Chapter 2
I liked to be at the office early, before the phone started ringing and the emails began to pour in. And when I say office, I mean three doors down in my apartment building.
My office was located in the apartment of one Phyllis ‘Philly’ Clarke.
We’d started working together about three years ago.
She did all my admin and accounting, and arranged my schedule.
Philly was a feisty sixty-eight-year-old widow, who’d become my right-hand woman and probably one of my only real, non-aquatic friends.
We met in the elevator after I’d collected my mail and was on my way back upstairs.
I’d received a letter from the taxman, and upon opening the little sucker, I noticed at once that there were a lot of capital letters and words written in red.
Although I had no idea what the letter was actually saying, I was pretty sure the gist was You owe us tax.
Pay now. Or else. Philly had got into the lift at the exact moment I was trying to decipher the tax talk, and being the excessively nosy creature that she was, I felt a head pop over my shoulder.
‘Mmm.’ The sound was loud and worried. I’d come to learn that Philly had a penchant for the dramatic; it came from watching too many soap operas.
‘Mmm. Aah,’ she said, even louder this time.
I swung around. ‘Do you have a problem?’
‘No, but you do. A big one.’ She was pointing at the red writing in the top left-hand corner of the letter.
‘Do you know what all this means?’ I asked, waving it in the air.
‘Of course I do, missy. I wasn’t the bookkeeper at my husband’s practice for forty-five years for nothing.’
‘So?’
She snatched the letter away from me and started reading it. What followed was a series of very agitated sounds, punctuated with some words with rather negative connotations.
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, just tell me what it means!’ I snapped.
She gazed suspiciously at me over the letter through glasses with such thick lenses that they magnified her eyes tenfold.
‘Put it this way . . . when Lake deLange discovered that her husband, Ryder Wood, was actually her long-lost brother’s evil twin, Hyder, and that she was pregnant with his child—’
I cut her off. ‘What are you talking about?’
She rolled her blue eyes. ‘From The Days and Nights of our Bold and Restless Children.’ She looked at me as if I should know what the hell she was talking about.
When I still looked blank, she pulled her glasses down her nose and glared. ‘The world’s most popular soapie.’
‘Ah,’ I said. ‘Sorry, don’t watch it.’
She tutted loudly. ‘Well, it’s worse than that!’
My face must have betrayed my terror, because suddenly she looked empathetic. ‘But don’t worry, missy, I can help you. Let’s do it over tea and cake, though. I’m starved.’
And that was it. She marched us out of the elevator, my letter in hand, and headed down the corridor to her apartment.
I’d been on my third cup of coffee when I’d left my own apartment earlier. I’d locked and bolted the door – you can’t be too careful in my line of work – and as I walked past the stairwell, almost at Philly’s apartment, BAM! I ran into the last person I was hoping to see.
‘Byron. Hi!’ I said, and looked around. A bit of a coincidence that I’d bumped into him at the exact time I was coming out of my apartment.
‘Hey. Hi, fancy running into you here.’
‘I think you ran into me on purpose,’ I said. ‘In fact, by the look of it, I think you’ve been waiting in the stairwell for me to emerge.’ I pointed at the mint wrapper that was lying on the floor. Byron had a habit of sucking on mints. ‘You shouldn’t litter.’
He gave one of those loud, resounding, resigned sighs, the kind I’d heard many times before. The sighs that came out of the mouths of cheaters when they realised they’d been caught and no amount of explanation would help them.
‘Fine. I did.’ His shoulders slumped. ‘I don’t get it, though. I don’t get you.’
‘What exactly don’t you get?’
‘We have fun together, don’t we?’ he asked.
I had to think about this for a moment. But when I did, I could recall that there had been a few pizza and movie evenings – mainly after sex.
‘Sure. We have fun,’ I said, slurping my coffee.
‘And we have a lot in common. We talk about stuff.’
I thought again. We both liked action movies. We both liked pizza with anchovies. He also had a fish.
‘Sure. I guess.’
‘And the sex is good?’
I cast my mind back and replayed some of our encounters. He was pretty well endowed. He had stamina, technique and was always willing, and I hadn’t seen any blue pills in his medicine cabinet when I did a routine sweep of his home one evening.
‘Yes. I enjoyed the sex.’
He threw his arms in the air rather melodramatically and then let out a strange sound.
‘Lizzy, don’t you see? This thing between us is a relationship.’
