“Oh my gosh, Ames!” I take the shoes out of the box and they’re the sexiest pair of black stilettos I’ve ever seen. They’re wrap-around sandals made of a net of crystal-covered leather. The motif looks like sparkly fish scales. “These aren’t I’m-single-and-desperate shoes, these are I’m-smoking-hot-and-you’d-be-lucky-to-kiss-my-toes shoes. Any special occasion?”

“Tomorrow evening I’ve got drinks with my colleagues. I hate those things, but they’re supposed to be for team building, so I’ve to go. Oh, and you’re coming with me.”

“Am I? Why?”

“I need a friend there. There’s this guy at the office. I hate him, he’s worse than William.”

As she says this Amelia turns purple.

“Worse than William?” I wonder what a dude could’ve done to be classified as worse than William, given present circumstances. He must’ve sunk pretty low. “What did he do?”

“He stole one of my accounts, then he made me cry, and then he kissed me.” Amelia pouts and I almost choke on my wine at the kissing part.

“He kissed you?”

“Yeah, the guts of him.”

I smirk; something tells me Amelia didn’t exactly dislike the kiss. “Good kisser or bad kisser?”

“Good. I mean, average.”

“Uh-huh. And how did you go from the client stealing to the crying to the kissing?”

“He announced the account change this morning at the staff meeting. In front of everyone, the bastard.”

“He sounds a bit jerky. Is it office policy to steal each other’s clients?”

“It’s accepted. The partners think it keeps the working environment more lively.”

“So he what? He waited for you to be on your honeymoon to steal one of your accounts?”

“Precisely.”

“What a D-bag. But why you? Did he want to be mean to you?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I guess it was payback.”

“Payback for what?”

“For me stealing his biggest client last month,” Amelia replies, unconcerned.

“Amelia! You made it sound like he was bad, and you’re worse than him.”

“At least I had the class not to gloat about it in his face.”

“Is that how he made you cry?”

“No, much, much worse.”

I stare at her interrogatively.

“Once the meeting was over, he came into my office to gloat. He asked me if I’d liked my wedding present.”

I stop mid-sip, shocked. “He didn’t.”

“He did.”

I squeeze her knee.

“That’s when I lost it. He was there, standing on my threshold all arrogant and smug, and I’d just found out Will was moving to New York… I threw the first thing I found—a mug—at him and I-I started crying. Ugly, hysterical crying. I couldn’t stop myself. I kept sobbing and sobbing.”

“And what did he—what’s his name?—do?”

“Dylan, his name’s Dylan. He came into the office and closed the door.”

And the plot thickens.