Getting Over Mr. Right Read Online Free

the
Sunday Express
magazine.
    I’d been with the company pretty much since I left college, back when I thought that advertising was a glamorous career worth pursuing. I had jumped at the chance of a temp admin job that consisted largely of fetching coffee. I worked my way up from that job to the position of account manager with responsibility for just about everything regarding the clients I was given. And over the years I had been given some corking clients. Remember those infomercials in which an aging soap actress demonstrates the ease of using a stair lift? That’s some of my best work. I seemed to get assigned a lot of the golden-ager products.
    In fact that morning I should have been working on a presentation for the clients from Effortless Bathing, whose product was not, alas, a swanky swimming pool but a walk-in bath for the elderly and infirm. You know the kind of thing. It lookslike an ordinary bath but it has a little door in the side so that you don’t have to clamber over and risk a fall. Instead you step in, sit down, turn on the taps and die of hypothermia while you wait for it to fill. It was a very boring product, but my boss, Barry, had promised the people from the step-in-bath company all sorts of excitement and sexy innovation in their push for sales-figure glory. Tasked with turning those promises into advertising gold, I had so far spent the best part of two hours doodling hearts on my notepad.
    As soon as I was sure Barry had left the office for a “business lunch,” I risked logging on to my networking accounts. Facebook first. And that was when it happened.
    The first thing I noticed was that Michael’s Facebook status, which he hadn’t updated in months (how could he find the time now he was a partner at Wellington Burke?), was showing something new. And somewhat cryptic. It said, “Michael Parker is making some tough decisions.”
    Tough decisions about what? I wondered. I went through the possibilities. He had mentioned a few weeks earlier that he had been head-hunted by another accountancy company. Was he still thinking of leaving the firm he had been with for so many years to take another job? I thought he’d decided against it. Or perhaps he was being facetious? When he said “tough decisions,” was he talking about the decisions he had to make regarding the new carpet he wanted for his flat? The previous weekend he had gotten into quite a bad mood as he examined various different swatches in search of the elusive carpet that would fit in with the chic, pale ultimate-bachelor furnishing scheme he wanted and yet not show too much dirt.
    I was just about to leave a message on his wall saying,
Go for the oatmeal Berber
, when the live news feed on my profile page refreshed itself with some very strange and unwelcome news indeed.
    It said, “Michael Parker is no longer listed as ‘in a relationship.’ ”
    This devastating tidbit was accompanied by a graphic of a tiny red heart in two pieces.
    You can imagine my reaction. I spat tea onto my keyboard. Michael Parker is no longer in a relationship? What the hell did that mean? I quickly sent him a message via the site: “Wot’s with the relationship update?” And then I sent him a text for good measure: “Just saw your Facebook page. No longer in a relationship? Very funny. Ha ha ha.”
    It had to be a slip of the mouse or, at worst, a very bad joke, but Michael responded to neither request for an explanation. I called his mobile. He didn’t pick up. I put that down to the fact that since he’d been made a partner, he’d moved to an office on the other side of the building and the mobile reception was patchy there, but when I called his direct line, he didn’t pick that up, either.
    “He’s just gone into a meeting,” said Tina, his unnecessarily gorgeous assistant.
    “Will you tell him to call me as soon as he gets out?”
    “Of course.”
    I felt a little relieved by that exchange. There was nothing in Tina’s voice that