Cathy Kelly - Lessons in Heartbreak

‘This is our history, Beth,’ Edward had explained.

And now he’d rewritten their family history. Anneliese didn’t know if she could ever forgive him for that. There was no justification, none.

Of course, it didn’t matter to Edward if she forgave him or not. He wasn’t in her life any more.

Izzie’s Manhattan apartment was cold and looked bare after the warmth of the New Mexico hotel. Even her beloved New York was coolly impersonal today, she decided: the cab driver who’d picked her up at the airport hadn’t been classically eccentric, just dull, and it was raining too, the type of flash flood that could drown a person in an instant.

Wet and tired, Izzie slammed her front door shut and set her luggage down, trying to put a finger on the sense of discontent she felt. There was something about the friendliness of the pueblo, a small-town kindliness that Izzie missed from home. She was a small-town girl, after all, she thought, feeling a rush of homesickness for Tamarin. She thought about home a lot these days. Was it because she felt so alone when Joe left late at night and her thoughts turned to her family, the other people who cared for her?

Or was it because she felt a growing anxiety over what was happening: a relationship that was so hard to explain that she hadn’t tried to explain it to anyone, not Carla, not her dad, not Gran.

She stripped off her dripping jacket and only then allowed herself to look at the answering machine. The message display showed a big fat zero. Zero messages.

Horrible bloody machine. She glared at it, as if it was the machine’s fault that Joe hadn’t rung.

Turning on the lamps to give her home some type of inner glow, Izzie stomped into the bathroom, stripped off her clothes and got into the shower to wash away the dust of the mesa. She was becoming obsessed with cleaning herself. Was Obsessive Compulsive Disorder a product of tangled love affairs? She’d never had so many showers in her life, always showering and scrubbing and oiling in the hope that, once she was in the shower, the phone would ring. It always used to. But not now. Joe hadn’t phoned in five days.

Five days.

‘I’ll talk to you,’ he’d murmured the morning she flew to New Mexico.

‘You do that,’ she’d murmured back, wishing she could cancel, wishing something would happen so she’d be close to him, because there was a cold, isolating feeling from not being in the same city as him. What was that about?

But he hadn’t phoned.

Not even on the last night when they all let their hair down, when the noise of partying would have made any normal absent lover slightly jealous – which was why Izzie had hoped he’d phone then, just so she’d have the chance to move away from the hubbub and casually say that Ivan was playing the limbo-dancing game, and make it all sound fabulous . So fabulous that he’d be jealous of her being there without him…Except he hadn’t played the game. He hadn’t phoned.

Izzie clambered out of the shower, still irritated.

No, a shower wasn’t the right thing. A bath, that would be perfect.

She started to fill the tub, poured in at least half of her precious Jo Malone rose bath oil, opened a bottle of white wine and made herself a spritzer for the bath, and finally sank into the fragrant bubbles.

She sipped her spritzer, laid back with her eyes closed and tried to relax. But the blissful obliviousness baths used to bring her, a sinking-into-the-heat-thing that made her forget everything else, evaded her. As ever, since she’d met Joe, he was the only thing in her mind.

For that first lunch, they’d met in a small, quirky Italian restaurant in the Village, the sort of place Izzie hadn’t imagined Joe would like. She’d guessed he’d prefer more uptown joints where the staff recognised every billionaire in the city. It was another thing to like about him, this difference.

Over antipasti, they chatted and the more he talked, the more Izzie felt herself falling for him.

He’d got a business degree, then joined J.P. Morgan’s graduate-trainee programme.

‘That’s when the bug hit me,’ he said, scooping up a sliver of ciabatta bread drenched with basil-infused olive oil. ‘Trading is all about instant gratification, and I loved it.’

‘Isn’t it stressful?’ she asked, thinking of losing millions and how she’d have to be anaesthetised if she did a job like that.

‘I never felt stress,’ he said. ‘I loved it. I’d trade, lose some, win some, whatever, I’d go home and go to sleep. People burned out all the time – the hours, the work-hard, play-hard mentality, it got to a lot of them, but not me.’

At twenty-nine, he’d been running his own trading fund, a hedge fund.

‘That’s what it means,’ said Izzie delighted. ‘I never knew.’

The higher up the chain he went, the more risk but also bigger percentages to be earned, until finally he ended up as head of trading for a huge bank. ‘Basically, you’re trying to systematically beat all the markets through math,’ he explained. ‘You name it, we traded it. We were a closed fund.’

Izzie, mouth full of roasted peppers, looked at him quizzically.

‘Means we only reinvested profits and no new investors could get in.’

‘Oh.’ She nodded. This was like a masterclass in Wall Street. How many years had she known all those money guys and never had a clue what they were talking about?

Finally, he and a friend named Leo Guard had started their own closed hedge fund, HG.

‘Eventually, we were doing so well, we changed the fee structure from two and twenty to five and forty.’

‘I add up using my fingers,’ Izzie explained. ‘I have no idea what that means.’

He grinned and handed her some more bread.

‘That’s the typical fee structure: two and twenty means you get two per cent for management and twenty per cent of profits from performance.’

‘Wow,’ she said. ‘And you were trading in millions?’

He nodded. ‘Imagine having six hundred under management.’

Izzie hated to look thick. ‘Six hundred million dollars?’ she said, just to check.

He nodded.

‘You’re rich, then,’ she said, hating herself for eating all that antipasti as she already felt full and the main courses would be coming soon.

Joe laughed.

‘You’re the real deal, Izzie Silver,’ he said. ‘I like that.’

‘Honest,’ she said, pushing her plate away. ‘Not everyone likes it.’

‘I do. Yes, you could say I am rich.’

‘You don’t own a super-yacht, though?’ she asked, with a twinkle in her eye.

He laughed again. ‘No. Do you want one, or do you simply want to date a guy with one?’

Izzie smiled at his innocence. ‘You haven’t a clue, do you?’ she said coolly. ‘I am so far away from the type of woman who wants a man with a super-yacht that I am on a different continent.’ She rearranged things on the table, pushing the salt and pepper around. ‘The pepper is me.’ She stuck it at the edge of the table. ‘And the salt –’ she moved it to the other side completely, ‘– is the sort of woman who wants to know a guy’s bank balance before she meets him for a drink. See? Big gap, big difference. Enormous.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Just don’t do it again,’ she joked. ‘I have never in my entire life gone out with a guy because of the size of his bank balance. Ever. I did briefly – one date – go out with a guy from next door in my old apartment because he knew how to work the heating, and he’d fixed it for me one day when the super wasn’t around and I went out on a date with him, but that was it. A one-off.’

‘You came out with me because I gave you a ride back to the office, then?’ he teased.