Chapter Fourteen
AFTER FOUR MONTHS, she stopped counting his absence in days. Not because she didn’t feel each day stretching like a chasm of grief, but because it was a step towards acceptance. And acceptance, surely, was vital.
Accepting that it really was over.
That she’d been strong enough to walk away from a situation that wasn’t right for her.
Even when so much of it had been perfectly right—sublimely, utterly, indescribably right—it had been missing the one part she considered non-negotiable.
Love. Real, freely given, unconditional, no-holds-barred love.
There was no way she could be with another man who didn’t love her as she knew she deserved.
But every day—every single day—she felt that ache of regret when she thought of him.
It took all of her energy to get through her workday—as a junior reporter for a respected national paper—without giving away to colleagues her deep, abiding heartbreak.
In the same way she’d worn a mask during her marriage, holding it together when she felt miserable inside, she was now playing a part.
Going through the motions and hoping no one would notice that she’d left her heart and soul in Greece, and knew she’d never be able to retrieve either.
It was exhausting. Draining, demoralising and completely sapping, so that every day, when she came home to her tiny apartment, she only had enough energy to make a piece of toast, shower and change into pyjamas, before going to bed.
She slept fitfully, at best, despite the exhaustion, and woke every morning with a start, as if unable to believe the reality she’d found herself in.
She missed Nikos as a fish would miss water. She missed him with all of herself, and it didn’t seem as though it would ever get better. She just had to learn to walk alongside her grief, or it would eat her alive.
The one concession she allowed herself was to continue wearing the engagement ring.
Everyone believed her to be engaged to the reclusive billionaire—it would have raised more questions than not, if she’d suddenly stopped wearing it.
And having heard the thought he’d put into buying it for her, how could she not?
It was a talisman that connected her to him, and she found her eyes drifting to it often as she remembered fractured details of their time together, so her breath would gasp from her on a fresh wave of longing and need.
Of desperate, all-consuming desolation.
It was wrenching. The worst of times.
But she continued to work, knowing that she needed that.
She deserved it. Having put her promising career prospects on hold to become the perfect political wife James had wanted, she knew that doing well in her role was a part of reclaiming the person she’d once been.
It had mattered deeply to her once, she knew it would again.
Generally, she stayed away from covering political stories.
There was too much of a threat of overlap with James, and, despite the true sense of liberation she now felt from that man, she had no interest in stirring up the hornets’ nest anew.
Her editor had agreed that the potential conflict of interest made it wise for her to stick to other stories.
And yet, on a warm Friday evening, just as she’d walked in the door, her phone started to ring and she saw a colleague’s name come up on screen. She contemplated ignoring it, but a phone call out of hours was odd, and Genevieve’s curiosity got the better of her.
‘Genevieve,’ she said, phone tucked under her ear as she hung up her handbag.
‘Gen, hey, it’s Gary.’ Genevieve felt a particular disdain for people who shortened her name when they barely knew her, but she couldn’t raise even a hint of that then. She was too tired. Too utterly exhausted. She flopped on the couch. ‘I need to call in a favour.’
She arched a brow, wracking her brain for why Gary would think he was owed a favour by her. ‘Yeah?’
‘This event tonight, I can’t cover it. Something’s come up. Don’t suppose you’d go for me? It’s simple. The president will make a speech, a couple of VIPs will talk. You just need to go, get a couple of quotes, an impression of the room, that kind of thing. You up for it?’
No, she wanted to scream. She wasn’t up for anything.
She wanted to curl up into a ball and cry until she had no tears left.
But brittle determination had her nodding.
Covering anything presidential was a coup, particularly for a junior journalist. ‘Yeah,’ she said after a beat.
‘I can do that. Text me the details. Will my credentials do?’
‘I’ll have Tiffany make sure your name is given to the event. You’ll be fine.’
‘Okay,’ she exhaled. ‘Good.’
Genevieve had been at events with the president a handful of times, while married to James, so she wasn’t as intimidated as she might otherwise have been.
She also had the added advantage of knowing how to dress, and do her hair, to look as though she belonged.
This, though, was attending in a professional capacity, so, rather than a cocktail dress, she opted for more of a corporate navy trouser suit with a silky oyster camisole underneath.
