Martina Devlin - Be Careful What You Wish For

For my own Molly, Molly Eccles, an aunt who’s also a friend … although infinitely better behaved than her namesake.

Cover

Title Page

Dedication For my own Molly, Molly Eccles, an aunt who’s also a friend … although infinitely better behaved than her namesake.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

‘Red wine or white?’ asked Helen.

‘Red – our bodies need the iron,’ said Molly. ‘But imagine having both in stock. Helen, it’s official, you’re a grown-up.’ She lolled on the sofa, waiting for her friend to prise open the bottle.

Despite a smorgasbord of corkscrews, Helen was fundamentally challenged in the uncorking department. Every so often she’d say wistfully, ‘Isn’t it a pity that Liebfrausquilch in the screwtop bottle tastes revolting? It’d be so handy,’ and Molly would threaten to report her to the taste Gestapo.

‘Give it here, Sharkey,’ she ordered now. ‘I’ll die of iron deficiency if I wait for you to relieve me.’ And she extracted both Merlot and corkscrew from Helen’s fumbling hands. ‘I thought this was supposed to be a foolproof gadget,’ she added. ‘Didn’t the Image magazine testers give it the full Orion’s Belt of stars?’

‘Misled again,’ mourned Helen. ‘I read, I bought, I faltered. Fill up my glass to the brim there, Molly, this is an emergency. I need to funnel the alcohol into my bloodstream in jig-speed time.’

‘You know what getting drunk on alcohol is called,’ said Molly, dribbling only a few drops as she poured.

Helen waited for Molly to fill her own glass and then clinked. ‘Tell me.’

‘A return on your investment.’

They swigged in companionable silence, facing each other on Helen’s somewhat mauled matching sofas from which, until she could afford two identical new ones, she wouldn’t be parted. Helen favoured pairs, whereas Molly shuddered if she accidentally found herself with a double – mugs, earrings, socks, towels were all deliberately mismatched. Shoes were about all she’d concede needed to come in pairs. ‘Eclectic’ was the word she dredged up whenever anyone suggested her taste veered towards the idiosyncratic; nobody came right out and told her she looked like a walking jumble sale, at least not since being staffed, after years as a freelance journalist, allowed her to relax her financial guard enough to buy clothes in the Powerscourt Townhouse.

‘So what’s the emergency, oh inheritor of the face that launched a thousand computer blips?’ she asked Helen, who was a software programmer.

The reference usually didn’t fail to make her friend blush or giggle, or at least twiddle an eyebrow, but tonight she didn’t react – an ominous sign. Helen took a protracted swallow that emptied her glass and said, ‘Thanks for galloping around at a moment’s notice.’

‘You know me,’ shrugged Molly. ‘I’d do the Lough Derg pilgrimage if it meant a drink in the heel of the hunt.’

‘I won’t ask you to walk on rocks here,’ said Helen, ‘but you might be obliged to walk on water. I need a miracle. Or failing that, electric shock treatment.’

‘So it’s a red-alert emergency, sirens blaring, traffic lights contemptuously ignored and cars bulldozed aside. It can only be man trouble.’

Helen frowned and refilled her glass without topping up Molly’s – which meant she was really distracted because Helen was renowned for her impeccable manners.

‘Just supposing …’ began Helen, rotating an opal heart earring in her left lobe, ‘… just supposing you fell in love with someone you weren’t meant to, but it crept up on you, and before there was any chance to erect the barricades you were head over heels and resistance was futile. How do you hold the feelings at bay – feelings you’re landed with whether you want them or not? Even though you refuse to meet him or return his phone calls you still think about him constantly. You can’t sleep, can’t concentrate on your job, and your life – which didn’t seem so unsatisfactory until the thunderclap – is so sterile and empty and meaningless there’s no way forward. Actually it’s more of a lightning bolt than a thunderclap, but no less elemental, and it’s left wasteland in its wake. God knows why I’m banging on about the weather.’ Helen twisted her earring so ferociously the back dropped off but she disregarded it. As Molly bent to retrieve the sliver of metal Helen continued, ‘The joy has been sapped from everything: going to work is like wading through fog; coming home to an empty house is so disheartening it’s tempting to stay on the DART train to the end of the line, and a day off stretches endlessly like a prison sentence with no remission.’

Her voice dropped until it was virtually a whisper. Molly’s stomach contracted at the misery on her friend’s face. She leaned across the sofa and wrapped her arms around the slight frame. She’d no inkling Helen was interested in anybody, never mind running the gauntlet of thwarted love.

‘Is it truly hopeless?’ asked Molly.

‘Yes.’

Pause.

‘He’s married?’ prompted Molly.

‘No.’

‘Gay?’

‘No.’

‘A priest?’

‘No.’

‘In love with someone else?’

‘No.’

‘Indifferent?’

‘No.’

‘Struck down by a fatal disease?’

‘No.’

‘Helen, I submit. I can imagine no more obstacles. If it isn’t a love that dare not speak its name, seek its flame or shriek its shame, if it isn’t a love potholed by a wife and four children, or even a love with a continent, an incurable illness and a clerical collar between you, I don’t see the barrier.’

At this Helen sank her head on Molly’s shoulder and sobbed, while Molly furtively reached for her glass. It could be a long night, no point in it being a dry one. But after Helen had a weep and accepted Molly’s offer of a cup of tea she calmed down.

‘I’m being stupid,’ she snivelled, juggling alternate sips of wine and tea. ‘It’s not love, it’s infatuation. If I’m patient it will fade.’

Like curtains, thought Molly, unable to stifle the stray comparison that sneaked into her mind.

Helen continued, ‘I simply have to wait for the feelings to evaporate. It’s just so –’ and here her composure quivered – ‘dreary in the meantime. The one person to whom I could describe how confused and destabilised I feel, because he’s probably experiencing something similar, is the one person I can’t approach. Him.’

‘You can talk to me, angel face.’ Curiosity and compassion were battling it out within Molly as she wondered who this unattainable paragon could be. Helen steadfastly stonewalled efforts to probe his identity, and Molly assumed it had to be someone from work. Where else did thirty-two-year-old women meet men? It certainly wasn’t in the supermarket, despite those magazine articles about checking out the contents of a man’s basket in the check-out queue. Small cartons of milk, individual pizzas and a decent bottle of wine meant singles; trolleys with a rainforest of loo roll and reservoir-sized cola bottles equalled daddies. Or so the article claimed. Molly wasn’t convinced it could be so self-evident. People weren’t tailored from Lycra for a one-size-fits-all finish.