Hannah
Maybe washed her hair instead of throwing some dry shampoo in its general direction on her way out the door that morning.
Taken a change of clothes with her to work so she didn’t have to wear the jeans and crumpled shirt that had already spent eight hours in a dusty stockroom.
Eaten dinner, because two tiny, unidentifiable canapés and a single cocktail sausage were no match for more glasses of prosecco than she’d remember tomorrow, plus a cocktail.
‘So, what did you think of the speech?’
She was standing at the bar, waiting to order a drink, when this slow, thick voice came from the right. She turned and saw a man twisting a tumbler with only a sip of whiskey in it, waiting for an answer.
‘I thought it was amazing,’ she said.
He lifted his drink, tipped his head to drain it and set it back down on the bar with too much force. The noise of the glass meeting the marble drew the bartender’s attention and Hannah flashed him a whenever-you’re-ready-please-can-I-order look.
‘She’s my wife,’ the whiskey man said.
Surprise reached Hannah’s face faster than the thought that she should hide it.
This was the husband? He’d got a mention in Olive’s speech.
None of this would’ve been possible without my wife, as I affectionately and gratefully refer to my partner, Derek.
Cue polite laughter from the men and wry, knowing smiles from the women.
In that moment, Hannah had imagined a handsome face standing attentively in the wings, smiling in sweet recognition, beaming with love and pride.
Not this red-faced, slack-jawed drunk who might have been sitting like this, with his back to his wife, the entire time she was speaking.
Really? This guy? For you?
‘You must be so proud of all she’s achieved,’ Hannah said.
‘What we’ve achieved,’ he corrected. ‘It was my idea. Liv perfected the formula, but I was the one who suggested she try making it in the first place. And I helped her secure investment, design the packaging, get it all off the ground …’ He swung his legs out from beneath the bar, brushing his knees against her.
‘But we figured it makes a better story if she did it all by herself. Better for the brand. The narrative. The origin myth.’ He stood up, swayed a little. ‘Anyway. Enjoy your evening.’
Derek’s departure revealed another man who’d been standing at the bar just behind him. Physically, he was Derek’s opposite: tall, lean, youthful, with thick dark hair to Derek’s grey tufts; jeans and a T-shirt to his crumpled suit.
He caught Hannah’s eye. ‘What a prize prick, eh?’
‘You heard that?’
‘Everyone’s heard that. It’s a mystery why she hasn’t left him.’
‘Maybe she’s playing the long game,’ she said. ‘Putting laxatives in his coffee while she transfers everything into her own name.’
A bemused smile. ‘Is that what you’d do?’
‘I’d do something.’
‘What do you do? For a living, I mean. Not revenge.’
‘I own a homewares brand. Curated. I started with a store in Powerscourt Townhouse Centre and, over time, grew it into a web—’ Hannah stopped herself. ‘A global online platform.’
‘Wow,’ he said. ‘Good for you.’
She immediately played this back in her head: no condescension detected.
‘What do you do?’ she asked.
‘Do you know Shredder?’
She frowned. ‘The guy from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles?’
‘That’s your first thought when I say Shredder?’
‘My second is a thing that shreds paper, if that helps.’
‘This is devastating.’ He put a hand over his heart as if she’d wounded him there. ‘Dare I ask how far down the list we have to go before you get to salad?’
‘Ah.’ The penny dropped. He was talking about Shreddr with no ‘e’, the healthy fast-food chain.
Hannah had never actually eaten there but she walked past one of its locations on her way into the shop every morning.
She got the impression it was the kind of place frequented exclusively by twenty-somethings obsessed with gains and macros, and people sad about the fact they didn’t have time to walk to where they actually wanted to eat. ‘The salad place?’
‘I’m one of the co-founders. Who, rest assured, has thought to himself many, many times that we have a truly terrible name. You have to explain there’s no “e”, if you google us you get paper-shredding services—’
‘And it’s a great name for a serial killer.’
He shook his head. ‘This just gets worse and worse.’
‘Sorry.’
‘I’m not sure you are, you know.’
‘I’m Hannah, by the way.’
‘Jason.’
He held out his hand and she shook it.
