Between Sisters (36 page)

‘Hilarious,’ said Red.

It was ludicrous that nobody could see beyond her looks. Sure, she was stunning if you liked that sort of thing, but she wasn’t as stunning, in his opinion, as his darling Coco.

‘Hello Red,’ said a cool voice behind him, and he turned to see Coco staring at him, doing her best to look fierce, but instead just looking grief-stricken. ‘I was late-night shopping and I thought I’d crash your business meeting,’ she said, looking now to Kirsten, who had taken off her horrible black glasses because it was clear that she didn’t need to wear them anymore.

To Coco’s eyes, it was all very simple: Red was with an exquisite-looking blonde woman when he’d told Coco he was meeting three guys for a business dinner. Game over.

‘Coco!’ Red jumped to his feet. He felt cold all over. He knew exactly how this looked, and so did Kirsten.

‘I’m related to a friend of Red’s, Teddy Mitchell,’ Kirsten said frantically. ‘Mr O’Neill was kind enough to say he’d meet me about the possibility of working at his company.’

Coco could only stare at this vision, the sort of five-foot-eight beauty she’d always longed to look like: Grace Kelly mixed with Cameron Diaz mixed with the magic of a fairy-tale princess. Utterly beautiful. What tosh about wanting a job with Red. She was clearly a model. And what job interview took place over a glass of wine in one of the city’s top restaurants?

She didn’t waste her time looking at the Cameron Diaz girl but stared at Red instead, who was watching her horrified face. ‘Please, Coco, this is so not what it looks like. It’s honestly a job interview. I’m doing someone a favour.’

‘Is that what they’re calling it now? I think I’ll go,’ said Coco, and she ran down the stairs.

In the moments it took for Red to quickly pay the bill and for Kirsten to apologise endlessly to him, Coco was gone.

He drove to her flat but she wasn’t there; she wasn’t at Cassie’s either, or at Pearl’s.

It was like she’d disappeared off the face of the earth.

‘Some gossip columnist was in the restaurant and wrote a piece in the paper about it,’ he told his brothers. ‘Remember?’

‘Yeah:
What up-and-coming businessman had his tête-à-tête with a lady friend interrupted by his fiancée?
’ recited Dan.

‘Teddy Mitchell rang and said Kirsten had gone to London. I don’t know where she got a job but he said she was very, very sorry and if only she could talk to Coco, she could explain it,’ Red said. ‘What was the point of that? If Coco didn’t believe me, what sort of relationship did we really have? Coco closed the shop, wouldn’t return my calls, although I begged her. She wouldn’t speak to me. She left me one message: “I know what I saw”. And wouldn’t let me explain.’

‘But you met her?’ Mike said.

‘I did,’ said Red sadly, ‘in town on the street, as if she didn’t trust me enough to sit down anywhere with me. I tried to explain, but she said she’d seen what she’d seen – she’d even seen the piece in the newspaper – and I said that if she couldn’t trust me, then we couldn’t get married, and that was it.’

‘Well played, big bro,’ congratulated Dan in fake tones. ‘Don’t you know
anything
? Women need to make you suffer. You needed to keep apologising, you needed to explain it a hundred times. She loved you.’

‘If she had, she’d have listened,’ said Red testily.

‘Bull! She needed you to keep apologising. But no, you have to fly off and not come back to the country for a whole year.’

‘Ma will never forgive you for that, by the way,’ Dan added. ‘Never.’

‘I tried to talk to her,’ protested Red.

‘You didn’t try hard enough,’ said his brothers in unison.

‘You been practising this?’ Red asked sourly.

‘Yeah,’ said Dan. ‘We can do it a cappella too.’

‘So what are you going to do now?’ asked Mike.

‘I saw her in the airport the other day,’ Red replied. ‘I wanted to go over to say hello but I didn’t, and since then I can’t stop thinking about her.’

‘We’re here because you can’t decide what next,’ finished Dan.

‘Exactly.’

His brothers looked at each other.

‘At the risk of repeating myself, you really know nothing about women, do you, bro?’ said Dan. ‘You needed to apologise till you were dizzy saying it, and then she’d have forgiven you. That’s what works with Alix.’

‘And with Dolly.’

‘Coco’s different. You know how sensitive she is about her mother not ever having been around. She thinks I dumped her the same way.’

‘Yeah but the mother was a dope head, wasn’t she? Coco can’t compare you. Go on: see her. What have you got to lose?’ Mike said. ‘Self-respect doesn’t keep you warm at night, man.’

