Nina,
By now Fournival will have returned your belongings and retrieved your keys. I hate to end things like this but I know you like efficiency and there’s no point dragging out a break-up. I’m sure you’ll agree.
Seamus Ryan said his PA would help orient you in your new role. I hope you thanked Seamus for me. I’d have got you set up myself but things got kind of busy in Tokyo and, well, you know.
Scotland sounds fun! I wish I could take off on a scouting spree to the Highlands.
I hope you can see that this is for the best – you’ll thank me one day – and I hope you find someone who makes you as happy as Himari makes me. She really is something else.
Thanks for the Christmas tree. The apartment looks swell.
Happy Holidays, L
She’d ordered a second gin and tonic from the trolley, making the hen party in the seats nearby cheer for the sad, pretty young woman who hadn’t stopped crying since she’d boarded at JFK, and they’d all ordered one too in sympathy. Nina wasn’t in the mood for talking, but the women tried to engage her nonetheless.
‘What do you reckon, Jo?’ probed a yellow-blonde woman in a snowman jumper, nodding her head in Nina’s direction. ‘Dumped, I’d say.’
‘Think you’re right there, ’manda,’ slurred the drunkest one of the lot, who was jammed into her seat surrounded by Macy’s bags full of Christmas shopping that had probably cleared out her entire December pay packet. ‘Here, have a tissue,’ Amanda said, passing them along the aisles and over multiple disgruntled travellers towards Nina. ‘Bloke trouble, is it?’
Nina sniffed and reluctantly took the tissues. ‘You could say that.’
‘Go on then, spill it, nobody here but us girls,’ urged another of the women, the bride judging by the pink plastic tiara squint upon her head.
Nina weighed her options and chose the temporary humiliation of telling her sad tale against keeping it inside and sobbing all the way to Edinburgh airport. She’d never see these women again anyway and she was in need of exactly the kind of protective solace a coven of boozed-up, shopped-out women could offer a broken-hearted stranger. Nina didn’t really have close girlfriends in New York, and the ones back home she’d all but lost touch with over her three-year stint in the States, apart from the occasional message.
Luke had obviously given their joint friends advance notice of the break-up (at least,nowthat was obvious) and not one of their circle had reached out to her in the last few days since Luke’s direct hit bombshell.
Here goes nothing, Nina thought,just my pride. ‘He chucked me out of his flat and he moved his new girlfriend in, just like that,’ Nina snapped her fingers, ‘no warning.’
These words, along with Nina’s mascara-soaked tissues and empty gin miniatures on her little folding table had the power of a summoning circle for the hens, who were by now craning round chair backs and leaning across the aisles saying, ‘And at Christmas too!’, every one of them cursing this evil ex-boyfriend and calling him all manner of entirely appropriate names.
‘I had to sleep at the Ramada for three nights by myself while they were at home eating the holiday food I ordered, drinking our champagne, sitting in front of my tree… sleeping in our bed.’ Nina, more than a little tipsy, couldn’t help sobbing again, encouraging another chorus of sympathy and fresh curses from the women and a lot of angry shushing from fellow passengers trying to get some shut eye. One of the women handed over her miniature bottle of red wine, which Nina immediately swigged from.
‘He’s obviously a right idiot, chuckin’ a knockout lassie like you!’ slurred one of the party’s mothers, resplendent in a foam Lady Liberty pointed coronet.
There followed a long discussion amongst the hens about how Nina could be a supermodel, and doesn’t she look like that one from the telly, theBig Brotherpresenter, you know, the one that’s married to that pop star? One of them pronounced her ‘a true English rose’ and everyone clucked in agreement and Nina boozily waved away their kindness, all the while wanting to ugly cry and have the women sweep her up into their arms, if only there wasn’t an aisle and a snoring businessman wearing earplugs between them.
By the time they were halfway across the Atlantic and the women had forgotten their ire at Luke and were being lulled to sleep by the engine noises and the two a.m. round of Bloody Marys that had seemed like a good idea at the time, Nina had turned her face to the window and let herself get lost in her memories once more.
An English rose. Luke had called her that too on that first fateful day when he’d swept into the building to see Seamus and stopped dead by the elevators just to talk to her, the new intern. Back then she wasn’t yet used to the forthright New York way of speaking and his directness in asking her out to dinner that night had shocked and thrilled her. He was so unlike the English men she’d known back home.
She’d told herself it didn’t matter that he was technically her big boss. Some women would have seen that as a challenge, or even a perk of dating him, but Nina wasn’t so superficial. She’d liked him with all his confidence and charisma. He’d been exciting and seemed so free compared to her boyfriends back home at school and college. He’d drawn her to him like a magnet and not one bit of her had wanted to resist him.
They’d met back when she was still learning to temper her South Downs accent and hadn’t yet acquired the upwards inflection her sentences were punctuated with nowadays, back when her hair was glossy brown and wavy and not the platinum-blonde, blown-back and quiffed crop it cost her a fortune to maintain today.
Luke had swept her off her feet, immediately taking her under his beautifully tailored Armani wing. Cocktail dresses and evening gowns started turning up at her place and she’d never paid a penny for them, and there had been lavish flowers and corporate goodie bags and freebies of all kinds. It was a glamorous, and swift, courtship. She’d seen nothing wrong in accepting his gifts – they were in love, after all, not that he’d actually used the L word, not even once, she realised now, but she’d felt looked after and desired – and she’d moved out of the shared interns’ apartment and into his place after only four months in the city.
He’d started taking her to events pretty soon after that, introducing her to his friends; a complex web of glamorous, influential people. They’d been loud and impressive, waspishly thin, and always immaculately dressed. They’d thrown big house parties in the Hamptons and even bigger product launches and influencer gatherings in the city. They were all so charming and generous, cultured and cunning, just like Luke.
She’d only found them abrasive or braying for the first few weeks, and then she’d found she was one of them, even if shecouldspend a booze-fuelled afternoon at a luxurious pool party with them one weekend, where everyone behaved like they were family, spilling secrets and spilling drinks, and by the next they’d have forgotten her name, but that was OK.
‘That’s just how things are in this industry,’ Luke had reassured her when she mentioned for the first – and only – time that maybe these people were a bit fickle and heartless.
‘What? Even your best mate, Seamus?’ she’d said, having seen how everyone, including Luke, gravitated around the richest man in their set. Seamus Ryan was, after all, the president of the luxest of lux companies. His employees talent-scouted designers and ‘lifestyle practitioners’ from across the globe, flying them to New York, developing their brands for consumption by the top two percent – brands the other ninety-eight were too gauche to even hear about.
‘Especially Seamus,’ Luke had told her. ‘You don’t have tolikeeveryone you do business with, but it pays to get on with everyone.’
Nina scoffed now to think of it. It had been Seamus’s private jet that had flown Luke and Himari, her replacement, into the city, intoherChristmas. It turned out the men were as thick as thieves and now Nina was on the outside of the circle wondering at what point she’d been pickpocketed because she hadn’t felt a thing at the time they were robbing her.
