Maxine opened the screen door to go back inside.

“France was Dan’s dream,” she said, her hand on the door. “Why don’t you come up with some of your own?”

“That’s not true,” said Cat furiously, but her mother was gone, the screen door slamming behind her.

It was pride that was holding her back. There was something pathetic about the rejected wife bravely pulling herself together, joining a tennis club, doing a photography course, cutting her hair, venturing timidly back out onto the single scene. It was like accepting the punishment handed over by the malevolent forces of fate. She wasn’t going to be a good little girl stoically picking up the pieces.

While her personal life was being pulverized, her professional life had been ticking along nicely. The “Seduce Yourself” Valentine’s Day campaign had been an unqualified success, with sales rocketing. There were even complaints! She’d always wanted to do a campaign that generated complaints. (“It was certainly not our intention to offend anyone,” said Marketing Director Catriona Kettle.) Breakfast show DJs made risqué jokes about Hollingdale Chocolates. “What are you going to do next, Cat?” asked Rob Spencer. “Give away a vibrator with every box of chocolates?” “Now you’re talking,” said Cat.

Rather than being embarrassed about their night together, Graham Hollingdale seemed to find it all rather delicious. He gave her twinkly little nudge, nudge, wink, wink looks in meetings. Sometimes she twinkled back. He was too dorky to be lewd. Polyamory was just a really interesting new hobby he’d taken up.

One day, he called her into his office and told her that he was giving her a promotion. Her lengthy new title would be “General Manager—Marketing and Sales, Asia-Pacific Region.” Rob Spencer and his team would report to her. (Rob Spencer would rather be savaged by a rabid dog.) She’d receive a twenty percent increase in her salary.

Graham grinned, and Cat thought, Did I just sleep my way to the top?

“Twenty percent?” she said.

“Yes,” said Graham fondly. “The Board is over the moon about the last quarter results. Your new strategy is so powerful!”

How far could she push this? Could she get more? Could she double it?

“Triple it,” she heard herself say.

“You want a sixty percent increase?”

“Yes.”

“All right.”

Bloody hell!

She sighed and thought of her mother telling her to come up with some dreams of her own.

“The thing is,” she said to Graham. “I don’t really want to sell chocolates anymore.”

He looked at her with doleful sympathy. “No. No, neither do I. What do you want to do instead?”

“I don’t know.”

“Neither do I.”

They laughed guiltily, like two teenagers sitting outside the careers adviser’s office.

“Wednesdays still no good for you?”

“No, Graham.”

It was a Sunday afternoon, and Cat was legally behind the wheel for the first time in seven months. Driving again after so long was an enjoyable sensation. It reminded her of that flying-free feeling of her first solo drive as a teenager. Not nearly as good but then, all her adult emotions felt like shadows, self-conscious imitations of those intensely real feelings from her childhood.

She had passed her driving test the first time, at 9 A.M. on the morning of her seventeenth birthday—the earliest possible moment she was allowed to try for it. Her sisters didn’t bother. Lyn wasn’t in a hurry, and Gemma couldn’t stop driving into things.

Frank had been waiting for her in the registry office, his head down reading the newspaper. When he glanced up and saw the expression on her face, he grinned, folded the paper in half, and tucked it under his arm. “That’s my girl.”

He let her take his brand-new Commodore for a drive. “Please don’t kill yourself. I’ll never hear the end of it from your mother.”

She drove all the way to Palm Beach. No alert-eyed grown-up in the passenger seat, the car felt so empty! Accelerating around each new swoop of the road made her delirious with freedom. She could do anything! If she could parallel park—she could take on the whole world!

Her future back then, thought Cat now, was like a long buffet table of exotic dishes awaiting her selection. This career or that career. This boy or that boy. Marriage and children? Maybe later—for dessert, perhaps.

She didn’t realize they’d start clearing the plates away so soon.

Somebody pulled into the lane in front of her without signaling, and Cat slammed on her brake and her horn simultaneously. That was it. The novelty of driving had taken approximately four minutes to wear off.

She was going over to Lyn’s place for coffee.

The famously gorgeous Hank, Lyn’s American ex-boyfriend, was in Sydney, and Lyn, for some unfathomable reason, wanted Cat to meet him.

“You’re not trying to set me up with him, are you?” asked Cat. There was a suspicious breathlessness in Lyn’s voice.

“No!” said Lyn. “And anyway—well, you’ll see. Just come. Bring a cake.”

Cat pulled over across the road from the bakery and hopped out of the car. The traffic was beginning to slow and a truck pulled up beside her. The passenger, his arm resting along the windowsill and his feet up on the dashboard, glanced down at her and gave a relaxed wolf whistle.

Cat looked up and met the guy’s eyes. He grinned. She grinned back. The traffic moved and she ran across the road, the sun warm on the back of her neck.