Free A Very Accidental Love Story by Claudia Carroll Page A

and parking in the tiny, gravelled driveway. I bought this house not long after I was made editor, thinking that I’d get to actually spend a reasonably decent amount of time in it, poor misguided gobshite that I was back then. It’s a neat, terraced little Edwardian redbrick in lovely, leafy Rathgar, two storeys over a basement, with a study that I never go into (no time, I’m only ever really in this house to sleep), a pretty, landscaped garden at the back that I’m never in (ditto) with a sunny little patio area that I once dreamt of sitting outside having a civilised breakfast in.
    Breakfast? Who, may I ask, has time for breakfast?
I’m doing well if I get to stuff a banana into my face while driving to work at dawn – and that’s on a good day when I’m not driving and having to hold a meeting over the phone at the same time.
    Then there’s a lovely, sash-windowed, high-ceilinged dining room that I never entertain in.
Entertain? Are you kidding me? When, exactly?
Not only that, but I forked out a small fortune for a stunning Victorian dining table and chairs that comfortably seats twelve and to date, has only ever been used once. I’ll never forget it; for a mortifying attempt at a dinner party that I gave as a house-warming, where the guest list included a few of the T. Rexes and their wives, plus one or two from the office, that, if not actual friends, were at least people who seemed not to actually despise me. And of course in the end, it was one of those awful, excruciating nights where no one really had a non-work related thing to say to anyone else and where everyone started asking me for the name of a good local taxi company … at half ten. Anyway like I say, I’m rarely home before the wee small hours and as I trip up the stone steps to the front door, stick my key into the lock and kick my way inside, the first thing I’m instantly hit by is the sheer state of the place. Now, I fork out good money for a cleaning lady to come in every morning, but never in a million years would you think it if you saw the manky hellhole I’m looking at right now. My jaw physically dangles open with the sheer astonishment of it.
    A box with a half-eaten pizza in it lies plonked on the bottom of the stairs, like someone was eating it there, then decided they’d something better to do and just abandoned it and walked off. Meanwhile, a big pile of washing lies abandoned outside the living room door, with loose, dirty knickers strewn all round it, none of which are mine and certainly not Lily’s either. Then just as a stale stench hits me I realise I’m standing beside two stuffed-to-the-brim black binliners just inside the hall door, miles away from the outside bin where, judging by the stink off them, they should have been dumped hours ago.
    Not unlike the
Marie Celeste
, there’s no one in sight. No one hears me, no one knows the boss has unexpectedly come home on a stealth mission. Slowly I make my way down the hallway, to the soundtrack of Adele’s
Someone Like You
blasting out loud and clear from the very top of the house.
    Elka.
    But I let that slide for the moment and on I go, on what’s now become something of an evidence-gathering mission, down the elegant cream-carpeted staircase at the very back of the hall that leads down to the basement. I’ve converted the whole downstairs area into one supersized family room, kitchen at one end opening out onto the patio, family room at the other. Which, needless to say, I neither cook in, eat in, nor get to see my family in, but there you go.
    I see Lily before she sees me. She’s all alone, plonked on a bright pink bean bag in the family room right in front of the TV, still in her little pinafore that she wears to preschool and twisting one of her strawberry-blonde ringlets round a pudgy finger, with the same pasty, expressionless face of someone who’s been listlessly watching telly for God knows how long. And as ever, I almost well up at the sight of this