Red woke early the morning after meeting his brothers. It was so early, he had time to go to the hotel gym, pounding away with weights, running – doing anything to get the excess energy out of his body. Coco used to laugh at him in the kindest possible way.

‘Can you do ten minutes for me at the gym?’ she’d say when he’d leave her in bed in the morning on Saturdays for his workout. Leaving her was always difficult: rosy from lovemaking, smiling with tendrils of her crazy dark hair all over the pillows. Sometimes Red wouldn’t go to the gym at all: he’d get straight back into bed.

‘We could do some exercise now,’ he’d growl, and Coco would giggle.

Saturday morning would fly by with them getting the papers and coffee, lounging around her apartment, discussing plans for the future, what they’d do, all the places they’d go to …

Today he got a taxi to her shop. He was pretty sure it was still in the same place because he checked it on Facebook occasionally. Read those cheery missives from Coco where she chatted to her customers.

Red got the taxi driver to drop him a street away from The Twentieth Century Boutique. He needed to build up the courage to walk in there. Imagine – him, Red O’Neill, having to build up the courage to do anything. This was what she’d reduced him to, he thought wryly.

When he reached the shop, he paused for a minute, and then thought,
You’ve got to do this
, so he pushed the door inwards. Instantly he could see there was no sign of Coco, but a tall, attractive young woman stood behind the counter and beamed at him.

‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Sorry, the door shouldn’t have been open – I forgot to lock it. We don’t open till ten. You can come back then – or do you need a special gift?’

Phoebe couldn’t help herself – a sale was a sale, even if she was just meeting Coco first thing for a chat about a plan for the shop.

Red couldn’t help grinning. The tall girl had him sussed out immediately: it must have been the slightly anxious look on his face.

‘Er, no,’ he said. If Coco wasn’t there, there was no point hanging around. He turned to leave but then he heard her voice.

‘… you could stay with Phoebe in the shop this afternoon after school. I have to go to the accountant.’

‘I want to stay with Phoebs,’ said a child’s voice firmly.

Red turned slowly and saw Coco emerging from down the stairs, a little girl glued to her side. The girl looked like Coco, which was crazy because of how old she was; it had only been four years and this child was, what – seven, eight, nine? Red was bad on children’s ages.

The girl threw her arms around Coco. ‘I’ll miss you, though,’ she said.

He watched longingly as Coco buried her face in the child’s neck. ‘I’ll miss you, too, honey bunny,’ she said. ‘But when I come to collect you after the accountants, we’ll do something exciting. Maybe drop into Grammy Pearl’s and take Daisy and Apricot for a walk, OK?’

‘Do you think Apricot’s all right on her own at home?’

‘She’ll be fine, honey,’ said Coco. ‘Now that she’s stopped eating the kitchen table, she’s been very good.’

‘Yeah, suppose,’ said the child.

Coco turned, and that’s when she saw him. Red closed his mouth. Coco’s jaw dropped at the exact same moment.

‘Red,’ she whispered. ‘I didn’t expect to see you.’

Red had it all worked out in an instant. His mother was wrong – Coco
did
have someone else, someone with a little girl. She’d always loved kids and now she was dating some guy with a ready-made family. This child looked as if she loved Coco like a mother, even if she wasn’t her real mother. She talked about Coco’s grandmother as Grammy Pearl. Coco had replaced him with someone she liked even more: someone who had a ready-made family.

Some lucky bastard was in Coco’s life, someone who’d given her the things Red had always wanted to. Who was he to think he could waltz back into her life and mess all of that up? He’d never seen her look so happy as she did staring into the kid’s eyes.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t have come. I was in the area and I just thought I’d drop in.’

Coco stared at him mutely because she couldn’t speak, she could only stare. ‘I … I …’ she kept trying to say.

‘Bye,’ he said, and he wrenched the door open, letting it slam behind him.

Both Phoebe and Fiona turned to look at Coco, who was clearly holding back tears.

Phoebe knew she wouldn’t want Fiona to notice, so she began blandly chatting to Coco about the latest batch of stuff they’d got in from an auction.

‘There are these amazing Shanghai-labelled silk blouses with the most beautiful silk painting on them. You are a genius, Coco. I don’t know how you get this stuff.’

Fiona, in her school uniform, had begun rifling through the jewellery as she always did when she came into the shop, picking up bracelets and sticking them on her arm and rattling them all together, going: ‘Lovely, I’m going to a dinner party,’ in a posh put-on voice, then giggling at herself when she spotted herself in the mirror.

