Over the past few months, I’d realized that might be my problem, needing to be in control. I’d always had difficulty sharing worries, until the day when I found someone I could do that with, a person I trusted completely: Molloy. Then he’d left. He’d had his reasons and eventually he had come back, but the vacuum he’d left behind had left me feeling vulnerable, as if I’d been leaning on a gate that collapsed under my weight. It made me unsure about leaning on that gate again when he’d asked me to marry him, out of the blue, with no warning whatsoever. Six months later that proposal still seemed like a crazy thing for him to have done. We hadn’t even been together at the time.

Mitch looked across at me and sighed theatrically. “Okay then. If you have to.”

“I have to.” I thought how amusing a city lawyer like Mitch Stevens would find my gate imagery. I may have grown up in Dublin, but it seemed I was a country girl at heart.

“What time is your flight in the morning?” he asked.

“It’s not till the evening but it’s from Orlando so …”

“You want to leave in the morning?”

I nodded.

He raised his eyebrows. “Lunch? A last supper so to speak?”

“Sure. That would be lovely.”

“The Greek place?”

Mitch was already at the table when I arrived even though I was early, and he wasn’t alone. Ten other people from the office were seated at a big round table in the middle of the restaurant, and they all cheered when I walked in. Mortified, I mouthed an apology to one of the waitresses who just smiled in amusement. It was no skin off her nose.

If I’d given it any thought, I should have anticipated some type of a send-off, but Mitch had such an ability to dissemble I hadn’t noticed anything other than a casual invitation to lunch. I suppose that was what made him such a good trial lawyer. You’d be forgiven for thinking that lawyers were incapable of subtlety in a place where billboards along highways and on taxis bellowed Get Aggressive Attorneys – Timberlake and Yonkers or Auto Accident dial 1800 – ask Gary! but that would be a mistake. I’d grown hugely fond of Mitch, but he had the capacity to be as sneaky and manipulative as hell when required.

And he’d gone all out for my send-off. There were balloons and streamers, even a bottle of champagne in the center of the table, which I eyed as I took the seat beside him.

“I hope you don’t expect me to do any work this afternoon!”

“It’s only a glass. One bottle isn’t going to go too far with this lot.”