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She stood up. Her legs were unsteady. She wanted to run over to him and tell him to stop. That it had all been a horrible mistake. Like a bad dream which you woke from and discovered that none of it had been real. But this was real. Real and very painful.
She wasn’t going to be that red-eyed woman clinging onto his leg as he walked out of the door, she reminded herself. Was she? And surely they could say goodbye properly. A lifetime of friendship didn’t have to end like this.
‘A last kiss?’ she said lightly, sounding like some vacuous socialite he’d just met at a cocktail party.
His mouth hardened. He looked...appalled. As if she had just suggested holding an all-night rave on someone’s grave.
‘I don’t think so,’ he said grimly, before turning to slam his way out of her apartment—leaving only a terrible echoing emptiness behind.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE APARTMENT FELT bare without him.
Her life felt bare without him.
Sara felt as if she’d woken up on a different planet.
It reminded her of when she’d arrived at her boarding school in England, at the impressionable age of twelve. It had been a bitter September day, and the contrast to the hot desert country she’d left behind couldn’t have been more different. She remembered shivering as the leaves began to be ripped from the trees by the wind, and she’d had to get used to the unspeakably stodgy food and cold, dark mornings. And even though she had known that here in England lay the future she had wanted—it had still felt like being on an alien planet for a while.
But that was nothing to the way she felt now that Suleiman had gone.
Hadn’t she thought—prayed—that he hadn’t meant it? That he would have cooled off by morning. That he would come back and they could make up. She could say sorry, as he had done. They could learn from their mistakes, and work out what they both wanted from their lives and walk forward into the future together.
He didn’t come back.
She watched the clock. She checked her phone. She waited in.
And even though her pride tried to stop her—eventually she dialled his number. She was clutching a golden pen she’d found on the floor of the second bedroom—the only reminder that Su
leiman had ever used the room as an office. He had loved this pen and would miss it, she convinced herself, even though she knew he had a dozen other pens he could use.
But he didn’t pick up. The phone rang through to a brisk-sounding male assistant, who told her that Suleiman was travelling. In as casual a tone as she could manage, she found herself asking where—only to suffer the humiliation of the assistant telling her that security issues meant that he would rather not say.
Where was he travelling to? Sara wondered—as she put the phone down with a trembling hand. Had he gone back to Paris? Was he lying in that penthouse suite with another blonde climbing all over him wearing kinky boots and tiny knickers?
With a shaking hand she put the gold pen down carefully on the desk and then she forced herself to dress and went into the office.
But for the first time in her life, she couldn’t concentrate on work.
Alice asked her several questions, which she had to repeat because Sara wasn’t paying attention. Then she spilt her coffee over a drawing she’d been working on and completely ruined it. The days seemed to rush past her in a dark stream of heartache. Her thoughts wouldn’t focus. She couldn’t seem to allocate her time into anything resembling order. Everything seemed a mess.
At the end of the week, Gabe called her into the office and asked her to sit down and she could see from his face that he wasn’t happy.
‘What’s wrong?’ he questioned bluntly.
‘Nothing’s wrong.’
‘Sara,’ he said. ‘If you can’t do your job properly, then you really shouldn’t come to work.’
She swallowed. ‘That bad, huh?’
He shrugged. ‘Do you want to talk about it?’
Miserably, she shook her head. Gabe was a good boss in many ways but she knew what they said about him—steely by name and steely by nature. ‘Not really.’
‘Look, take a week off,’ he said. ‘And for God’s sake, sort it out.’
She nodded, thinking that men really were very different from women. It was all so black and white to them. What if it couldn’t be sorted out? What if Suleiman had gone from her life for good?
