Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
“I have an eye infection, which means I can’t wear my contact lenses right now.” Ellie answered Knox’s question about the glasses perched on her nose.
It wasn’t strictly true. She’d had an eye infection a couple of months ago—probably from too much crying!
—but had continued to wear the tinted glasses even after the infection had gone.
The tinted lenses could hide other things.
Such as the dark shadows beneath her eyes from lack of sleep and the unhappiness in their depths.
Unfortunately, she knew from Knox’s curious expression that he was nowhere near finished asking her questions.
Questions Ellie already knew she really would rather not answer.
“What happened to Andrew Day?”
Such as that one!
She stood abruptly before moving around him to go into his office and pour herself a much-needed cup of the delicious-smelling coffee, lingering there to take a reviving sip.
Coffee might not solve all problems, but it was certainly helping to delay her answering Knox’s question.
Knox still stood in the doorway when she turned to face him, one of his dark brows raised to emphasize his question.
What happened to Andrew Day?
It was a good question. A relevant one. But not one Ellie felt completely qualified to answer.
Because she had no idea what had happened to the man she had fallen in love with ten years ago and thought she would love and be with for the rest of her life!
It had seemed as if one day Andrew had been his usual loving and considerate self, and the next, he’d turned into a liar and an inveterate gambler who drank too much and became verbally and, eventually, physically abusive when he lost a bet or he thought Ellie was nagging or challenging him. Which he thought or assumed often.
Ellie had tried to reason with him, to get him outside help for both the gambling and drinking.
She had tried, so hard, to help him, but when he started to gamble away his half of the HERA profits, she’d had to put her foot down and tell him he either stopped or she would have to seek legal help to have him removed from any further involvement with the company.
The company they had both worked so hard to make into the success it was today.
The two of them had begun dating during their first year at university, being on the same business course.
They had been together all through university and then opened the HERA offices immediately after earning their degrees.
Ellie still remembered how happy they’d been when they came up with the name Halliday to represent both of them.
Unfortunately, Ellie’s parents had died in a car crash when she was just nineteen.
She had been so grateful for Andrew’s support during that time.
Not only had she been emotionally broken by the loss, and thankful for having Andrew there to support her, but he had also helped her to deal with her having her parents’ lawyer being the trustees of her inheritance until she was twenty-five.
Those trustees had allowed for the release of some of that money for the start-up of HERA when Ellie was twenty-two. Even so, she and Andrew had started small, the two of them doing all the work involved, from recruitment and acquiring customers, to putting out the bins.
By the time the whole of the money was released to her three years later, HERA was already a successful recruiting agency for the elite.
Ellie now sometimes wished, in the middle of the cold and sleepless nights she was often plagued with still, that they could go back to those days when they had been too busy trying to succeed to have the time to indulge in damaging addictions.
She had even offered to sell the company altogether and for the two of them to start over again somewhere else, doing something less stressful, if that would help Andrew break away from these obsessions.
He had laughed mockingly at the suggestion before informing her that he had been having an affair with another woman for the past six months and had no intention of leaving New York or this other woman. A woman, he told Ellie, unlike her, who didn’t nag or constantly expect things from him.
Ellie had been devastated at the accusing way he’d told her of his affair, too numb with grief at this callous end to their long relationship to react to the unfair insults that went along with it.
She had come out of that initial grief and into a world of pain when Andrew had gone on to tell her this woman was only the latest in a long line of women he’d slept with during the nine years of their relationship.
That had been the end as far as Ellie was concerned.
Gambling away the profits of HERA was one thing, his drinking another, but having affairs while Ellie worked every hour she could to make a success of their company and for the health of their relationship had been the straw that finally broke her.
The bruises and broken arm she had received that night, after refusing to release any of her own money for Andrew to gamble with, had healed far more quickly than her broken heart and disillusionment after she’d had no choice but to acknowledge what a monster Andrew had become.
Had always been?
It grieved Ellie to admit it, but other than those first few years together, the answer to that was probably yes.
He had never hit her before that evening, but when she’d sat in the hospital, waiting to have her arm put in a sling after the X-rays showed a break in her lower arm, she’d realized how much Andrew had changed.
He’d always liked fast cars, and once HERA had shown enough profit, the first thing he’d done was buy himself one. The following year, he had traded that one in, then a year later another he had done that again, and so on, always for what he assured Ellie was a better make or model.
There were also the many evenings in those last two years that he spent “taking clients out to dinner.” But when Ellie had asked him which clients they were, he had always dismissed her concerns and told her to leave it to him to be the charming one of the company.
While she had been at the hospital that night, quietly crying at the bleak mess her life had become, she had asked to have blood tests for any STDs Andrew might have passed on to her. Her relief had been immense when those blood tests had all come back negative.
Ellie now not only had an arm that physically ached in cold weather, but she also felt thoroughly humiliated at not having realized Andrew had been having affairs for years!
So what happened to Andrew Day wasn’t a question Ellie felt she could answer without thoroughly humiliating herself in the process.
Because, according to Andrew, it was her nagging and always being on his case that had made him into the stranger he had been to her on the evening she saw him for who he really was.
She still had nightmares sometimes, remembering how Andrew had attacked her. Those nightmares were accompanied by a feeling of dread and fear of having to be near Andrew ever again.
Separating her private life and the company from Andrew had been traumatic. But Ellie had done so knowing she had to protect herself, and the company, from further attack.
Not that the latter had been altogether successful, apart from managing to keep Sally and Benny in her employ.
She couldn’t say the same thing about her client base, because it seemed that Andrew had also grown—or had always been?
—vindictive, and as such was unwilling to go quietly from her life or from HERA.
Within months of their separation, he had opened up his own company and persuaded a lot of HERA’s clients to go to him instead of her.
Which was the real reason Ellie had come here herself this morning, to stand in until Sally arrived with Knox Wilder’s laundry and coffee.
She, specifically HERA, desperately needed to keep Wynter Security as one of their clients.
Ellie had been slightly dazed and heartbroken those first few months after she learned of Andrew’s affairs. Which was why she hadn’t realized at first exactly how much money he had taken from both the company and from their joint bank account.
Thankfully, her parents’ lawyers had insisted that the bulk of her inheritance be kept in a bank account that only they and Ellie could access.
It had been another source of contention between her and Andrew when he learned of that condition.
In retrospect, those lawyers had probably already seen what she hadn’t, which was that half of her attraction for Andrew had been the money left to her by her parents.
After their separation, personally and professionally, Ellie had been so focused on going to work each day, in doing her job of running the company, that she hadn’t realized what else Andrew was doing to undermine her and HERA.
By the time she realized clients were canceling rather than renewing their contracts with HERA, she had already lost a third of that client list.
She had telephoned several of those companies to ask why they had decided to break with HERA, wanting to know if it was something she was doing, or not doing, which was to blame.
Every one of the people she spoke to had fobbed her off with the excuse of tightening the company belts in the current financial climate.
Not totally convinced by this explanation, Ellie had made an appointment to see and speak to a partner in one of those firms.
At first, when the other woman realized who she was and her reason for being there, she had been reluctant to talk to Ellie.
But eventually, she had admitted that Andrew had contacted her and explained that he had now opened a recruitment agency of his own.
That he had done so after having to part ways with Ellie when he discovered she was embezzling money from the company to feed a gambling and drinking addiction and so was no longer a reliable partner, in business or privately.
Andrew had completely twisted the truth and projected his own bad behavior onto her!