‘It’s not a relationship,’ I said very quickly, something I’d had to say to Byron many times before.
‘Could have fooled me,’ he said, his tone sarcastic and cutting now.
‘This is not a relationship. We’ve just been having a bit of fun for a couple of months, that’s all.’
He stepped forward. ‘A couple of months? Try seven.’
It wasn’t seven months, surely? The first time we’d hooked up had been in the lift.
It was 3 a.m. and I was pretty tipsy after my first night on the town in years.
He was also coming home after a night out.
Somewhere between floors three and four, something happened.
We flung ourselves at each other and went for it.
And that party had been . . . Shit, it was about seven months ago.
‘Lizzy.’ He was inching closer now with an intense look in his eyes.
Don’t say it, don’t say it, don’t say it . . .
‘We’re perfect for each other. Don’t you see that?’ He looked like a sad puppy who’d been put outside and was now crying at the door. I’d never really liked dogs; correction, they’d never really liked me. ‘So what’s the problem?’ He tilted his head and looked at me with pathetic, pleading eyes.
‘The problem, Byron?’ I placed my cup down on the windowsill and put my hands on my hips, adopting a firm stance I hoped would convey the seriousness of my next statement.
‘The problem is that I don’t do relationships.
’ I must have spoken a little more forcefully than I’d intended to, because now he looked not only like a puppy left outside, but one that had been left outside in the rain.
He nodded at me peculiarly. ‘It’s okay, Lizzy. I get it.’ And with that, he turned and walked away.
I picked my coffee up and took another sip, grateful that that was over, but also not feeling great, because clearly I’d hurt his feelings, even though I’d told him from the very start that I didn’t do relationships.
It was supposed to be casual. Some sex, some pizza, some conversation. Nothing more.
‘He’s right, you know,’ said Philly, taking off her glasses and cleaning them. ‘You’re in a relationship with him, whether you can see it or not.’
‘I hate how the sound in these corridors carries, and it’s not a relationship!’
‘No? Well, what do you call seven months of sex, eating pizza and going to a wedding together?’
‘That was only pretend. My teammate was going to organise me a date for the wedding if I didn’t come with one.’
Philly rolled her eyes. ‘Fake-dating trope, never works. Always leads to feelings.’
‘That’s crazy.’
‘No, what’s actually crazy is the way that guy feels about you, despite all the crap you give him.’
‘Well, I don’t feel the same way. And I can’t force myself to either.
’ I’d only ever felt that way about one person in my entire life, but it had been incredibly short-lived, and now all I felt for Cam was hatred.
Intense, searing hatred. In fact, if there was a word that meant more than just ‘hate’, I needed it to describe the depth of my feelings for the infuriating Cameron Anderson.
I needed something to distract me, so I got up and prowled round Philly’s apartment.
The place was a curiosity. Her late husband, Lou, had been a prosthetist; the guy made limbs and other bodily appendages for amputees.
But more than that, he’d considered himself an artist, and after he died, Philly decorated their apartment with some of his best work.
So upon entering, you were immediately greeted by a leg, mounted on the wall in a large ornate frame.
Start looking a little closer, and you’d begin to notice the madness of it all.
Because apart from the body parts everywhere, Philly was also an avid collector of everything!
Little bits and bobs covered every surface. No centimetre was safe from the mad cramming. Miniature houses, ceramic deer, frogs wearing ballet shoes, novelty spoons, snow globes, porcelain figurines, seashells, souvenir plates and even taxidermy birds.
‘You know, I didn’t much like Lou when I first met him,’ Philly began.
She always pulled these ‘Lou and I’ stories out when we had our regular debates about how relationships were all doomed to inevitably crash and burn in the flames of infidelity, heartbreak and pain.
‘I thought he was very strange, making all those arms and legs. He begged me to go out with him for months, and eventually I agreed.’ She walked over to the mantel and picked up a picture of her beloved husband.
‘Well, I tell you, five minutes into that conversation, I knew he was the one.’
I sighed and rolled my eyes. Not because I was belittling her relationship, or even judging it; in fact, I thought it was sweet how much she’d loved him. But I knew unequivocally that relationships were just not for me.
‘I wish I could see you as happy and in love as Lou and I were,’ she said.
‘Maybe in my next lifetime,’ I replied dismissively, hoping that it would put a full stop to the conversation. Thankfully it did.
‘By the way,’ Philly said, ‘there’s a blueberry cheesecake in the fridge, new recipe.’