‘And that’s all very interesting,’ she said, ‘but I meant for revenge.’
He laughed, loud and hard, just as the bartender finally appeared. Jason offered to buy her a drink and she let him. They slipped on to stools and started swapping their own origin stories.
She told him how miserable her first job out of college, in financial services, had made her.
Her realization one Sunday night that while she didn’t know what she wanted to do, she did know that she didn’t want to live her life wishing most days of it away.
How a friend’s casual remark about what a great gift-giver she was, how she always managed to find something unique and perfect, had sparked an idea for an online shop that saved shoppers the work of searching for special things.
He told her about how he’d bounced around various retail jobs after dropping out of college, feeling stuck, until, five years ago, he’d joined a gym in a bid to stop that feeling from turning into depression.
How he’d made a friend there, Thomas, who was trying to get a meal-prep delivery service off the ground.
How that idea had morphed, over many late-night conversations, into a chain of healthy fast-food restaurants they’d launch together.
Now, they had more than two dozen locations nationwide and a popular YouTube channel, and were in talks to publish a recipe book.
They also talked about Clare’s Atlantic coast (one of his favourite places), book brushes (one of her favourite gifts to give) and the ending of Lost (he said no finale would have satisfied the audience by that point but that he’d actually quite liked it; she agreed, but said she was still angry about all the episodes spent pissing about in the temple), but if there was any flirting on either side it was the kind that came with complete deniability.
Neither of them could accuse the other of anything except pleasant conversation.
She drank prosecco until, at last orders, he convinced her to try a Moscow Mule. It was only once she’d drained hers that she turned to look around the room and saw that all the other people still in it were being paid to be there.
They’d been talking for three hours.
This realization was immediately followed by two more: that they’d made it this far without any idiotic political views, blatantly fictitious stories or shitting on popular things in a pathetic bid to seem interesting, and that, if Hannah didn’t get to a toilet in the next three minutes, she was going to wet herself.
Jason waited for her at the door to the street, holding the coat she’d forgotten to take with her.
‘Well, that was fun,’ she said as they walked outside into the freezing air. ‘And probably a really bad idea, seeing as I have to be in the shop for eight.’
‘I’ll bring you some of our Sunshine State,’ he said.
‘What’s that?’
She tried not to react to I’ll bring you.
‘Our bestselling smoothie shot. Apple, orange, ginger, lemon, turmeric and cayenne pepper.’ And regret, Hannah added silently. ‘We designed it as an immunity booster but accidentally made a great hangover cure.’
‘I prefer a Sausage and Egg McMuffin and a coffee myself.’
‘If you tell anyone this I’ll have to kill you, but …’ He dipped his head, came closer, lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘So do I.’
She could feel his breath on her face, smell the ginger on it. She looked at his lips and imagined touching them with hers.
Electricity pulsed in the space between them.
But then, abruptly, he stepped back.
‘It was nice to meet you, Hannah.’
‘Nice meeting you. Safe home.’
He smiled before he turned and walked away, and then she did too, but in the opposite direction, the afterburn of a momentary bloom of possibility glowing warmly in her chest.
But so what?
Jason had probably gone home to a three-bed semi in the South Dublin ’burbs and tried to slip into bed without waking his wife, an ethereal blonde in a silk eye-mask who would take his late night in good humour because she loved him and she liked him – barf – and who, tomorrow morning, would gently tease him about his hangover but also leave water, coffee and painkillers by the bed before she slipped out of the house to go to bloody reformer Pilates or whatever.
Or maybe the smell of freshly brewed coffee would lure him downstairs to where his wife had already finished her morning workout and was now packing nutritious lunch boxes, pleading with protesting children to find their shoes and put on their coats while a yappy little dog darted underfoot, and when he walked into that chaos, she’d say something like, ‘Nice of you to join us,’ but with a wry smile because she was so relentlessly understanding.
‘Fuck,’ Esther, her deputy store manager, said. ‘What did this guy’s imaginary wife ever do to you?’
They were sitting behind Curated’s counter, greedily slurping coffees and trying to will themselves awake.
