Free After the Last Dance by Manning Sarra Page B

girlfriend who’d been with him since sophomore year at Harvard who didn’t stand a chance. Her most pressing problem had been Jackie, Andrew’s WASP mother in Providence, Rhode Island but she’d come round soon enough when Jane had sought her advice on how to cook Andrew’s favourite meals, gifted her tea couriered over from Fortnum & Mason and finally won her heart with a very embellished story about sitting next to Pippa Middleton at a polo match. The only other cloud was Andrew’s sister, Stephanie, who styled herself as Andrew’s business manager, though getting Andrew a business manager who actually knew how to manage a business had always been high on Jane’s to-do list.
    It sounded so cold, but even the most starry-eyed girl approached matrimony with some degree of calculation. There was so much more to Andrew than being a soft touch. He was kind, handsome in a clean-cut preppy way, would never, ever raise his fists or his voice and he’d created the face and voice recognition software that Google and Apple and NASA and the Chinese were all over, which meant that Andrew was going to be very rich. Obscenely, obsequiously, oligarch-ishly rich. So, even if she and Andrew had been spectacularly ill-suited, Jane could have waited it out for three years.
    After three years of marriage, she’d have earned herself a big fat alimony cheque, and being a divorcee had a completely different vibe from being a superannuated party girl.
    But yesterday morning it turned out that bloody Stephanie, for all her talk of graduating top of her class at Wharton, had filed incomplete versions of his patent applications. They were missing a vital number of components and ironically number four on the list of tech suitors that Jane had drawn up three years ago was working on something similar and now Google and Apple and the Chinese were going to give
him
billions of dollars instead. In sixty short minutes, Andrew was old news. Just another nearly-made-it. Surplus to requirements.
    â€˜You can still get married,’ Jackie had insisted as the entire Hunnicot clan had gathered in the bridal suite of THEHotel At Mandalay Bay. It was meant to be bad luck for the groom to see the bride before the wedding but bad luck had already arrived, taken a seat and poured itself a large drink.
    Andrew had looked like hell. His face was as grey as his silk brocade waistcoat, but at his mother’s words he’d turned hopeful eyes to Jane, who’d been sitting on the bed wondering if anyone would notice if she put her head between her legs because she really thought she might pass out. ‘Do you still want to marry me, Janey?’
    â€˜Of course I do,’ she’d said because you couldn’t kick a man while he was down. Not in front of his nearest and dearest.
    Then Andrew had talked about the possibility of a job at Microsoft. Of moving to Seattle and maybe even stock options and Jane had nodded and smiled and squeezed his hand when he came and sat down next to her.
    Even once the engagement ring had been bought and paid for, every now and again Jane would get a feeling as if icy fingers were clutching hold of her heart. That she was close, but not close enough and it could still all go wrong. Now the icy fingers were back and not letting go. Also, the one time that she’d been to Seattle, it had rained the entire time.
    Finally, she’d persuaded Andrew that everything was going to be fine, just fine, and he’d left to wait for her on the terrace. Jackie and bloody Stephanie and Jane’s bridesmaids, though they weren’t friends so much as the girlfriends of Andrew’s friends, had lingered but Jane had begged them to go too.
    â€˜I just need a minute.’ She’d swallowed delicately. ‘To think about my parents. I wish they could have been here today.’
    They’d melted away and Jane hadn’t wasted any time. She’d quickly packed her case,