The Girl in the Yellow Vest Read Free Page A

really just a bump in the road and one morning Trent would wake up and say he’d made a mistake. Two weeks later she had to concede he wasn’t going to do that.
    Emily hugged her arms as goose bumps broke out on her skin. ‘Well, I knew you were flying back to Perth for the wedding and I thought, if he hadn’t told you, I’d tell you then . . . now. Besides, I needed some time to get used to the idea before, you know, I made the announcement that I’m single again after five years.’
    Man, I don’t even know how to be single any more.
    Will’s face seemed to harden. ‘What happened?’
    Emily couldn’t help it. ‘To be honest, I don’t know.’ She felt her face crumple.
    Will blinked at her, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. ‘Now we both know my love-life is a train wreck but even I can usually pinpoint the place where things went wrong.’
    It was true. In the entire time she’d known Will, which was nearly two years longer than she’d been with his best mate, he’d been out with exactly five women. None of them had been on the scene for very long but there always seemed to be a legitimate reason for his relationship failure.
    There was the copy-writer who’d annoyed the hell out of him by speaking all the way through every movie they went to see. And then there was a Korean girl who giggled at everything, even when it wasn’t funny. After these two, he decided to go for an older woman – hoping for someone more mature in her outlook in life. And she was.
    Unfortunately, so was her husband.
    His last relationship had seemed the most promising. The female in question had been sweet, intelligent, pretty. All was going well until she asked Will if he wanted to join a cult with her and live in a commune so as to recapture the missing pieces of their souls.
    Uh-huh.
    Emily still hadn’t found out what had happened to his first girlfriend, Sasha, with whom Will had been going out when they first met. But she figured that if Will had thought her ‘viable’ he would have said so. In fact, that was the difficulty: Will approached women in the same way he approached an engineering problem. Like a scientist. He dissected their personalities into parts and used the breakdown to decide how compatible they were with him. He had no belief in the old idiom ‘Opposites attract’ or that, given time, some idiosyncrasies could grow on a person. He even had his own theorem about conversation. More than three awkward silences and the relationship was dead in the water. It didn’t help that his facial hair was too long to be fashionable and he refused to take an interest in his physical appearance. Usually only men in their fifties wore cardigans, a circumstance that Emily had been moaning about for years, to no avail.
    ‘They’re comfortable,’ had been Will’s argument. ‘And they have pockets.’
    ‘So do jeans.’
    ‘Not nearly big enough for a calculator.’
    Emily’s lips twisted at the memory.
    ‘So tell me how did it happen, then?’ Will brought her mind back to her own relationship disaster.
    ‘We went out for dinner, that really nice place I’ve been wanting to go to for ages. He said he had something to tell me.’ She shut her eyes. ‘I thought he was going to propose. And instead –’ her voice wavered ‘– instead he said he wanted me to move out so he could start seeing other people.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘He said that he felt we were stagnating and we’d been together too long and a whole host of others things I didn’t quite understand, which he summed up with the age-old line:
It’s not you. It’s me
.’
    Will snorted. ‘What a chump. There’s got to be more to it.’
    Out of habit, Emily opened her mouth to jump to Trent’s defence but to her dismay nothing came out. In confusion, she looked down. ‘Do you think there’s something wrong with me, Will?’
    ‘No.’ His tone was adamant.
    ‘I think Trent was right about a few things.’
    Will’s brow furrowed.