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"How long are you thinking of staying?" Grace asked now.

"The lease is for six months with a renewal option after that, so I don't know...as long as it takes, I suppose."

"Six months?" her friend shrieked. "So you're really giving up your whole life here?"

"Did you think I'd just hang around for a couple of weeks and then turn tail? It's not that simple, Grace."

"It all just seems so...sudden," her friend argued, and when Leonie said nothing, she went on. "Especially when you're usually so calm and together about everything."

"Calm and together when it comes to other people's stuff, maybe."

But when it came to her own issues, it was so much harder to be pragmatic. Yes, coming here might have been impulsive, but at the same time, it felt...right.

"Okay, so now you've found a place to live, great. At least I'll know where you are. But what are you going to do? You still can't just hide away forever in some strange city."

Leonie shrugged. She wasn't going to think that far ahead. "Now that I have a base, I suppose I'll start looking for a new job." Right before she left Dublin, she'd resigned from her position at the event management company and turned down her boss's kind offer of a leave of absence, because she simply wasn't sure of her plans.

And while she had some savings to keep her going for a bit, she knew that in order to preoccupy her time (and perhaps more importantly, her mind), she needed to find work.

"I just can't get my head around this," Grace said mournfully, and Leonie could picture her friend back in her kitchen, surrounded by the toddlers' toys, blond head shaking in disbelief. "And all the way to America."

"Well, this is home too in a way," she pointed out, referring to the fact that she'd been born in the United States, though her Irish parents had relocated to Dublin soon after. Following their eventual separation, they'd moved on yet again; her dad was now in Hong Kong and her mum in South Africa with a new partner. She could have gone to her mum's, but they didn't have a particularly close relationship, nor did she want to be a burden, and again, she needed to be on her own for a while.

"Okay," Grace said quietly after a beat. "I suppose I might as well tell you. I bumped into Adam the other day. He doesn't know...that you've left the country, I mean."

Leonie felt dizzy. "You didn't...?"

"Of course I didn't," Grace replied quickly. "I promised I wouldn't. I'm not saying I agree with it, but a promise is a promise—even if it had to be made over the phone from across the Atlantic," she added archly.

Leonie tried to digest this but didn't know why she felt so surprised that Grace had seen or spoken to him; Dublin wasn't that big a city after all. Another reason why she'd felt the need to get the hell out of there—she didn't want to run the risk of bumping into him unawares. Heart pounding, she resisted the urge to press Grace for more details, like how he looked, what he'd said. Did he even ask about her?

"So don't you want to know what we talked about or what he said?" her friend asked.

"No, I don't actually." Leonie swallowed hard. "I-I'd rather not talk about him at all, to be honest."

"Well, he looked absolutely terrible, and for what it's worth, I think he really regrets—"

"Grace, please. I said I don't want to talk about it, okay?" Maybe in time, but definitely not now, not when everything was still so raw.

"Isn't there any chance you two could still work things out? Forgive and forget, even?"

"I very much doubt it." Leonie sighed, knowing that when it came to her and Adam, things were no longer that simple.


CHAPTER THREE

Two weeks later, she got the keys to the apartment and moved into her new home—for the next six months at least.

She'd told Grace the truth when she'd said she didn't know how long she'd be staying. All Leonie knew was that taking time out was what she'd always done when faced with any major crossroads in life.

Her work required her to be cool, calm, and decisive, and she was usually pretty good at applying those same traits to other people's issues, but for some reason, she could never quite manage to call on them when it came to her own.
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