Cathy Kelly 3-Book Collection 1: Lessons in Heartbreak, Once in a Lifetime, Homecoming

‘Don’t say anything.’ She scrambled out of the bed, dragging the sheet with her, wrapping it around her body like an Egyptian mummy. She didn’t want him looking at her naked body ever again. She felt so ashamed: ashamed, humiliated, stupid. He’d used her. She loved him, thought he loved her too. But she was wrong.

‘Let’s not fight,’ he said gently. ‘I didn’t come here for that.’

The shred of dignity left to Izzie stopped her saying: What did you come here for, then? Because the answer was simple: to fuck you, my handy little girlfriend. That’s all she was. A convenience store – available for late-night drinks, dinner and free sex. For the first time ever, she had respect for the hard-boiled identikit New York girlfriends of married men. At least they understood the rules of the game and they considered it a profession. Get your man and get something from him. She’d considered herself different: his true love. She was his equal and she wasn’t the sort of woman who wanted things from a man. She wasn’t in it for gifts – she was in it for love. Except he was in it for something different. No shit, Sherlock.

‘No,’ she said, reaching inside herself and finding one last thread of calmness. ‘Let’s not fight. I have to pack.’

Pack? She didn’t care if she travelled on the flight without a single item of luggage but the clothes she stood up in. Still, it was a good excuse.

‘Of course,’ he said, sliding gracefully out of the bed. He was such a handsome male animal, she thought, watching him. Everything she found physically attractive: no fat, just hard muscle and a hard business brain, and now – she’d just found out – a hard heart.

‘What time is your flight?’ he murmured.

‘Five forty tomorrow evening,’ she said.

‘Nothing earlier.’

‘No.’

‘If you want, I could get you on the private plane,’ he said.

Like a computer finally downloading a big email, the litany of vicious things she’d planned to say earlier came online in Izzie’s brain. The thread of calm vanished.

‘But not the company plane, right? That might really let people know that you were screwing me. No, you’d have to take a favour from someone or else pay to fly me home, because God forbid that any of your employees should find out about me, the boss’s whore.’

‘Izzie,’ he said, sounding hurt, ‘I never made you feel that way, I never meant to.’

‘I know, but that’s still how I feel,’ she said.

‘Guess we’re fighting after all.’

‘No, you’re leaving,’ she said. ‘In fact, I am too. I’ve got things to buy.’ She grabbed a sweatshirt and sweatpants from her closet and went into the tiny bathroom. Twenty seconds later, she emerged, wearing the tracksuit and her hair messy from where she’d hauled it over her head. Who cared about her hair? Bed-hair and life-is-over-hair looked pretty much the same. ‘I’m going. You can let yourself out.’

‘Don’t go,’ he said urgently.

‘Tough, I’m going,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to wait here and listen to more of your lies.’

‘They’re not lies, Izzie. I love you, it’s just difficult now. Complicated –’

‘I’ll undo some of the complications, then,’ she snapped. ‘Consider me out of your life, Joe. Does that make it easier?’

She snagged her purse from the hall, grabbed her keys and was gone.

She ran down the stairs to the street in case he came after her, and then ran two blocks to a coffee shop they’d never been to together, just in case he came after her.

But he wouldn’t, she realised, as she stood at the counter and tried to summon up the brainpower to actually order something.

‘Er…skinny latte, please,’ she said to the barista.

Joe wouldn’t follow her. He didn’t want an emotional girlfriend who had expectations: he wanted an easy lay who wouldn’t cause trouble. Or did he? She’d trusted him, had been sure he was telling the truth. But if he was, and if he loved her, wouldn’t he walk away now to be with her?

She sat at a table and stirred sugar into her latte. What a hideous day this had turned out to be. First, darling Gran: now, this.

‘Oh, Gran,’ she said to herself, ‘I’ve let you down so much. Let both of us down, actually. Bet you thought you’d taught me better, huh?’

A mother with a baby in a stroller and several bags of groceries underneath, sat tiredly down at the table beside her. Izzie watched the mother and child sadly. She’d never have that, not now. Motherhood was a destination getting further and further away from her. Once, she’d thought it was a right, inevitable. Women got married and had children. Then, it became a challenge: harder than originally thought, but still possible. And now…now it looked impossible, unless she went it alone.

Suddenly, she could understand women who reached forty and went looking for donor sperm to father their babies. If there was no man on the scene to be your baby’s daddy, and the time bomb that was worn-out ovaries was ticking away, what else did you do? Wait like Sleeping Beauty for a non-existent prince? Or save yourself.

The baby wriggled in her stroller and Izzie caught sight of her properly. Downy African-American curls framed an exquisite face with chubby cheeks and huge dark eyes like inky pools. In her peachy pink sleepsuit, she looked like a little doll.

‘She’s lovely,’ Izzie said to the tired mom, who instantly brightened.

‘Yeah, isn’t she? My little princess.’

‘Does she sleep?’

What Izzie knew about small children could be written on the head of a pin with room left over for the State of the Union speech, but she knew that sleep patterns were as important to mothers as New York Fashion Week was to her.

‘She’s getting better,’ the mother said, warming to her theme. ‘She went six whole hours last night, didn’t you, honey?’ she cooed to her baby. ‘You got kids?’ she asked Izzie.

Izzie felt the prickle of tears in her eyes.

She shook her head. ‘No,’ she said.

‘Not everyone wants ‘em,’ the woman agreed.

Izzie nodded. She didn’t trust herself to speak. She pushed her barely touched latte away from her. ‘Bye,’ she gulped and ran out.

It was too late for her to have a baby, she thought, wild with grief. It wasn’t that her eggs were too old or that her body was too decrepit: it was that her heart was a dried-out husk and you couldn’t nourish another human being when there was nothing left in you.

‘Don’t go yet, Gran,’ she whispered up to the Manhattan sky. ‘Please don’t go yet. I need to see you one last time, please.’

EIGHT (#ulink_acc2e5f8-1815-5b32-9394-0f462b987e54)

Izzie’s in-control façade had stayed in place throughout the entire flight, the roller-coaster turbulence of their descent into Dublin airport, and the long march through the glass hallways of the airport to the baggage reclaim.

She travelled so much for business that she could adopt her woman-business-traveller look easily. With her pink silk eyemask for sleeping on the flight, her moisturiser to cope with the dryness of the cabin, and her flat shoes (socks in her carry-on bags), she had travelling down pat.

It was only when the airport double doors swept open and she was suddenly out of the international-no-man’s-land of the airport and into the actual country of her birth that it all hit her.

This wasn’t a routine work trip or even a planned trip home: this was an emergency visit because her beloved grandmother might be dying.

Directly outside the doors, standing right in front of lots of moving human traffic crossing the road, Izzie Silver stopped pushing her trolley and started sobbing for herself. A hundred miles away, Anneliese sat at her aunt-in-law’s bedside and talked softly about how she felt, and how she simply wasn’t able to cry.

‘It’s like I’ve this black hole inside me,’ she whispered, even though there was no need to talk so quietly. There was plenty of noise in the bustling ward where Lily had been moved earlier that morning. They needed the bed in the intensive care unit and with no change in the old lady’s condition, and no sign of any change, the small hospital couldn’t justify keeping her in a vital ICU bed.

‘Crying would be better,’ Anneliese went on. ‘Therapeutic or something. But I can’t. It’s like being full of nothingness. No matter what I do or how I try to buoy myself up, it’s hopeless. Grey, dismal desert only with blackness everywhere. Oh, Lily,’ she sighed to the still, silent figure in the bed. ‘I wish you were here so I could tell you – well, you are here, but not in the same way.’