After All - Part Seven

Chapter Seven

Two days later and Sarah her deputy, was back from her jaunt, some winter sun in Cyprus. Mattie had managed to avoid being alone with Dylan, she had no intention of discussing anything with him at the moment. Friday afternoon, as with most weeks, they had a managers meeting to thrash out the coming seven days. She was lucky in that her team were full of initiative and these were enthusiastic events. An hour before the meeting Sarah burst into her office looking tanned and extremely happy. Mattie wasn’t expecting to see her friend and deputy this side of the weekend gave her a grin. “Nice to see you Miss Price!”

Sarah smiled at Mattie and ‘accidently’ wafted her hand in the air, and Mattie gasped, she was sporting a rather huge diamond ring on her finger.

                “Oh My God!” Mattie jumped up, the initial relief and pleasure at seeing her colleague only increased with happiness for her. “Steve popped the question?”

The two hugged, then as she admired the ring in more detail, Sarah sighed, “it was SO romantic, we went scuba diving, and he ‘found’ the ring amongst some coral. Then he had a laminated card in his pocket with ‘will you marry me?’ on it.”

Mattie felt tears well in her eyes for her friend, “I TOLD you that man was a keeper! Have you set the date?”

Sarah shook her head, “not yet. Two sets of parents still need to get their opinion in! So what have I missed? Thought I’d catch up before the meeting. How was your weekend off? Did Paul cope with holding the fort?”

Mattie sighed, “get a coffee. There’s a lot to tell you.”

Sarah was bewildered, staring at her friend as though she had suddenly started to speak French as the whole week’s events came out. “I can’t believe Paul would do this to you...to us.”

Mattie smiled bravely, “we’ve got nothing to hide, this place is ship shape. He just needs someone to tell him where he’s going wrong because that’s what this is, he’s always been unrealistic.” Mattie was like a step daughter to Paul, since they’d met at a job fair a few years earlier he’d looked out for her. When he acquired the golf course and hotel four years earlier he told her she was his first choice to manage it. She’d been in post since and they’d been friends AND colleagues. But this blip, this search for something beyond the reasonable was against his character.

                “So this consultant...how long is he here?”

Mattie shrugged and started to fiddle with the pile of papers on her desk, “not sure...”

Sarah watched her for a moment, Mattie could feel her eyes studying her long before she spoke, “Mattie, what is it?”

She slumped in her chair and sighed, “well he didn’t care about broadcasting it to whoever listened...Dylan Wallace...the consultant, he’s my ex husband.”

Sarah couldn’t look more surprised if Mattie had grown an extra head, “you were married? I had no idea...you’ve never hinted...”

Mattie grabbed her mug of coffee, “it didn’t end well...I have tried to forget it. But as soon as he arrived he wanted to share our history with the world.”

                “Nice,” Sarah offered in a conspiratorial way, “way to make things easy here.”

Mattie rolled her eyes, “you have NO idea.” she handed her colleague a wad of papers, “information before the meeting, if you want to catch up, I’m just going to check the kitchen has coffee on its way.”

When she returned Sarah was up to speed and they were discussing an upcoming conference that Paul had booked when her office door swung open and Dylan stood there.

Mattie groaned, then shook her head, “hurt you to knock?”

                “Ha! You’d not answer.” He turned his eyes to Sarah, “you must be Sarah Price. Back from your holiday.” He extended a hand, “I’m Dylan Wallace, I’m sure Matilda has told you ALL about me.”

Sarah took the hand and smiled, “not much to tell apparently. Nice to meet you Mr Wallace.”

He had a retort poised on his lips, Mattie could tell, but a knock at the door silenced him.

                “Staff with courtesy!” She offered staring at the closed door, then giving him a quick glare, “does this mean you’re staying for the meeting?”

He nodded, “is that a bad thing?”

Shaking her head she opened the office door and the five other managers filed in, chatting then reaching for essential coffee.

The meetings were sometimes stressful, but usually quite good natured, each of her managers was well driven and turned up weekly with new projects, ideas and initiative.

                “What are the plans for the weekend? Daniel how’s the conference looking?”

He nodded, “all sorted, ninety five accountants, sixty of whom are staying for two nights. Three course lunches and dinner for most too. It’s a nice earner for us.”

Mattie beamed, “and housekeeping are up to it James?”

As James held court, his favourite thing, Mattie looked around, and sighed, Dylan was watching her again. He wasn’t about to give up on her.

When everyone filed out, Sarah stayed behind to catch up on all that was missed, Dylan hovered for a little while, but as they remained engrossed in work, he finally left.

An hour later Mattie was alone, finishing off her work before the weekend to herself that loomed so temptingly, when there was a knock at her door.

                “Come in!” she called from her position ransacking the filing cabinets for a relating to the upcoming golf tournament. Sighing with frustration she kicked the drawer closed then looked up to see Dylan lounging against the door frame, she couldn’t have contained the groan if she’d tried.   “What do you want?”

He laughed, “so genial and helpful to everyone else but still hostile to me.”

She shook her head, “I’m not hostile, I’m tired, busy and wanting to get out of here. Anything wrong with that?”

Shrugging he moved across the room to stand in front of her, “you’re avoiding me.”

                “I’m avoiding the past Dylan. I got over it years ago.”