Hannah’s was one of many stores inside what had been a palatial Georgian townhouse, hollowed out and re-roofed to create a spectacular, four-storey-tall atrium surrounded by an array of boutiques, speciality stores and restaurants.
Nothing opened for another two hours, so all was quiet, but six pallets of Christmas stock were due to arrive at any moment.
Hannah didn’t want to tell anybody about Jason, but she was also desperate to talk about him. Esther, being her trusted employee and unconnected to any of her other friends, was the perfect solution.
‘And he might have an imaginary husband,’ Esther pointed out. ‘After all, didn’t he tell you he made a friend at the gym?’ She raised her eyebrows meaningfully.
‘That was his business partner, and he also said something about how that guy’s girlfriend had helped design the logo.’
‘But he didn’t mention anything about a girlfriend?’
Hannah shook her head. ‘No mention of any romantic partner of any description. Or children.’
‘Because he doesn’t have them, surely?’
‘He has to have someone. Otherwise it just doesn’t make any sense. He’s attractive, polite, intelligent. Successful. Normal. Clean.’
‘Clean,’ Esther repeated. ‘Wow.’
‘There’s just no way this guy is single.’
‘Can I point out that you are also all of those things?’
Hannah made a face. ‘So?’
‘So, you’re single.’
‘But I’m a thirty-something woman, so that’s irrelevant.’
Esther rolled her eyes. ‘I presume you’ve—’
‘Before I was even home. I did it in the cab.’ She’d got his full name from his bio on Shreddr’s website – Jason O’Riordan – and then went searching everywhere else with it.
‘Nothing useful. I mean, there was stuff, but it was all about the business. Nothing personal. I did find a Facebook profile in his name, but it was set to private.’
They sipped their coffees.
‘What was the profile pic?’ Esther asked then.
‘A landscape. Fields and sheep.’ Hannah paused. ‘Clare, probably. He mentioned going there. If that page is even him.’
‘You could ask around? Dublin is a village. I bet someone will know him. Chances are he was in school with one of your friends. Or in college with one of their husband’s. Or he married someone who was in school with one of your friends or college with one of their husbands.’
Jason had told her he’d grown up in Cork and dropped out of college, but Esther’s theory was still entirely plausible because Ireland was a village too.
But there was no way Hannah was going to even mouth a man’s name to her friends.
It would immediately be a Huge Deal. She knew for sure she’d get a much bigger reaction telling them about her brief, professional encounter with Jason than anything she’d ever told them about her business, and this filled her with a ferocious, pre-emptive rage.
She’d started Curated from nothing, with nothing, and here she was now, shipping products worldwide, employing a team and making a living.
A good living, doing something she loved.
And yet Hannah knew that if she announced she was getting married, or even just that she’d met someone who made that a distant possibility, that news would generate far more giddy excitement and heartfelt congratulations from her friends – and family – than anything else she’d ever done, because apparently nothing had changed for women, actually, and the most important thing a female could achieve, still, was fucking wifedom.
There was nothing that could compete with getting picked.
Fuck off.
She might stay single just to spite them.
Jason was not going to force her into a decision either way.
He stayed on her mind for a while – a week, maybe – but then there was a debacle with a missing shipment, the staff toilet stopped flushing and one of their repeat-offender shoplifters returned for her traditional pre-Christmas spree, all in the space of twenty-four hours.
After that came the relentless rush of Christmas shoppers.
They were so busy that, at weekends, they had to implement a queuing system.
Hannah spent most of her time going up and down the queue with little cups of mulled wine, chocolates wrapped in foil and apologies.
When word of this spread, the lines grew longer.
Hours, days, weeks whizzed by. The world outside her business ceased to exist and she loved it. It was exhilarating.
Then it was over.
Come Christmas Eve the shop had been practically picked clean, despite their bringing in every last item left in the warehouse after the final shipping date had passed.
They closed early and, as per tradition, Hannah took the whole team out for a boozy lunch.
On the way to the restaurant, Esther tapped her on the shoulder to give her a look.
They were passing a branch of Shreddr, which made her think of Jason for the first time in weeks.
She didn’t think of him again until the middle of January, when, early one morning, he appeared in the shop.