a fraction. “That’s my fiancée, Stephanie.”
Sophie watched as an immaculate chestnut brunette with hair a little shorter and a little thicker and a lot more styled than Sophie’s marched over to them on a pair of very high heels. She was wearing a gray pencil skirt topped off with a high-necked cream satin blouse that emphasized the shape of her bountiful breasts. As she approached she smiled warmly at Sophie and extended a perfectly manicured hand that Sophie took rather self-consciously, suddenly aware that her fingertips had been nowhere near nail polish in months.
“Hi, I’m Stephanie Corollo. Delighted to meet you …?”
“This is Sophie Mills,” Jake said, kissing Stephanie on either cheek. “A former associate and good friend I just bumped into.”
“Sophie, how lovely to meet you,” Stephanie said. “And may I say what fabulous shoes? Manolo, 1980s, am I right? You and I have a lot in common. Will you be joining us for dinner?”
“Oh no,” Sophie said. “I’m supposed to be at a divorce party, and besides, three’s a crowd and all that …”
“Nonsense, Jake and I practically live in each other’s pockets as it is, and I don’t have any girlfriends on this side of the Atlantic. I’m dying for someone to talk to about things with frills. Come to dinner with us? I’m sure Jake would love a reason not to talk about wedding plans for a few hours.” Stephanie’s plea was charming and sweet and Sophie found her quite hard to resist, but the fact that she had been, on more than one occasion, in a rather compromising position with her fiancé made Sophie feel that she had to.
“I would love to, but I can’t. A friend went out of her way to get me into that party and I can’t run out on her. But it’s been lovely to meet you, Stephanie. You and Jake make a fabulous couple.”
“We do, don’t we?” Stephanie said, slotting her hand into Jake’s and smiling at him. “Well, come on then, darling, they said they’d hold our reservation until eleven thirty, and after the day I’ve had, I need at least two glasses of wine. Make that bottles.”
“I’ll call you,” Jake said, interestingly not making any mention of their proposed lunch date.
“Do that,” Sophie said, nodding, watching for a while as Stephanie strode out of the foyer and into the night, trailing Jake in her wake.
Sophie took her phone out of her bag to call Louis, but the urge to speak to him had waned and it didn’t seem like such a good idea anymore.
Fourteen
The morning after her night out with Christina and her surprise encounter with Jake Flynn, Sophie found a text message from Louis on her phone: “Glad you got there okay. We’re all fine.” There was nothing else, not a hint that he missed her, that he was worried about her, or that he even wanted to talk to her. Sophie’s thumb hovered over the Call button for a long moment, but she resisted the urge to call him.
She spent the rest of Sunday in bed, or in her pajamas sitting on her mother’s sofa, eating cereal and watching TV.
“It’s just like summer holidays all over again,” Iris told her, drawing back the living room curtains to let in some late-September sun that made Sophie blink and rub her eyes. “You never used to want to go out and get fresh air back then either. I practically had to kick you and Carrie out of the door and tell you to enjoy yourselves. The last thing you need is to be sitting around in the dark moping. Why don’t you go out for a walk? Take a dog or two. If you take Scooby he’ll pull you along and you’ll hardly have to put in any effort at all. You need some fresh air to blow away those cobwebs, that’s what you need,” Iris assured her.
“What I need is a new brain,” Sophie told her mother. “A new brain, one that knows how to process rational thought, and I need a new heart, a hard as stone heart, not one that falls in love with the world’s most inappropriate man at the drop of a hat, and most of all I need not to think, and sitting here watching whatever is on the telly is exactly the best way to do that. I need all of those things and nothing that has anything to do with fresh air. I’ve had more fresh air recently than any sensible pair of lungs can deal with and just look where that’s gotten me.”
On Monday Sophie was awakened just after nine by her cell phone.
“I miss you,” she’d breathed into it, answering it while still half asleep and hopeful that it was Louis.
“Really? I haven’t given you a second thought.” Cal’s voice exploded in her tender ear. “Look, I think you should come and take me to lunch today. Eve hates me, and even though I’ve never done better at work, I have the distinct feeling she’s looking for a way to take credit for all of my ideas and shove me out. I need to fight fire with fire—I need your Machiavellian backstabbing skills.”
“I don’t know, Cal,” Sophie said, yawning, stretching so that her feet dangled over the end of the bed. “I was thinking about having a duvet day. I’ve discovered that I like lounging around in my pajamas watching daytime TV. And anyway, my body’s just realized that I haven’t slept late in six months and it’s demanding I catch up with the deficit.”
