From The Heart by Sheila O'Flanagan Page A

but Gabriella,’ I protested, my heart beating faster at the thought of going back to Spain even if it was miles away from all my friends there, ‘I have a job here. And I’m sure that there are plenty of people there already who would do a good job for you. Magdalena, perhaps?’
    ‘Isobel, why is it that whenever I offer you a job you always suggest someone else?’ There was a hint of amusement in her voice. She was remembering the time she’d offered me the promotion, when I’d been pleased and flattered but secretly terrified and had suggested that almost anyone else in the firm would be better at it than me. ‘You are doing well in your current position, yes? It is very senior. Very responsible. I thought you might be interested in this one. I know you liked living here. But if you have set up a new life in Ireland, that is perfectly fine.’
    A new life in Ireland. Well, yes, to a point. But I was still living at home, hadn’t quite managed to get myself an apartment of my own yet and hadn’t quite managed to get myself a new social life either. My best friend, Julie, was in the States with her husband, Andy. Alison and Peter were inseparable. There weren’t many social opportunities in the new job. But in lots of ways that was what I wanted. To be busy. To keep my heart intact. To not get involved with people any more. To stay single!
    ‘Isobel?’ Gabriella’s voice broke into my thoughts. ‘It is up to you. But I would really like to have you here. I want someone I can depend on.’
    I nearly laughed out loud at that. Of all the things that I was, I really didn’t think dependable was going to be that high up on people’s lists.
    ‘Let me think about it,’ I said.
    ‘Two weeks,’ she told me. ‘Then I must advertise for someone else.’
    I didn’t need two weeks, of course. I never would have needed two weeks. I’d loved my life in Madrid even if it had been an escape and a reinvention. Maybe I could have a good life in Alicante too. I didn’t know the city but, I reckoned, I’d gone somewhere before where I didn’t know anyone and I’d made lots of friends and it had been good for me. So why not do it again?
    My mother looked at me despairingly. My father shrugged his shoulders. Alison told me to go for it. Ian, my brother, muttered that maybe this time he’d get the chance to take a Spanish holiday with somewhere decent to crash out, and wasn’t Alicante on the coast, which would be excellent for a bit of R&R? Julie sent me an e-mail telling me that it would be good to live in a different country again for a while and asking me had I ever heard from Nico and what was the likelihood of bumping into him? I responded that I hadn’t and that Madrid was at least four hundred kilometres away from Alicante, so no, bumping into people from my life there wasn’t going to happen.
    In the end it wasn’t really a struggle at all. I took the job and I went to Alicante.
    Gabriella had set me up in an apartment in a tall but ugly block in the city which had the compensating factor of having a huge balcony and a view over the marina. The office, a mere five-minute walk away, was in a truly beautiful renovated building with high ceilings, marbled floors and elaborate wrought-iron Juliet balconies outside the floor-to-ceiling windows. It was the most elegant place I’d ever worked in my life.
    The job was great. I recruited new people, set up course timetables, scoured for clients and generally worked my butt off. But I loved it. My social life revolved around my work because there was a vast amount of corporate entertaining to do. I did, occasionally, meet people for dinner or for drinks but it never amounted to much. In many ways I was at my most content on my own, in the late evenings, walking along the psychedelically tiled Explanada de España, listening to the animated chatter of the people around me as they strolled arm in arm (or, in the case of some of the older townspeople, sat on the red