“Good morning, Rob,” she said, as she pulled her chair in under the table. He nodded vaguely in her direction, swiped at his crusted eyes, and stayed silent.
“Enjoying the paper?” she asked, looking down at the Journal that was taking up half the table.
“Yeah,” he said, not even looking up to meet her gaze.
She nodded, looked down at the paper again, and replied: “Good. Do you find you get more from the stock tips when you read them upside down?”
Marco sniggered, and Mrs Cavelli studiously nibbled the corner of a pain au chocolat. Rob glared at them, picked up the rustling newspaper, and switched it around until it was the right way up.
“Better?” Leah asked, pouring herself a coffee.
“Yeah,” he mumbled. It was obviously his word for the day, and as much as she was going to get out of him. Served her right for bear-baiting. She should have left him alone, let him have the space and silence he craved, but heck, she was tired too. Tired of sleepless nights. Tired of wondering what was going on in his mind. Tired of wanting to hold him, to comfort him, and not being able to. Tired of him pushing her away. In Scotland she’d struggled to keep her hands off him for sexual reasons; here, now, it was more. It was a basic instinct to reach out to another human being, and fighting it all the time was getting pretty exhausting.
“So, Leah,” said Dorothea, shaking a napkin onto her lap and attracting the attention of everyone in the room. “I thought it went amazingly well last night – you did an outstanding job! Everyone was full of compliments, and I simply lost track of the amount of guests who asked for your details. Isn’t she fantastic, boys?”
“Truly fantastic,” said Marco, mumbling around a mouthful of food, “you did well, Leah, really well.”
Rob remained silent, until his mother appeared to kick him in the shin under the table. With a pair of very pointy shoes.
“Ouch. Yeah. She’s amazing,” he replied dutifully, making it sound like the rote answers primary school kids give in assembly. If it hadn’t been for his obvious distress, Leah would probably have considered kicking him under the table herself.
Mrs Cavelli was staring at him the way a butterfly collector might at a particularly impressive specimen of Red Admiral. Like he was a thing of great beauty that she admired, but was about to stick a spike through. There was a slight shake of her head, a flutter of sadness in the green of her eyes, then she turned her glance back to Leah. Rob returned to his paper, oblivious to the tensions swirling around him. Oblivious, or just too hungover to care.
“Well, it wasn’t just the food that was a hit, Leah,” Dorothea said, “it was you personally. I know you’re fresh out of a relationship—”
“So fresh, in fact, I was still wearing the wedding dress a few days ago,” Leah replied, not liking the sound of this particular conversation, or the scheming look on Mrs Cavelli’s face.
“Yes, so I understand. But that’s the past, and this is the present, and you have a future to think of. Heaven forbid anyone ever tells me the details of what you and my son got up to in Scotland – some things are not meant for a mother’s ears – but I believe that as of now, you are young, free and single. Is that right?”
“Yeah,” answered Rob on her behalf, his voice gruff and definite.
Leah picked up a bread roll from the basket and pinged it at the side of his head. It bounced off, leaving fresh crumbs in his already unruly hair. He grimaced, like Thor’s hammer had smashed into his skull.
“You shut up, sunshine,” she said. “I can speak for myself. Dorothea, yes, technically you are correct, but I am really not interested in men at the moment. Any of them. I have work to establish, I have to sort out my finances, find somewhere to live—”
“Oh piffle!” she interrupted, dismissing Leah’s to-do list in the way only a wealthy woman could. “That’s all very dull. Listen, last night, I promised Rick Machin I’d ask if he could have your phone number. Rick Machin, my dear, is one of the most eligible bachelors in all of Chicago. Probably third most eligible, after the two specimens sitting at the table with us right now.”
Marco snorted in amusement, but didn’t speak. Rob, Leah thought, frowned a little bit harder, but it was tough to tell with his face almost slumped into the newsprint. She turned back to Dorothea, who was waiting intently for her reaction.
