‘I just couldn’t go back to a poxy little one,’ Mark had said. ‘The fridge I had in my apartment in Tribeca was like a wardrobe – it ruined me for anything smaller.’
‘You’re such a spoiled brat.’
‘Can’t deny it.’ He’d grinned at her, the skin at the corners of his eyes crinkling.
Feeling a burst of longing for him, she went back to her laptop and searched again for any news relating to flights from New York, not just JFK now but Newark and La Guardia, too. Nothing. She was being neurotic, she told herself, worrying for no reason at all. There was a simple explanation and he’d be home tomorrow. Everything was fine.
Chapter Two
When Hannah woke up, light was edging round the curtains. The other side of the bed was empty but she quite often woke up alone when Mark was travelling so it was a moment before she remembered that today she wasn’t supposed to. She propped herself on her elbow and reached for her BlackBerry. No new messages.
She lay back down for a minute, thinking, then threw off the sheets and got out. Mark’s favourite grey cashmere jumper was on the back of the chair and she put it on over her pyjamas. Downstairs the post was on the doormat: just an electricity bill, a statement from Coutts for Mark and yet another mail-shot letter from Savills fishing to see if they had any plans to sell the house. She left the bill and the statement on the hall table with the previous days’ post and went through to the kitchen.
While she waited for the kettle to boil she checked her email on her laptop, just in case, but the only messages were junk. Still nothing from Penrose Price either, she thought, and the interview there had been over a week ago now. That job was the one she really wanted, too; AVT yesterday wasn’t in the same league. If they were going to let her know by email, though, it wouldn’t be on a Saturday, and they would send a proper letter; they were that kind of company. Anyway, it was only a matter of time before the rejection arrived, in whatever form; if it were good news, she would have heard it by now.
She drank her coffee and thought about what to do. Perhaps Mark had caught a red-eye and was just getting into Heathrow now. She picked up her phone and pressed redial. Voicemail again. This time she didn’t leave a message; she’d left one last night and emailed as well, and he would know she was wondering what was going on. She felt a stab of annoyance with him for being so inconsiderate – how hard could it be to call and leave a twenty-second message? – but it was quickly followed by a wave of anxiety. Something was wrong. This was so unlike him – he’d never not come home when he said he would without getting in touch.
It was five to nine, still a bit early for a Saturday, but Neesha had a three-year-old, she’d probably been up for hours already. Hannah scrolled through her contacts list until she found her mobile number.
Mark’s assistant was a beautiful half-French, half-Indian woman who’d been brought up in South Africa but educated at the London School of Economics, where she’d met and married her husband, Steven. She was twenty-seven and Mark had recently started letting her manage her own small projects, afraid that she would leave unless she was promoted quickly. Pierre, her son, had arrived about ten years earlier than she’d planned to have him, she’d told Hannah at DataPro’s summer drinks party, but she was as ambitious as she’d always been. Mark had said that if she was as efficient a project manager as she was an assistant, he expected her to be one of the most senior on the team within five years.
The phone rang. After six or seven rings, however, the answering service clicked in and Neesha’s voice asked the caller to leave a message.
Hannah coughed, her throat suddenly dry. ‘Hi, Neesha,’ she said. ‘It’s Hannah Reilly. I’m sorry to call you at the weekend but I wonder if you could give me a ring when you get this?’
After a couple of slices of toast and a skim of the news online, she went upstairs and put on her running kit. She didn’t particularly like running – Oh, be honest, Hannah, said her internal voice, you hate it – but over the past three or four months, she had made it part of what she thought of privately as her sanity routine. She had a frightening awareness of how easy it would be to become depressed about her situation without a structure to her days that involved some form of discipline and physical exercise. Not her life with Mark, obviously – when she’d talked to him about it, he’d asked if she was unhappy with him and she’d looked at him as if he was nuts – but work, or her lack of it.
Though they’d been married for nearly eight months now, she’d stayed on in New York for three months after their wedding. Mark had increased the amount of time he spent working in DataPro’s American office and they’d talked about him making it his base full-time, flying over to visit the London office instead. His new partner, David, would take over from him there. After a month or so, however, talk of the move had become less and less frequent, and then Mark arrived one Friday evening looking guilty. He’d made her one of his custom martinis – vodka, with cranberry bitters – and told her that the consultants they’d hired to advise them on streamlining overheads during the turndown had strongly recommended closing the US office. He’d gone over the figures again and again, Mark said, and he knew it made sense.