He watched her struggle to contain her emotions and knew she was anything but over it. Holding out a cheque he sighed, “what you said earlier in the week. About being bankrupt.”

Mattie moved away from him, “I dealt with it.”

                “It was MY debt, I knew that. I just presumed you’d left it against my name. Why did you take it on?”

She was backed into a corner, physically and emotionally, it was such a hard time to remember, and he was forcing her. With a groan she looked at the cheque in his hand, it was for the exact amount of the debt he’d left. Whilst she’d had to write off the debt, she’d been unable to work for a while, fallen behind with repayment plans, she’d hidden it from so many people, working for peanuts, barely eating to keep up the pretence to friends and family that she was coping.

                “The debt was on MY credit cards, or against MY home. I couldn’t move away from it, it followed me. In the end I had to give in to it. I couldn’t just walk away, leave everything like you did.”

                “I went on business. I left for deal in Hong Kong, you KNEW that!”

Mattie fought the nausea that threatened to overtake her, “it was always so easy to you. That was the fifth whim you’d flown off on, the fifth time you’d cashed in thousands on the promise that it was yet another ‘big chance’. They never were.”

He sighed, “take this. Please.”

She grabbed the cheque and ripped it in half with a laugh, “two hundred and fifty thousand pounds? You think I believe you’re good for that? You couldn’t hold on to a fiver, you lost money like water through a sieve. Bloody hell Dylan, I wish there was more room on that little cloud of delusion for me.”

He shook his head, “you don’t get it, do you?”

                “Do I care? No.” She made to back in to her dressing room, to lock herself away from him but his voice caused her to stop.

                “It paid off this time. Hong Kong and then New York. After a dozen duds, I finally found a tip off that paid off.”

She turned slowly and stared at him, “what?”

                “Hong Kong, the investment was in air conditioning...the company bombed, but I stepped in and turned it around. Then sold it on for three times the profit, by the time I hit New York, I had found another business, did the same...I became a millionaire within a year of leaving London.”

She staggered, as she was divorcing him, struggling to deal with life he was finally making it, finally getting the rewards for all his scamming and wheeler dealer antics. She slumped into her seat, he was rich? She knew he more fine suits, had splashed cash around since he’d arrived, but Dylan had always been extravagant. She’d presumed this was no different to his exuberance of the past.

                “Take the money. You deserve it. It was MY debt not yours. All you ever did was graft honestly.”

Taking a deep breath, gathering the edges of her fraught emotions, she looked up at him, “throw money at me. Is that to help me or your guilt? Because I have lived with YOUR lies, YOUR debt, and YOUR fake promises. I am not about to take on your guilt. You hear me?”

With the door locked behind her Mattie needed time to regroup, she hadn’t really imagined that any of his harebrained schemes would pay off, he’d always been suave, sophisticated, he had a natural comfortableness in any situation. She’d presumed he was employed, working as a consultant; she had no idea that it was just part of the conglomerate that was his life. Had he always been destined for greatness? She wasn’t sure. He’d been swamped with failure for as long as she’d known him. How typical that the moment she smelled the coffee and dumped him he suddenly became the success he’d always dreamed of...the success he’d always promised her he’d be?

She showered quickly, then dressed in her jeans, shirt and boots. She hated going back to her flat in her work gear, she stood out in the area like a sore thumb, and whilst she was broke, she appeared to be the opposite in her smart work clothes. The fact that they were the only expensive things she possessed didn’t translate, and in the area she lived in standing out wasn’t good. She dry cleaned her work clothes in a laundrette near the tube station that she used to go to and from work, and in doing so her two worlds never met.

Hair brushed, face clean, she stepped out into the office to see Dylan still sat opposite her desk. If he was surprised at her appearance he hid it well.

                “I’ve nothing further to say Dylan.”

He stood and blocked her path, “well I have. I am here, and you need to face up to that.”

She turned on him, “I faced up to you and all that you did to me when you swanned off into the distance without a care in the world. My mother was ill...you KNEW that. I needed you, but the whim, the risk...the challenge of the unknown was greater than me, than the needs of your wife.”

He flinched in pain at that, “how is she? Your mother.”

Mattie closed her eyes for a moment, then pinched the bridge of her nose; it still hurt to think of the eight weeks that saw her mother turn from a vibrant vivacious woman to the skeletal ghost who passed away in her father’s arms. Cancer, a cruel illness.

Looking up she sighed, “she died Dylan, my mother died less than two months after you took the last fifty thousand pounds of our credit limit, against our home and pissed off to pastures new.”

                “Shit.” He stood up, “I had no idea...”

Mattie sighed, “why would you? You left and didn’t care about me. You were after the next challenge; all you cared about was the risk of taking on long odds. Well Dylan, I was obviously yet another of those risks and you gambled with everything we had. You didn’t care that you lost me and left me with a shit load of debt that I was too busy grieving to deal with. So don’t you DARE stand there and ask me to deal with the past, to talk to you. You killed a part of me when you left, I’ll never get over your betrayal, or the hell you left me in, it was like a constant reminder for years. In six months I’ve paid off the last of the debt, it’s taken me six years, but come August I’m free...and I’m having a holiday...or maybe a meal out, because it has been a LONG time since I’ve had anything luxurious in my life.”

He tried to say something, but she held up a hand to silence him, she needed to get out, get away before she crumbled in front of him.