Found by Elle Field Read Free Book Online Page A

calm down. If I call Mum and ask her if it’s true, it will make what Felicity did be true that little bit sooner. Well, might have done. It would help to explain a few things though – such as why Felicity sold the shop in Bournemouth. Was that what she was doing – winding everything up?
    ‘OK, what landmark is next?’ he demands, pulling me back to the here and now.
    I force myself to laugh, but I’m relieved to have Ob to distract me as I stop on the corner of Broadway and West 33rd Street so I can stare up at the Empire State Building. From where I’m standing the side of the building pokes out, but it still manages to loom over the street, and I know if I went to stand at the bottom of it, I would be overwhelmed.
    I feel insignificant in this moment. How did people even come up with the idea of these dizzying skyscrapers, let alone work out how to make them possible? Whoever built the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building, their legacy will live on forever. What sort of a difference will I ever make? Suddenly it seems very important that I make a difference and leave something behind. What will my “skyscraper” be?
    ‘Arielle? Hello? Fatty!’
    The moment is shattered.
    ‘I have no idea,’ I confess as I start walking again. I’m not sure if I’ve answered Ob’s question or my own internal self-doubt.
    Yellow taxis zoom as fast as they can down the streets, hoping to pick up the big spenders who are emerging from Macy’s. Once upon a time that would have been me; now shopping is the last thing I want to do. Ha! Who would have thought that would ever happen?
    ‘I’m passing Macy’s, but I don’t think that’s your cup of tea,’ I offer.
    The thought of Ob in Macy’s is highly amusing. They’d think he was some hick visiting from Ohio with his broad shoulders, flaming red hair and plaid shirt – at least they would until he opened his mouth and then they’d probably come over all gooey hearing a British accent.
    Silence. Well, silence from Ob anyway. In front of me a yellow taxi has just run into the back of another – a clear fender bender – and cars are beeping at them for blocking the road as the drivers emerge and start yelling at one another, arms flailing.
    ‘Ob?’
    ‘I want this baby so much, Arielle,’ he whispers. ‘I want to be a dad.’
    Poor Ob. He sounds heartbroken .
     
    *
     
    ‘You’re back!’
    It’s nearly three hours since I left the hospital, but it feels a lot longer. Whilst I felt I needed some air, some space to think, I just wanted to be with Piers really. New York is no fun without him, and even though Ob kept me company on the phone, he hung up pretty quickly after I called him out on his declaration to marry Jade – marrying Jade is not the solution.
    ‘I couldn’t keep away,’ I quip as I kiss Piers on the cheek and sit down next to him.
    He smiles at this and I wonder if he, like me, is remembering when it was him that used to practically live at the hospital – when he couldn’t keep away from me. We’ve been together ever since apart from that stint at my parents’ last year, and I really don’t like to think about that trying time if I can help it. Piers throwing me out was hideous, but it was needed, and look where I am now. OK, it’s on hold, but I have a career... sort of!
    I’m not often near the Barbican where we first met, but the few times I have been that way I always recall the awful interview I had with Penelope Whitter, the demon managing director of Benfords. I sometimes wonder what my life would have been like if she’d offered me that financial PR position, and whether my path would have crossed with Piers’.
    I’d like to think we’d still have met, though on the meagre salary the company offered I wouldn’t have been hobnobbing in Chelsea. Maybe his firm would have been a client and that’s how fate would have brought us together though. I’d like to think that we’d have found each other somehow if things