How to Get Over Your Ex

Having her here, in his house, would have been a complication.

He had a signed contract; the time for courting The Valentine’s Girl, professionally, was over. He should have just given her a list of activities that the station was prepared to send her to and been done with it. Instead of being a sap. Instead of reacting to an event fifteen years old and letting it colour his better judgement.

Instead of empathising.

Just because he’d been exactly where Georgia was; on the arse-end of a declined proposal. Only in his case, he got all the way down the aisle before realising his fiancée wasn’t coming down behind him because she was on her way to Heathrow with her supportive bridesmaids. What followed was a horrible half-hour of shouting and recriminations before the priest managed to clear the church. Lara’s family and friends all went wildly on the defensive—as you would if it was someone you loved that had done something so shocking. His side of the church rallied around him so stoically, which only inflamed Lara’s family more because they knew—knew—that there were a hundred better ways to not proceed with a marriage than just not turning up. Less destructive ways. But she’d gone with the one that would cause her the least pain.

And, chump that he was, he actually preferred that. He wasn’t in the business of wishing pain on people he loved back then.

The heartbreak was bad enough, slumped in the front row of the rioting church, but he’d had to endure the public humiliation in front of everyone he cared about. Their whispers. Their pity. Their side-taking. Worse, their determined, well-meant support. Every bit as excruciating and public as Georgia’s turn-down live on air. Just more contained.

Like atomic fusion.

But the after-effects rippled out for a decade and a half.

He jogged up the stairs and headed straight for his study. The most important room in his house. The work he got done there was the difference between just-hanging-on in the network and excelling. No one excelled on forty hours a week. He was putting in eighty, easy.

It was the one thing he could thank Lara for.

Setting him up for the kind of success that gave him a luxurious study in a big house in Hampstead Heath and had him rubbing shoulders with some of the most powerful people in the country.