She teamed it with a string of her mother’s pearls, and styled her hair in a high ponytail.
She hated heels but they were part and parcel of this sort of thing, so she slipped her feet into a pair before regarding herself in the full-length mirror.
Make-up.
She looked like a zombie. Working quickly, she dabbed concealer beneath her eyes, a little bronzer to her cheeks and gloss to her lips, so the next time she checked the mirror, she seemed passably human.
Not like someone who’d spent the last four months wishing the world would open up and swallow them whole.
The event was in a five-star hotel on the other side of the city, and, in the interest of living well within her means, she took the bus. Even allowing for public-transport delays, she made it with a couple of minutes to spare.
Something she was not remotely grateful for when the first person she ran into, upon entering the decadent ballroom, was her ex-husband, and his date.
‘Well, well,’ he drawled, lips flickering with undisguised distaste as he pulled the woman at his side closer. She was very beautiful, in the way all James’s mistresses had been, and wore clothes she knew to be to James’s taste.
A sense of pity squeezed Genevieve’s heart, and she fought an instinct to tell the other woman to run a thousand miles in the opposite direction.
‘Senator,’ she said, voice clipped, before stepping around him, to leave.
‘How’s the fiancé?’ he asked after her, and her eyes squeezed shut on a wave of fresh pain. Desperate, aching pain. Nikos. The man she thought of as hers, who never really had been.
She turned around though, and forced a smile. ‘Fine. I’m sure he’d want me to say hello. He really did enjoy that little chat you both had,’ she added.
James’s eyes narrowed and she knew that had it not been for the threat of Nikos hanging over his head, he might have said something horrible. Threatened her in some way. Instead, he stood there silently, face turning a shade of puce.
‘Aren’t you going to ask me how I am, James?’ she prompted, anger stirring inside her at how this man had belittled her, all their marriage.
‘I don’t particularly care.’
‘You never did,’ she said, with a shrug of her shoulders. ‘And I spent so long wondering what I’d done wrong, to make you so cold, and uncaring. But now I see you for what you are: a psychopath.’
He looked as though he wanted to slap something.
‘I truly have no idea what I ever saw in you.’ She dragged her gaze over his body, and she couldn’t help thinking of all the ways in which he didn’t match up to Nikos—and never could.
‘Have a nice night,’ she aimed at his date, before turning and moving swiftly into the crowd, to the area cordoned off for the press. She recognised a couple of journalists she knew, and settled herself amongst them, already enervated by the need for small talk.
It didn’t last long. With the precision of a Swiss clock, the president arrived as scheduled, the crowd falling silent with respect.
He began to speak of his hopes for a piece of upcoming legislation around childhood hunger, and then began to speak about the government’s charity partners, operations that were working in the field, donors to the cause.
‘In particular, I would like to thank, as I welcome to the stage, one of the biggest patrons in this space, a personal friend of mine, Nikos Konstantinou.’
Genevieve dropped her phone to the tiled floor, and felt her journalist colleagues’ eyes turn to her.
Fortunately, the applause somewhat muted the sound as Nikos’s name was mentioned.
It was little wonder his appearance had caused such a stir: he was famously reclusive.
To have him appearing at an event with the president was a huge coup.
Her pulse exploded. Her heart went crazy.
Her eyes stung. She knew her face must be a blotchy mess of pale and pink, she could feel the heat and clamminess growing on her, and it only got worse as Nikos, her Nikos, strode on stage, more charismatic than any man had ever been, and stood behind the lectern, though his size dwarfed the thing.
‘Here,’ someone beside her said, passing the phone to her numb fingers.
She stuffed it in her pocket without responding.
She couldn’t. Every single part of her was focused on Nikos as he began to speak, in his beautiful, accented English, his eyes sweeping the crowd and somehow not landing on her. Not seeing her.
And why would he think to look for her? He didn’t know what she was doing for work, nor that she’d be there. Which meant he’d come to Washington and not reached out to her. He’d come to the city he knew she lived in, and made no attempt at contact.
‘Oh my God,’ she whispered, closing her eyes on a wave of renewed pain.