“No,” Leah replied, thinking it best to keep it simple. She’d seen Mrs Cavelli in action before, and being subtle was like an earthworm trying to reason with an oncoming steamroller, just before the squelch. “No, you can’t give him my phone number.”
“No? What do you mean, no? Why ever not? He’s handsome, charming, a splendid chef…”
“No,” Leah repeated, stressing the word as firmly as she could without shouting.
“But darling, you’d have so much in common!”
“We’d have nothing in common, and I’m not interested. I’m very grateful for the opportunity you gave me last night, Mrs Cavelli, but if you carry on trying to bully me into this, I’m afraid you’re next in line for a bread roll to the head.”
There was a deathly silence. Marco held his hands over his mouth to stop himself from laughing out loud, and even Rob’s lips twitched in that familiar sideways half-smile she already knew so well. The half-smile she hadn’t seen much of at all since they came to Chicago. He looked up from the paper and caught her staring. The smile disappeared. Whatever he saw in her face was enough to turn his gaze cold, like the lights had been switched off inside him.
There was a beat as they locked stares, all humour drained from the situation. His eyes were deep, dark, angry. Angry with her? With himself? With everything? Leah desperately wanted to look away from that icy glare but somehow couldn’t, and she felt a fierce blush burning up over her neck and cheeks.
“No, Mom’s right, Leah,” he said after several long, cool seconds. “You should give it a go. Rick’s a nice guy - I never met a woman yet who didn’t think so. Go out on a date. Have some fun. It’ll be good for you. Maybe you need to start over, get away from your bad decisions. All of them.”
The tension in the room ratcheted up a notch, as Marco and Dorothea looked on. It was clear to Leah that he included himself in the ‘bad decisions’ category, and her heart ached for him. There had been hints of this side of him in Scotland, but here in this room, with what seemed to be the physical and emotional hangover from hell, it was in full force: he hated himself with a raging intensity that excluded everything but his own pain and guilt.
Leah had no idea if that kind of hatred could be overcome, and suspected she’d never find out – she couldn’t help a man who didn’t want to be helped. Who didn’t even want her around. He seemed desperate to offload her onto someone else, onto this Rick Machin character, to get rid of her. Maybe he wanted to wash his hands of even partial responsibility for her, wipe the slate clean, pretend nothing had ever happened between them. It hurt, but perhaps he was right, and she did need to start over. Because the Rob sitting in front of her was nothing like the man she’d spent her Christmas with. He was twisted, and sad, and humourless, and verging on cruel. Her heart might be tugging the rest of her towards him, but her survival instinct told her to slow right down.
“You really think I should?” she asked. Her tone was neutral; her face was neutral. Her heart was thudding like a wild thing in her chest. She felt furious and hurt and insulted and confused, all at the same time – but fought like a wild thing to keep all of those emotions hidden.
Rob shrugged his broad shoulders, pulled a ‘who-gives-a-damn’ face, and said one word:
“Yeah.”
The word of the day.
Leah stood up, no longer able to bear being in the same room as him. She paused in the doorway, looked over her shoulder.
‘You know what, Dorothea? Why not? Give him my number. Maybe it’s time I had a little fun of my own.’
Chapter 13
She didn’t speak to Rob again for almost a fortnight. It was a l
ong fortnight, and a strange one, made up of what felt like a thousand days and nights and a million ups and downs. She felt abandoned, and lonely, and strangely determined to try and break through to him.
He’d left for New York three days after their laugh-a-minute brunch, and had been a ghost in the time in between. He spent eighteen hours a day in his office, and did a spectacular job of avoiding her and everyone else when he was at home; evading them all with manoeuvres worthy of a special-ops unit.
Leah had given them both a day to cool down, then did what came naturally to her: tried to make things better. Rob had made it obvious he didn’t want a relationship with her - but he clearly needed a friend, whether he realised it or not. She’d seen it now, the depth of his pain; the black hole of despair that lived inside him, consuming him like an emotional tapeworm. Nobody deserved that, no matter how much they blamed themselves for the death of those they loved. Not even you, a tiny voice reminded her; not even you.
