One Last Summer at Hideaway Bay: A gripping romantic read with an ending you won’t see coming!

Emma’s face was expressionless and somehow more frightening than if she had been visibly angry. Lucy felt herself freeze and for a moment she thought she might wet herself. Emma strode towards her, stopping a few feet in front of her with a smile that didn’t meet her eyes. Lucy didn’t know what to say and she mumbled something incoherent before Emma raised a hand to her mouth in a ‘shhh’ gesture, dropping her smile. She pointed to Lucy’s desk and took another step towards her.

‘Take your things, and leave. Now!’ she snarled at Lucy. ‘You silly, silly little girl.’

Lucy watched her turn and walk away, still glued to the spot. Her legs wobbled slightly as the door closed again and Emma disappeared down the stairs. She took a heaving breath in and tried to compose herself. She pressed her hands into her eyes; she refused to cry here. There was a large woven shopping bag in her bottom drawer, from some launch she’d been to with Warren. ‘Dream It, Live It,’ the slogan on the side read. Lucy couldn’t remember what the product or film, or whatever, had even been. She began putting the few personal things she kept at work into the bag. It wasn’t like in films, she noticed. It didn’t feel like the time for ceremony and she didn’t have the kind of things that you’d pause and look at meaningfully, remembering good times or hard times – or whatever. She essentially had a filing cabinet full of pharmaceuticals to her name. She grabbed handful after handful of pill packets, deodorants, blister plasters, eye drops, and dried-up eyeliners and mascaras. There were lanyards that she’d been given at events, VIP access passes for concerts and festivals and photo-booth pictures of her and various Spectrum colleagues incredibly drunk at different parties.

She took the fire escape exit out to the car park, bypassing the party. She could hear Emma on the microphone addressing the crowd, people cheering her as if they adored her. The same people who, Lucy knew, in fact despised and feared her. But maybe it was more complicated than that, she thought, as she walked across the yard towards the main road. Maybe if she had the intelligence not to see everything in black and white, in good and bad and right and wrong, maybe then she wouldn’t have just lost the job she’d worked so hard for. Emma was a bitch, that was certain, but she employed all these people, she was successful and she could be kind when she wanted to be, when it suited her. Had Lucy just thrown away a career because she didn’t like her boss? Didn’t that just make her the biggest idiot of them all?

On the Tube she tried to fight thoughts of what her life had become. She lived alone, had broken up with Scott, barely spoke to her sister and only seemed able to enjoy herself when she was almost totally out of it. She had singlehandedly lost herself her job tonight and she really didn’t know what she had to wake up for tomorrow. She thought of Tom, and Nina and Kristian. Wondered what they were doing. Tom was probably drinking a beer and watching the sea, looking at the stars, like he always used to. ‘Just magical, isn’t it?’ He always used to say at the sight of a glittering sky over the ocean. And she’d look at him, with his gaze fixed firmly up into the night, and study his beautiful, kind face in the moonlight, and think ‘yes, it is, Tom, it really is magical’.

Back at the flat, she flicked her lamp on and sat on the sofa, suddenly tired from the evening’s events. She looked at her phone; it was 10pm, probably not too late to call Nina.

‘Hello?’ Nina’s voice answered. ‘Don’t tell me it’s Lucy Templeton!’ she feigned surprise.

‘Hello,’ Lucy replied, ‘Don’t moan at me. I’m sorry, I should’ve called you back ages ago but –’

‘But you’ve been very, very busy being a London media daaaarling,’ Nina said.

‘I’ve been busy fucking everything up, actually,’ Lucy replied, smiling with the relief of talking to her oldest friend.

‘Well, you know what would make it all better…’ Nina said.

‘I know what you’re going to say,’ Lucy replied.

‘And you know I’m right. I’m generally always right,’ Nina said, seriously.

‘I don’t know if it’s a good idea,’ Lucy said, and she meant it. ‘I don’t know if coming back there, being around Tom – all the memories. I don’t know if that’s not just the worst thing I could do right now.’