‘Good for you.’ I give Danielle an acknowledging nod and sit myself down at the table. ‘Now, I hear the food at this place is great. What do you all recommend?’

‘Well handled,’ I hear Emmanuel whisper, as she takes her seat next to me.

Chapter 13

By the time I get back to my apartment that evening, I’m beyond exhausted. I kick off my trainers (which I wear to and from the office), dump my bag, and collapse onto my bed.

It’s not the same exhaustion I felt after returning to work from my sickness absence. My low-level MS symptoms are playing a part, as they now do every single day, but the overriding feeling is one of information overload. So many new names, new faces, new structures, processes and procedures. Overall, it seems like it will be a great place to work and I’m just desperate to get stuck in. I always hate having to be shown the ropes and getting up to speed; my natural instincts are to be in control and moving things forward. But it shouldn’t be more than a few days before I can take the project reins and get us off and running.

My relationship with Danielle, however, is going to be a different story. She spent much of lunch and the rest of the afternoon emitting her laser beam of superiority: her knowledge of the company, her apparent closeness to the chief executive, and her understanding of the project from the data analysis she’s completed so far. She’s going to be a royal pain in the arse. Nothing I can’t handle, but it is going to require careful managing, which has the capacity to zap my energy pretty quickly. I’m just so relieved she doesn’t know about my medical situation: a weapon I suspect she would use and abuse.

This is something I would ordinarily have discussed with Dom, keen to get his take on things and sharing that feeling of camaraderie. I feel a wave of sadness wash over me as the familiar Dom-shaped hole in my life opens up once again, and I realise that I have nobody to chew the Danielle issue over with. How isolated that makes me feel.

Unwilling to engage with this concept, and determined to think that I’m made of stronger stuff, I push the emptiness aside. Danielle is not going to take over my evening as well, so I turn on the TV to the six o’clock news headlines. I lie there for about twenty minutes, not really taking anything in but unable to muster the energy to do anything else. After a while, my mind starts to wander and lands on the memory of Matt from the train. He was so fun and charming, not to mention absolutely gorgeous. Did I overreact by binning his number? I clearly liked him, and we did have a connection. But our lives couldn’t have been further apart – he scales hills for fun while I can barely manage a flight of stairs. No. It was a non-starter.