Rob had no idea that she could understand his anguish in a way his family couldn’t, that her guilt parade was right up there marching in time with his. She owed it to both of them to reach out one last time, she decided. To try and break through those layers of despair and self-loathing, even if it meant risking rejection on all kinds of levels. It – he – was worth it.
Rob, however, had other ideas. He turned into the Invisible Man, separating himself from her and his family like a plague victim. She was forced to try and communicate the way any 21st century woman did: by text, voicemail, and online. Even if he wasn’t around to physically talk to, there were plenty of other ways to harass someone in the modern era, she knew.
The flipside of that, Leah soon discovered, was that there were also plenty of ways to be ignored. The texts went unanswered. His PA Felicia repeatedly informed her, in tones that escalated from sympathetic to annoyed, that he was unavailable. She’d obviously decided that Leah was made of restraining order material, and heck, maybe she was right. Rob, it seemed, had gone underground. He’d even started staying out all night, presumably in a hotel, to avoid them all.
His silence made her feel like an obsessed teenager breaking every girl rule in the book, but her ego could take a few dents, she decided. There was more at stake here than protecting her pride.
Leah had the strongest feeling that if she didn’t manage to break through Rob’s barriers now, it would be too late. He’d spend the rest of his days closed off and half alive, forever a spectator at the show. And in the same way he’d helped her when fate delivered her shivering and sad to his doorstep, she now needed to help him. Or at least to try. To show him that someone cared enough to see through the arrogance and the bullshit, all the way through to the man inside. The softer, gentler man she couldn’t quite give up on. The man who had, at least for a few crazy days over Christmas, been capable of happiness. He’d had it once – and she wasn’t ready to accept that he would never have it again. If he’d let her, she’d show him that she understood – and that there were better ways to live than this.
She wasn’t pursuing him so she could force him into a relationship he didn’t want. She wasn’t pursuing him to get him into bed, no matter how much fun that had been. She was pursuing him because she cared; because she wanted to have one last try at reaching him. One last try at salvaging something from the wreckage of their friendship before she took his advice, and moved on.
In the end, none of it mattered. Rob left for the Big Apple without so much as a goodbye, virtual or otherwise, to either Leah or his family. So much for salvage.
Marco tried to assure her it was Rob being his ‘usual beast of a workhorse’, but she wasn’t stupid. She could tell everyone else was worried about him as well. That Marco and Mrs C were also wondering what he’d do next, and how much damage it would cause him. That this was worse than usual, even by Rob’s self-destructive standards.
The silent treatment continued while he was in away in New York. Unless he was in business meetings 24/7, he was still deliberately ignoring her. She checked and rechecked her phone, just in case the battery had accidentally fallen out. She scoured the spam box of her emails, in case [email protected] had been junked. She even started doing google news searches for him and monitoring the online financial press, on the off chance he was mentioned. It was all together tragic, she knew – but not as tragic as the way Rob was wasting his whole life away.
After four more days of stalker-quality behaviour, Leah sat down in front of her laptop, sighed, and finally closed the lid on both the computer and her hope.
It had been a week since he’d last spoken to her, at brunch on New Year’s Day. When his parting shot had been to encourage her to date another man.
A week without contact of any kind. A week of talking into a void. A week of frantically responding to no response at all. Enough was enough; even lunatic optimists needed to know when it was time to give themselves a good talking to. It didn’t matter what empathy she felt, or how pure her motives were: Rob didn’t want to know. It was time to stop, for the sake of her own mental health. To return to the land of the sane, and to her own life; her own problems. God knew there were enough of them. She’d put everything on hold, and now was the time of reckoning – time to get her own house in order, as Rob clearly wasn’t interested in anything she had to say.