“Oh no, you don’t,” Cal warned her. “You don’t get to stay in bed moping. You need to be up and about and telling me how to oust Eve permanently without incurring a criminal record, while I commit artery suicide with a double bacon cheeseburger. You owe me, Sophie. I’ve lost hours of my life listenin
g to you twittering on about Louis, debating if he is or is not the love of your life, blah, blah, blah, and I’ve never complained.”
“Er, excuse me—” Sophie began to protest.
“Barely ever complained. And now it’s your turn.”
“Okay, fine, you’re right,” Sophie conceded. “You are a good friend to me and I should be a better one to you even if I am in the middle of my own personal crisis. I’ll get up and get dressed and come and meet you for lunch.”
“Great, come and pick me up at my office at one,” Cal instructed her.
“Well, I would, but I don’t really know if I want to deal with all the fuss of going back to the office …” But Cal had hung up.
After a shower Sophie spent much longer than she’d anticipated in deciding what to wear for her first visit back to the offices of McCarthy Hughes, which had once been such a huge part of her life. She had to get her look exactly right and she had to do that with the haphazard collection of clothes she had thrown into her suitcase. Somehow she had to find a look that said she was happy to have given up her hard-earned and well-paid career for a man she barely knew, but that, given the need, she could step back into it at a moment’s notice because her finger was still firmly on the corporate-event-planning pulse. Sophie found herself thinking of Jake Flynn’s fiancée Stephanie Corollo as she dressed, in the end picking a smart cream shirt to top off her pencil skirt, and finishing with a neat vest that nipped just under her breasts. It took her an age to dry her hair with her mother’s weak and dangerous-looking hair dryer, the very same one Iris had been using to blowdry various animals since the seventies. When she came to putting her makeup on, she found that half of it was missing, probably having found its way into Bella and Izzy’s play makeup set. Eventually though, Sophie was able to stand in front of the mirror and give herself a once-over. She looked good. She looked like a woman in control, even if she wasn’t entirely sure that some of the long blond hairs that had strayed onto her shoulders didn’t belong to an afghan hound called Marilyn.
Just as she was leaving, her phone rang. Sophie looked at the name that flashed onto the screen as she picked up her jacket and bag, expecting it to be Cal. But it was Louis’s name that came up on the screen. He was calling her at last. He was missing her at last, and most important, he was making the first move.
“Hello,” she said tentatively, an edge of uncertainty in her voice.
“Is this Aunty Sophie?” Bella’s voice boomed out. Whenever she was on the phone, she always had a tendency to talk twice as loudly as normal, which Sophie put down to the several months she’d lived with her grandmother.
“Bella? Yes, it’s me,” Sophie said, a rush of warmth sweeping through her. “Why aren’t you at school, are you feeling poorly?”
“I am at school,” Bella bellowed. “Me and Izzy borrowed Daddy’s phone out of his jacket pocket this morning and took it to school so we could talk to you. We put it in Izzy’s book bag because nursery children hardly ever get searched.”
“I’m here too!” Sophie winced as Izzy’s high-pitched shriek came through.
“Shush or else we will be discovered!” Bella urged her sister, who collapsed into a fit of giggles, giving Sophie a mental image of Bella swooping the phone out of her sister’s reach as Izzy tried to grab it.
“Bella? You’ve taken Daddy’s phone without him knowing and smuggled it into school?” Sophie asked her anxiously.
“Yes,” Bella said. “We wanted to talk to you and Daddy said not to phone you until you phoned us, because you needed to think. We were going to call you on the phone box outside school because we know your number, but we needed money or a credit card so I borrowed Daddy’s phone instead.”
“You were going to leave the school grounds on your own to try and phone me?” Sophie asked, trying to quell the alarm that heightened her tone. “Wouldn’t your teachers have noticed?”
“Not at pickup time, it’s easy to sneak past the teachers with all those people in the playground,” Bella said proudly, which didn’t exactly reassure Sophie, but right now she knew the last thing Bella needed to hear from her was a scolding, not if she was prepared to go to those lengths to talk to her.
“And where are you now?”
“We are in the playground, behind the scooter rack—it’s lunchtime,” Bella told her a touch impatiently.
“And are you okay?” Sophie asked her.
“We’re not bad,” Bella said. “Daddy seems quite cross most of the time. And that Wendy woman keeps coming around. They keep talking without us being able to hear them, but I know they are talking about Seth. Who is Seth?”
“He’s Wendy’s son,” Sophie said uneasily, hating the position that Louis was unwittingly putting her in, forcing her to tell half-truths to the children.
“Well, I don’t know why Daddy’s so worried about him. Anyway, I miss you a lot.”
