Chapter Seven

      The following day, I was back to work in a blurry haze from sleep deprivation, but was I complaining? Far from it. Instead, I almost skipped round our huge open-plan office, beaming and smiling at the world. I let all the small stuff that normally bugs the arse off me slide, and at once stage, even insisted on bringing back an americano for Maia Mars, seeing as how I was passing by Starbucks anyway.

      ‘Look at you, the Smitten Kitten,’ Dermot teased, perching on the edge of my desk and blocking my computer screen, so I’d no choice but to give him my undivided attention.

      ‘Well?’ he said probingly, but I just threw him a knowing smile and kept my mouth zipped.

      ‘Ask me what I’m doing this weekend. Go on, just ask me,’ I told him, all excited.

      ‘You’re meeting up with this mystery man? That’s fabulous news!’

      ‘Dinner,’ I told him proudly. ‘He wants to have dinner. Not just drinks where he can skedaddle off if he doesn’t like the look of me; full-on dinner. He’s even calling tonight to arrange it.’

      ‘I’ll even forgive your adolescent excitement. After all, there have been three popes and counting since the last time I even heard you use that sentence.’

      It was an absolute gold star, red-letter of a day in work too. We went live on air with the idea I pitched about long-distance relationships and I’m not joking, the response to it was phenomenal. The segment was originally only intended to run for about fifteen minutes max, but we were so inundated with callers that it ended up stretching to a full hour, which, in a show like Afternoon Delight, is roughly the equivalent of striking a goldmine.

      Throughout the show, all the gang in work kept coming up to me to say congratulations and even Aggie gave me a wink and said, ‘Great work, Holly. Keep this up and you’ll end up doing my job someday.’

      Wow. Just wow.

      And you want to have heard some of our callers’ love stories. Swear to God, it did me good just to listen in, and more than a few even reduced me to tears. One caller named Annie rang in to say she’d recently divorced and was living with three young kids all under the age of ten, while her ex was now shacked up with a newer, thinner ‘life partner,’ as he apparently refers to her.

      ‘I was in a complete slough of depression after my divorce,’ Annie told us, sounding shy and a bit wobbly, really speaking from the heart. ‘Even having to drop my kids off at my ex and the “life partner’s” fancy apartment for weekend visits was just killing me. Worst of all was the feeling that another woman – a complete stranger – was getting all this fun, quality time with my children, while I just spent weekend after weekend all alone by myself, with nothing but the telly for company.’

      ‘So what then?’ Noel Browne, our presenter, gently probed in that honey voice of his, like the expert he is in sniffing out a good story.

      ‘Well … there I was at my lowest ebb,’ she said, growing stronger and more confident by the second as her story came pouring out. ‘Then a pal suggested online dating to me. She very kindly told me that I was still only in my forties and that the romantic part of my life was far from over. Which was reassuring to say the least, and at the time, exactly what I needed to hear. But the problem was my confidence around men was on the floor after my divorce and I really did reach a point where I thought I’d never be happy again.’

      ‘So you signed up to a dating website?’

      ‘Yeah, I did. Terrified at first, because it was all so new to me. After all, I hadn’t been single and out there for the guts of twenty years and believe me, Noel, things have certainly changed since my day.’

      ‘But then someone special came along?’

      ‘After a few false starts, eventually, yeah. He’s a divorcé with kids, just like me. The only problem is that he lives in London and I’m here. But we got to messaging and emailing each other so frequently that eventually it was as though I felt I knew him inside out, without ever having met him. Does that make any sense?’

      It certainly did to me I thought, nodding along as Annie chatted away.

      ‘Now I was a complete bag of nerves meeting for our first date,’ she told the nation live, ‘but I needn’t have worried, turned out he was every bit as petrified as I was. And we ended up having an absolute ball together. We’d so much it common; it was ridiculous! So of course from then on, there was no question of our not ending up together.’

      ‘But how do you make the whole long-distance thing work for you?’ Noel asked gently.

      ‘Well, that’s just it, you see. It’s not like work at all,’ she laughed and I swear I could practically hear the lightness breaking through in her voice. ‘The brightest part of my day is when he emails or calls me. We Skype first thing in the morning and last thing at night and it’s just fantastic. Then every other weekend, he’ll come and stay with me, and on the weekends when I don’t have the kids, I take a trip over to London. It’s magic and, trust me, the distance between us is absolutely nothing.’

      ‘I totally agree with your last caller!’ said Emily, who rang in hot on her heels. ‘I met my husband online and even though he works in Dubai now, the sparkle is still there. Our golden rule is we see each other once every six weeks and in the meantime, we probably chat more now than I ever do with anyone I know from home. Everyone said I was mental when we first got together, but like I always say, I’d rather a fabulous relationship with the man of my dreams who lives thousands of miles away, then a mediocre one with some fella from down the road who I met in some bloody local bar.’

      And by that stage? I honestly felt like encoding that phrase onto my desk and making everyone come and admire it, just for luck.

      And then there was Matthew, who called in to say that he too met his partner via a dating site. She lived in Edinburgh and neither of them could relocate so, as he put it, ‘we just make it work. And it’s fantastic. After all, I’d rather have two weekends a month of pure magic, then four full weeks of being nagged for leaving my underpants hanging off the back of the radiator.’

      Took the words right out of my mouth.

      After the show, Noel even sought me out to thank me personally; an event so rare round here that there was pin-drop silence all around the office while he and I had a stilted, professional chat.

      But then Noel has one of those man-of-the-people, I-too-feel-your-pain personas that’s totally at odds with the real him. In reality, he’s actually a multi-millionaire on a massively inflated salary who lives on the Hill of Howth in a palatial mansion. In fact apart from a quick daily briefing with the team before we go on air, we only see him round here sporadically. He’s usually in and gone the minute the show wraps, then straight off to his far more glamorous job at Channel Six TV, where he presents a late-night current affairs programme. Which, as you’d guess, is a shouty mess of a show, involving yet more ranting, hammering on desks and basically doing whatever he can to inflame public opinion.

      ‘Good work, Holly,’ Noel said, towering over me and patting his over-large tummy, like he was ready for one of his legendary boozy, Michelin-starred lunches about now. ‘Long-distance online relationships. Whoever would have thought that would generate such a huge response?’

      ‘Ermm, well, thanks very much, Noel,’ I muttered, aware that half the office was having