aged and neither have you.’
‘She’s younger than me!’ But Grace smiled. ‘Come on, let’s go.’
She led the way to the restaurant, which was a couple of streets back from the seafront. There were half a dozen tables on the street outside, another half a dozen on a covered terrace and the same again inside. When they told the waitress they didn’t have a reservation, she brought them to the last unoccupied table on the covered terrace.
‘This is pretty,’ said Deira as she looked around. The decor was in shades of cream and pale green, and the walls were stencilled with flowers. ‘Did you come here a lot with the professor?’
‘No,’ said Grace. ‘He preferred to eat at the other end of town. This is my first visit, so I hope it’s good.’
It was. Over their lobster dinner, the conversation turned to Deira’s upcoming interview, and she told Grace of her fear that if she got the job, people would think she’d left Solas because she couldn’t bear working with Gavin any more.
‘Who cares what they think?’ said Grace. ‘You’ll know the reason.’
‘I know. But . . .’ Deira snapped one of the breadsticks that had been left in a basket on the table. ‘All my working life it’s mattered to me how I’ve been perceived. It’s why I am who I am. A senior executive. A person with responsibility. Someone in control.’
‘You’d be all those things in the new place too,’ Grace pointed out. ‘As for being a person in control, I can’t help thinking that’s vastly overrated. It was what Ken always wanted, and when it was taken away from him because of his illness, he couldn’t cope. Like I said before, he struggled when I had more influence in the relationship. It wasn’t good, Deira. It really wasn’t.’
‘I’m talking about work,’ Deira said. ‘I’m not talking about Gavin and me personally.’
‘But it all stems from a personal thing, doesn’t it?’ said Grace. ‘And you feeling that he has something you don’t. You don’t want that to be the defining thing in the office either.’
Deira looked at her silently. Grace had put into words much of her feelings about her life since Gavin had left her.
‘You’re right,’ she admitted. ‘I don’t want them feeling sorry for me. Thinking that he’s all strong and virile and a baby-making machine, whereas I’m a sad old woman who’s had to leave the job because of him and who can’t even do what women are supposed to do.’
‘Women aren’t only here to have babies,’ protested Grace.
‘I know. I’ve always believed that. It’s just that when you haven’t . . . when you’ve decided you should have . . . when you’ve made a fool of yourself with a man over it . . .’
‘Which man?’ asked Grace. ‘Gavin or Charlie?’
‘Oh God, both of them.’ Deira covered her face with her hands as she felt her colour rise.
‘But how do you feel about it yourself?’ asked Grace. ‘Have you given up on the idea of going down the IVF route and doing it on your own?’
Deira let her hands fall to her lap again. ‘It’s such a hit-and-miss scenario,’ she said. ‘According to the HFEA – that’s the Human Fertilisation and Embryo Authority – the birth rate for women trying to conceive from their frozen eggs is eighteen per cent. If someone came to me with a proposition for an event with that kind of success rate, I’d tell them to sod off. And only just over three per cent of women in my age group have a successful live birth. Those aren’t odds, Grace. They’re impossible numbers.’
‘But lots of women do have babies over forty. You might be one of the lucky ones.’
‘True,’ said Deira. ‘But I’d have to go through all that IVF entails for even the tiniest chance.’
‘If it’s what really matters to you, though . . .’
Deira put her fork on the table and looked thoughtfully at Grace. ‘I honestly don’t know if it’s that I can’t bear being the only one of Gavin’s women who hasn’t had a baby, or if I subconsciously clamped down on my desire to have a baby while I was with him and truly feel my life is incomplete without a child. If I don’t know why I want something, how mad is it to be looking at ways of having it?’
‘It’s easy to second-guess yourself,’ said Grace. ‘You need to listen to your heart, Deira.’
‘It was listening to my heart that landed me