Epilogue
I did get to have my lovely Thai dinner party in our wonderful new kitchen. It was a noisy, boozy affair. Which was just as well — no one noticed that the jasmine rice was overdone or that I only had mascara on one eye. Daniel said it was my own fault for doing my make-up in my underwear.
We’d planned to make a formal announcement at the end of dinner, the champagne would have been nicely chilled by then .
. . but eagle-eyed Kate spotted the rock on my finger just as I was ladling out Nam Pla soup.
Her squeal of surprise nearly pierced everyone’s eardrums. Yes, Kate was back from Australia.
Bill had taken charge very thoroughly and brought her back with him.
Trust her to spot the ring straight away, perhaps because she was still so conscious of her own.
Daniel had surprised me by proposing exactly six months to the day I moved in.
As we were celebrating our anniversary, he asked me whether the superpower of my choice was still flight?
With my answer, which of course, was yes, he produced a tiny figure of Superman, complete with his very own necklace, a gold band with a seriously super-sized diamond on it.
Mum was immensely relieved; she’d already chosen and bought her mother-of-the bride hat the week after I moved in with Daniel. Dad was delighted and immediately embarked on a campaign of blackmail threatening to refuse to hand over the bride in church unless Daniel agreed to join his cricket team.
A lot has happened in those six months. I only went back to the flat once. Daniel and I popped in very briefly, packing my things as quickly as we could. There were too many memories there and I put it up for sale.
The correspondence from the Crown Prosecution Service about court dates and witness appearances seemed endless but in the event the trial was straightforward and I only needed to make a very brief appearance.
The barrister defending Peter, who’d insisted on pleading not guilty to aggravated burglary, false imprisonment and aggravated bodily harm had a tough enough job.
He wanted my time in the witness box to be limited, which suited me fine.
The photographs of my beaten-up face so horrified the jury that Peter was sent to prison for two years.
It would have been nice to say that I’d left all the horrors of that day behind me in my rosy glow of happiness, but in the days before the trial the nightmares were frequent.
No matter how many times I put the chain on the door in my dreams, faceless men with many arms shot through the door.
Daniel was always there to hold me in the dark, stroking my hair while my heart pounded, the sound almost audible in the quiet night.
Even now I still occasionally jerk awake, the sense of being chased filling my thoughts as I come to.
The only proper contact I had with Emily was at the trial.
We exchanged emails to sort out the bills and detritus of sharing a flat and the odd friendly one about how fantastic her new job was and how much better it was there than at Organic PR.
But gradually these petered out, as did her relationship with Barney.
Thank goodness. I wasn’t sure I could have stomached seeing her over family Christmas lunches.
Apparently she’d latched on to a client who also happened to be a multi-millionaire.
Amazingly, my boss David was incredibly supportive during the trial.
In fact, immediately after the hostage situation as Dad tensely refers to it, David insisted on providing me with trauma counselling on the company.
My team, Cara, — who, conveniently for me, did get together with Ned — Camilla and Helene, without Emily’s malignant influence, became good friends, as well as Daniel’s unofficial fan club.
All are completely besotted with him. Whenever he visits the office, his ego swells tenfold.
I can hardly complain. I have to agree he is pretty wonderful.
Fiona was absolutely delighted to find Emily gone.
She’s a huge fan of mine — especially as my promotion paved the way for her move up to the top floor to board director.
Now I organise the posh parties and it’s quite good fun.
I don’t miss my hard hat as much as I thought I would and those girls at the magazines — well, let’s just say they grow on you.
THE END