The House on Willow Street. Cathy Kelly

funny. So what’s the BUT. The but that I don’t have.’

      She wanted him to say it. Because you were never The One, Mara. Because I was continually looking over your shoulder and then Tawhnee came along … She wanted him to tell the truth instead of the lies he clearly had been spouting when they were together.

      ‘There’s no “but”. You’re perfect,’ Jack said.

      ‘If I’m perfect, why didn’t you stay with me?’

      ‘I don’t know. She came to work for us, she’s stunning – not that you’re not stunning too,’ Jack said hastily.

      ‘You told me you liked the way I looked, and then you go and fall in love with a woman who is the complete opposite of me,’ she said. Except for the boobs, she thought grimly. In addition to her supermodel sleekness and legs up to the armpits, Tawhnee had gravity-defying boobs. The office women were convinced that Tawhnee had had a boob job. The office men didn’t care.

      Jack said nothing.

      Mara wasn’t to be deflected. ‘I want to know why,’ she said. ‘That’s all. Why you’ve married Tawhnee when, despite two years with me, you never even so much as asked me what I thought about marriage? It’s because I wasn’t the one, isn’t it? I was simply the one you could play around with while you waited for her to show up.’

      It wasn’t as if Mara had been pinning her hopes on a wedding, but the longer she went out with Jack, the more she began to think that such an event might happen one day. She was sure that he loved her as much as she loved him. That Jack Taylor, a man who could have any woman he wanted, had really chosen a petite red-head who’d thought she was ordinary for years until she’d met him, and he’d told her she was special. She’d begun to believe all the things he’d said.

      That she was the sexiest woman he’d ever met. And the funniest. And the most beautiful … Except he’d never asked her to marry him.

      Four months after she’d found out he was cheating on her, he’d announced his engagement to Tawhnee. Today, a mere two months later, they were married.

      ‘You didn’t talk about marriage either,’ he bleated. ‘I didn’t think you were the kind of woman who’s into all that sort of thing’.

      ‘What gave you that idea?’

      Jack had one last card. ‘Tawhnee said she wanted to get married. She said it on our first date.’

      ‘Really?’ said Mara, sigh and word wrapped into one.

      Was that what it would have taken? If Mara had told Jack she was the marrying kind of girl, instead of the let’s-go-to-bed-and-have-fun sort of girl, would it have been her today in the long white dress?

      ‘Give me that cigarette.’

      She plucked it from his fingers and took a long drag. She wasn’t actually a smoker, not really. When they’d been together, she’d had a few when they were out partying. Liking the idea of taking a cigarette from his mouth. It was such an intimate thing to do. But tonight, she wanted to do something self-destructive, and letting nicotine hit her was the only thing to hand. She’d promised herself she would not drink too much: to turn into the drunken ex at a wedding would be too humiliating.

      She coughed and felt her guts loosen.

      ‘Yeuch.’ She stubbed the cigarette out on the balustrade.

      ‘I hadn’t finished with that!’ wailed Jack.

      Mara patted his cheek. ‘That’s precisely what I said to Tawhnee, but hey, that’s life.’

      Mara left him standing there. She collected her handbag from her chair, and smiled at the people at her table. They were colleagues from work and most of them had been so sweet to her.

      ‘Jack’s a fool,’ Pat from accounts said for about the fifth time that evening.

      ‘I’d go out with you tomorrow,’ slurred Henry, who sold higher class properties because he’d been to all the right schools and looked immaculate in navy pinstripe.

      His wife, a frosted blonde who was equally posh and very kind, slapped him gently. ‘Don’t be silly, Henry. What about me?’

      ‘You could come too,’ Henry said happily.

      ‘I’m going to head off,’ Mara interrupted, before Henry could get on to the subject of threesomes.

      ‘Good plan,’ said Veronica, who worked with Mara and had her junior doctor fiancé in tow. He was asleep in his chair and someone had put a garland of flowers on his head. ‘You’ve done your bit.’ She got up to hug Mara. ‘We all think you’re so brave for coming,’ she whispered. ‘At least you’ve got two weeks before they’re back from honeymoon. Apparently, Tawhnee will carry on working with Jack for the next year, so you’ve got some breathing space to get your head around it all.’

      Mara inhaled sharply. ‘Nobody told me that.’

      Tawhnee was supposed to leave, that’s what Jack had told her in the early, painful days of finding out. Tawhnee would be leaving at Christmas.

      ‘Easier not to know, isn’t it?’ Veronica said.

      No, thought Mara suddenly, it isn’t.

      Her whole career at Kearney Property Partners was changing and nobody had thought to tell her. She was the silly, cuckolded girl who’d been so in love with Jack Taylor that she’d forgotten about herself. She’d handed him her heart and her job on a plate.

      ‘Thanks for telling me,’ she said to Veronica.

      ‘You’re so brave,’ Veronica said again. ‘Please, please, find yourself a total stud within the next two weeks so you can drag him into the office for lunch on their first day back from honeymoon. Ideally, you should be practically having sex with the stud on the reception desk when they come in.’

      Mara laughed, thinking of movies where desperate women hired escorts for weddings and office parties so they wouldn’t be seen as hopeless cases. Perhaps she should have rented a hunk for tonight. Someone to look as if he couldn’t wait to rip her dress off with his teeth – even if he was being paid for it. But then that would be fake and, suddenly, Mara was in no mood for fake.

      Like she was in no mood to go back into the office and pretend. She looked at all the smiling faces round the table, all wishing her well, and knew she wouldn’t be able to carry on working there for much longer.

      ‘See you all next week,’ she said brightly and whisked her jacket – vintage fake leopard print – off the chair.

      Outside, she asked Reception to call her a taxi, and then hid in a big armchair near the door, hoping nobody from the wedding party would spot her escaping.

      She rang Cici, who was out with some friends.

      Mara whispered what Veronica had told her. ‘Even Veronica’s getting married,’ wailed Mara down the phone. ‘The whole world is at it. Was a law brought in making marriage compulsory and nobody told me about it?’

      ‘Don’t be daft. You don’t want to get married, not really.’

      ‘I do.’

      ‘You don’t. Jack’s a prat. Geddit? Jack’s a prat. He’d make you miserable. What if the two of you had got married and he’d met Tawhnee afterwards? What then, tell me?’

      ‘He’d still have run off with her,’ Mara said, feeling like the voice of doom in her own Greek chorus. ‘Does loving a shallow man make me shallow too?’

      ‘No, simply a typical woman,’ advised Cici, wise after several bottles of Miller. ‘You’ll feel better tomorrow and we’ll think of a plan to have fun, right?’

      ‘Right.’

      The taxi driver told her she was a sensible girl