“And me, and me too!” Sophie heard Izzy in the background.
“I miss both of you too,” Sophie reassured them. “I really do. But you know Daddy’s going to be worried when he finds out his phone is missing. He needs it for work.”
“Except he’s not working this week,” Bella told her. “He’s stopped all of his work to help that Wendy woman find that Seth person.”
“Has he?” Sophie asked, taken aback. She hadn’t quite expected Louis to alter his life so radically the moment she left the scene. What did it mean that he’d turned down or called off work right at the moment when his business was gaining a reputation? Did it mean he was willing to give up, for his son, for Wendy, everything he’d been building over the last few months?
“When are you coming back, Aunty Sophie?” It was Izzy who spoke this time, having successfully wrested the phone from her sister.
“Um, well …soon I expect.” Sophie glanced at her watch. She was going to be late for Cal.
“Tomorrow?” Izzy asked. “Tomorrow is soon.”
“It might not be exactly tomorrow,” Sophie told her, feeling her chest tighten. “But it will be soon.”
“Do you promise?” Izzy asked her solemnly.
“I do promise that I will see you soon,” Sophie said, hating to be vague, but knowing that with Izzy at least, an open promise would be sufficient.
“Hey …” Izzy yelped a protest as Bella came back on the phone.
“We have to go, there are teachers coming,” Bella hissed.
“Oh …right, but, Bella, listen—give your phone back to Daddy as soon as you see him, okay? I want to talk to him tonight. And promise me that you will not ever go off the school grounds unless it’s with a relative or someone else you know, okay?”
“Okay,” Bella hissed. “Got to terminate connection. Roger, over and out.”
Once the connection was severed, Sophie thought for a moment, feeling uneasy about the lengths Bella had gone to to talk to her. Nothing really bad had happened, but still, if the seven-year-old was prepared to consider sneaking out of school to make a call to Sophie, then what else might she do if she felt under pressure? Sophie felt angry with Louis, who surely must know she would always have time to talk to the girls. He was being petulant, punishing her for leaving, and it was the children who were suffering. Sophie would have called him right then if he’d had his phone and told him exactly what she thought of him banning the girls from speaking to her, and of canceling his work to follow Wendy. But she didn’t, and all in all that was probably a good thing.
Sophie looked up at the skyscraper where McCarthy Hughes was located and felt her heartbeat quicken. There had been something about her journey over here, the rumble of the Tube train as it carried her into the heart of the city, the smell of the damp autumn air as she emerged a short walk from her former offices, that had sent adrenaline surging through her body, reminding her of the thrill she used to get from her job.
Not so long ago, the building she stood in front of had been her entire universe and she had been at the hub of it. And now she was back.
“Sophie!” Nick Parkin spotted Sophie first when she walked into the open-plan office. “What are you doing back?” He greeted Sophie with a hug, whispering into her ear, “Please tell me that your romantic dream didn’t work out and that you’ve come to rescue us from the Evil Queen and bring spring back to Narnia again. It hasn’t been the same since you left.”
“I’m sorry, Nick, but coming back here is the last thing on my mind,” Sophie lied, wondering uncomfortably if the feeling she was experiencing in her gut was the feeling of being at home. She stopped by Clara Hodgkin’s desk to say hi.
“Sophie, how are you?” Clara exclaimed. “What’s life like on the outside?”
“It’s great, thanks,” Sophie told her.
“Well, I don’t need to tell you how difficult things are here. No one’s got any money. No one’s getting new accounts. The only one who’s doing okay is your protégé, and Eve doesn’t like it one bit. I know you ran away to a better life, but I miss you, Soph. Any chance you might come back?”
“No,” Sophie told her. “I don’t think so, Clara. Look, the experts say that things won’t be that bad for long.”
“Are they experts on Eve getting a personality transplant?” Clara joked bleakly.
Sophie slowed as she approached the office that had once been hers and was now Cal’s. Leaning over his desk in a tight black dress that showed every single one of her ribs was Eve, examining something on Cal’s computer screen.
Sophie stood in the doorway and looked around at what had been her domain for so long. It was the place where she had tried so hard to be secretly in love with Jake Flynn and where she had first heard the news that Carrie had died and left two small children in need of a guardian. Cal had changed it completely, as Sophie knew he would. It had been painted a fresh white, he had moved in a sofa, there was a vase of ostentatious flowers, there were new blinds, and artwork was hanging on the wall.
“A-hem,” Sophie coughed to make her presence known, even though she was fairly sure that both Eve and Cal knew she was standing there.
The Accidental Family Page 22