Coco stood as if rooted to the spot. She was looking at the door, as if she could still see the man.

Phoebe steered Coco into the office, still chattering about silk blouses so Fiona wouldn’t notice.

‘Coco, what’s wrong?’ whispered Phoebe urgently.

Coco turned to her and, for the first time since Phoebe had known her, which admittedly wasn’t very long, she saw true anguish in her employer’s eyes. Even when Coco spoke about Jo and the stroke, there was courage and determination there. Coco was going to help Jo get over this and do everything she could to make Jo and Fiona’s lives better, despite the stroke. But that fire and determination were missing now. Instead, Coco’s beautiful face looked as if she’d received the worse news ever. Tears brimmed from her dark eyes and Phoebe could tell that she was holding back great sobs because she didn’t want to upset Fiona.

‘Just look at the computer for me for a minute,’ Phoebe said loudly, the sort of words that wouldn’t particularly interest Fiona, who was still playing dress-up with bangles and necklaces.

Phoebe got Coco seated in the office chair and then rushed out, turned the sign on the door to closed and locked it, which she wished she’d done earlier. She ran back into the office, where Coco still sat, gazing into space.

‘What’s wrong?’ asked Phoebe. ‘Please tell me. Maybe I can help.’

Coco looked at her with those anguished eyes and Phoebe wanted to hug her tightly and make her better, the way she tried to make things better for Ethan and Mary-Kate.

‘Please tell me, is there anything I can do?’ asked Phoebe.

‘No,’ said Coco brokenly. ‘There’s nothing anyone can do.’

‘That man, who was he? Is he a stalker or something?’ Phoebe asked.

If he had been frightening Coco, she’d run out and hunt him down and hit him for upsetting Coco. She had a punishing right hook, developed at school when there’d been a brief period where they’d had a PE teacher who was keen on taekwondo.

‘It’s nothing like that,’ whispered Coco. ‘He was someone I was in love with. We … we were engaged.’

‘Oh,’ said Phoebe.

‘And I haven’t seen him since … it ended. That’s the first time, and I thought I was over him.’ Coco clamped a hand over her mouth. ‘I’m sorry. I’m talking too much. You don’t want to know this.’

‘Course I do.’

‘Can you … can you mind Fiona for a moment? I just have to talk to Cassie.’

‘No problem,’ said Phoebe, straightening. ‘I’ll take Fiona for a hot chocolate, say you’re working on something on the computer, something boring, and perhaps take her to school?’

Moments later, Coco heard Phoebe telling Fiona that it was so exciting, they were going for a hot chocolate, and because Coco had some boring computer stuff to do, she’d take Fiona on to school. Wouldn’t that be fun!

Fiona rushed in for a hug but was gone again in a flash.

Coco followed them to the door and locked it again.

The pain she’d felt that night in the restaurant was as bad as it had ever been. She wasn’t over Red O’Neill. She probably never would be.

Cassie was driving to work. She looked at her phone briefly to see who was calling in case it was one of the girls, but it wasn’t – it was Coco.

Searching for somewhere to pull the car over, she answered.

‘Hi honey, I can’t really talk. I’m on the way into work and – oh, there’s a garage I can pull into.’

Gratefully, she drove on to a corner of the forecourt.

‘Cassie,’ said Coco, ‘you’re not going to believe it, but Red just walked into the shop.’

‘Red?’

‘Yes,’ said Coco, sounding as if she’d been crying for hours. ‘I don’t know why he came in. He knows it’s my business and he looked around, took one look at me, and then glared at me and left.’

‘Are you sure?’ said Cassie, thinking that this behaviour didn’t sound like Red.

She’d always been very fond of him, and had been devastated when he and Coco had broken up. To hear that he’d just marched into Twentieth Century, glared at her sister and then marched out again sounded very odd.

‘He did, I’m telling you. Just glared at me.’

‘OK,’ said Cassie. ‘Do you think he wanted to see you on your own? Was anyone else in the shop?’

‘Well, he could have rung the shop,’ said Coco, ‘and there weren’t any customers. There was just Fiona and Phoebe and me. We weren’t even open.’

Cassie thought about it. ‘Just the three of you,’ she mused. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘Neither do I,’ said Coco tearfully. ‘It was horrible, just horrible. I tried so hard to get over him and then he just marches into my life again and then marches out. I just can’t do this anymore, Cass.’