It was the only sensible thing to do, but still she felt like a coward. That she was giving up. Giving up on the man she knew he could be; giving up in the way even Marco and Dorothea seemed to have done. They’d accepted his fate, and so had Rob. Why was she the only one crazy enough to still have hope? A hope that now needed to be tied up in a box, and put away in a shelf in the corner of her melting brain.
She was doing the right thing, she told herself. There might be nothing more she could do for him, especially when he wasn’t willing to try, but her own life was still a work in progress. She could take the positive change he’d brought about, and move on. Like he kept telling her to do. Leave the bad behind – and Lord knows there was enough of it. Part of her was scared: obsessing about Rob and his emotions had been a handy way of distracting her from her own. From the sneaking suspicion that she’d fallen in love with a man that didn’t want her; from the fallout with Doug, from addressing the fact that she found herself here, in a city she didn’t know, with her life in very elegant tatters around her.
She had to get a grip.
She spent the next week engaging both her brain and her body in more positive activity, determined to do what Rob very obviously thought she should. Hold her head high, and move forward, to God only knew what.
She started looking seriously for apartments, discovering the online world of Craigslist and leaving the to-let ads in the paper covered in big red circles. She sorted out a bank account, and filled in all the forms Marco had given her for the work visa. She bought a diary, and returned the calls of the potential clients passed on by Dorothea, booking in provisional dates and arranging meetings. She tried to distract herself planning possible menus and sourcing stock and costing up staff. She sat and doodled designs for a website, and made inquiries with printing companies.
She walked, for miles and miles, falling in love with the city. Dawdling at the edges of Lake Michigan; watching people jog around the beachfront paths in seventeen layers of sweats, panting their hot breath in clouds of steam into the icy air. She read, sitting on the wooden benches in Lincoln Park; and travelled backwards and forwards on the ‘L’, Chicago’s answer to the Tube, watching the people and the places. She borrowed a bike, and cycled on the frosty paths along Lakeshore Drive, knuckles white with cold. She found fresh food markets, and tiny restaurants, and public gardens where you could buy cuttings of all kinds of herbs and spices. She stayed as busy as it was possible to be.
And finally, when all of that started to fade, when the blur of activity wasn’t enough to dim the memory of Rob’s haunted eyes on New Year’s Eve, she gave in on one last battle.
She gave in to Dorot
hea’s Give Rick A Chance campaign, and arranged a date. The first proper date she’d been on since she met Doug, five years and a lifetime ago.
She had nothing to lose and Rob, she decided, would probably dance a little jig and sing a cheerful ditty as soon as he found out. Assuming he ever came back to Chicago at all. Maybe, once he discovered that Bunny Boiler Harvey had moved on to a new victim, he’d be on the next flight home, full of relief at his lucky escape.
Even the thought of him being glad to get rid of her drenched her with anguish, tears pricking her eyes as she prepared for her night out. She shook it off, splashed water on her face and stared into the mirror of the bathroom. This was no way to be feeling on date night. Tears and mascara just didn’t mix. She grabbed a red lipstick from the vanity, unscrewed the lid, and scrawled on the glass in big block letters: GET A GRIP!
She took a step back, surveyed her crimson creation, and nodded. A motto to live by.
She had a date. With a real life man who was genuinely interested in her. She needed to concentrate on that man tonight, instead of A, the imaginary one who’d flown thousands of miles away to escape her, or B, the fiancé who loved her so much he accidentally bonked her bridesmaid. Rick Machin was C – an unknown quantity who might be just what she needed.
Determined to give the night her very best try, Leah kept the tears at bay, and applied her make-up with extra special care. She straightened her hair so it flowed like a golden river down her back, and paired a slinky navy mini-dress with heels that brought her to the towering height of five foot five. Big hoopy ear-rings. Perfume everywhere. And a final lick of cherryade lip gloss.
There, she thought, surveying her handiwork. Not bad at all. Thank God for make-up and the million and one other tricks girls could hide behind. She may feel like she was shrivelling to dust inside, but she looked great.
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