it was Sophie.
“Alex, wake up now! I know you’re in there!” she yelled.
With heavy legs and an addled head, Alex placed her feet gingerly on the floor and stumbling out to the front door opened it to find Sophie’s expression tense and expectant.
“Last night you looked rung out with exhaustion. Now you look as though you’ve had an overdose of sleep.”
“I took a sleeping pill,” Alex explained, turning around and traipsing back inside to turn the coffee machine on. Sophie followed.
“How are you?” she asked tentatively. “How was last night?”
“Dreadful,” Alex admitted wretchedly. “He was crying. I was crying. It was just appalling.”
“How is he taking it?”
“Good and bad,” Alex recounted bleakly. “He said he’d sensed something was coming, that I seemed unhappy, but he wasn’t sure whether it was just the changes at work.”
“Was he angry?”
Alex thought over Sophie’s question, trying to make sense of her disheveled memories. “No, more resigned,” she replied eventually. “He said he’d felt he’d been clinging on to me for some time, as though I was trying to escape. Imagine that Sophie, it must have been awful for him.”
“I know it’s hard to get your head around things this morning but he will get through this Al. He’s an attractive guy and he’ll meet someone who’s better suited to him—it’s just a matter of time.”
“He has already,” Alex admitted. She needed Sophie to know so that the news, when it eventually reached her friend’s ears, would not be a shock. “He and Monique are going to start spending time together.”
Sophie’s hand rose to cover her mouth as she gaped at Alex. “Are you serious?” she asked finally and Alex nodded.
“When did that start?”
Alex turned away to steam up some milk.
“He told me it had been creeping up on both of them for awhile. Monique had made no secret of the fact she was crazy about him and I’d been making him feel unhappy and unwanted for ages.”
“How do you feel about it though?”
“It feels strange but I know I’ll be fine about it with time,” she confessed, feeling a surge of relief on that point at least. “I know Monique will make him happier than I ever could.”
“No regrets then?”
“About breaking off the engagement—none. About the way I treated him—plenty.”
“Don’t be too hard on yourself. You didn’t plan for it to turn out like this.”
“That doesn’t change the fact that because of me Simon’s wasted three years of his life.”
“I’m sure he doesn’t look at it that way.”
“Then he should, because I am to blame for it,” Alex declared.
“Alex, life’s not a machine. It doesn’t always go the way we want it to because sometimes other things take over. Speaking of which, you’ll have to hurry up after that coffee and get dressed. That indomitable boss of yours has got a bee in his bonnet about this rugby match today and your name’s on the list.”
Alex groaned. She’d forgotten all about the match and wondered whether she would ever throw off the effects of the sleeping pill so that she could run around a sports field that morning.
“You’ll have to be a saint to keep working for him you know,” Sophie added thoughtfully as she sipped her freshly brewed coffee. “He’s so grumpy sometimes. You should have heard him when I told him you’d left for the day yesterday … oh, I had to tell him about you breaking up with Simon, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Alex reassured her, knowing he’d guess as much within about five minutes of seeing her—she could hide nothing from him.
“But then he can be very persuasive too when he wants to be,” Sophie prattled on distractedly. “I told him you had a headache but he didn’t accept it. He just kept firing questions at me until I heard myself telling him you were under a lot of pressure because you were calling off your engagement. Come to think of it, I don’t remember how he managed to prise it out of me.”
“He’s a litigator. That’s his job.”
“I wouldn’t like to be cross-examined by him if my reputation was on the line,” Sophie mused out loud. “Anyway, he backed right off and was quite pleasant once he heard the reason you’d left. He seemed to accept that breaking off an engagement was a good excuse for a PA to flee from work.”
“I guess I’ll find out pretty soon whether or not he still feels that way,” Alex replied dubiously.
But as Alex stood under her hot shower a short