"My wife didn't like the ones I picked out."

"Right. Well, let's see if we can find something she likes this time."

Day 32 . . .

Lydia didn't recognize the number on the phone but, what the hell, she answered it anyway. Live a little.

"This is Conall Hathaway."

"Ah, for the love of-How did you get my number?"

"You rang this morning to tell me you were outside my house."

Her hair! Her bloody needy hair-she should have just got out of the car and rung the doorbell.

"I've decided to take you up on your invitation," he said.

"What invitation?"

"Tomorrow. I'm taking the day off. We're spending it together. We're going to drive somewhere and-what did you say? Do some cleaning? Meet your mum?"

"I only said it because I knew you wouldn't be into it."

"But I am into it."

"You're not coming."

"What time will I pick you up?"

"No time. You're not coming. Get used to it. Go into work, make another million quid."

"I'm coming."

He sounded firm and convincing and she realized it was a good thing she'd met his type before. She'd driven a fair few of them over the years. Those men-and they were nearly always men-with their confidence and their vision and their complete lack of interest in what anyone else was looking for. They wanted what they wanted and then they went and got it and they didn't care what mayhem they caused. There was a phrase that army blokes used when they were trying to explain away a load of dead civilians. Collateral damage, that was it. Yeah, the Conall Hathaways of this world had no interest in their collateral damage.

"I reckon about ten o'clock," he was saying. "You won't want to go any earlier because of the traffic. But any later and too much of the day will have gone."

If he was doing this to anyone else, it might even work. But it wouldn't work with her.

"So . . . see you at ten?"

"See you at ten," she repeated, with great sarcasm.

She'd go at nine.

Day 32 . . .

As he was driving home, Matt passed the woman who'd accused him of being an ax murderer a few weeks back. The memory filled him with surprising bile. Which only intensified when he remembered that he hadn't done today's daily Act of Kindness. Bollocks. Between the late start this morning and then the distraction of all that Philippa, the real-estate agent, had had to offer him, he'd clean forgotten. But the thought of having to be kind to some random stranger met with shocking resistance. He couldn't do it. No way. He'd just lie to Maeve, he decided; and the idea sat so comfortably with him that suddenly he was scared. No, he'd tell the truth and simply ask her for a day off. Then he had an even better idea: hadn't he done today's AOK by visiting Philippa? By finding Maeve a potential new home, he'd done an AOK for her. Or indeed for himself. But that was such a novel notion, he moved on quickly. Yes, an Act of Kindness for Maeve. And by not going out with Alex tonight, he was doing Maeve yet another AOK. Speaking of which . . .

As soon as he was parked-in a stunning stroke of luck, right outside 66 Star Street-Matt fired off a quick text to Alex.

Mergency at work. Cnt mke 2nite. Cary on widout me!

Then he hurried into the building, as if he could rush away from the guilt.

Maeve was on the couch, watching South Park.

"Take a look at these." Matt poured a bundle of glossy brochures into her lap.

"Again?" she asked.

"It's ages since we looked and I just think . . . like, it's not good here, Maeve. Too many people in and out. We'd be better off in a house of our own. Just take a look, and keep an open mind, that's all I ask."

Maeve nodded. "Okay. Open mind. I will." She glanced at the first one, saw the address and said, "No. Cripes, no, Matt."

"Why not?"

"It's less than five minutes' drive from Hilary and Walter. They'd be round the whole time. Well, Hilary would." There was a high likelihood that Walter would never visit. "I know she's your mum, Matt, and she's a dote, but we'd never get rid of her. She'd be sitting at our kitchen table, drinking wine and talking shite, till the cows came home."

"We wouldn't give her any wine."

"She'd bring her own."

"Okay." Matt sighed heavily. "Scrap that one. Next!" A two-story box on a housing estate in suburban Shankill.

"Shankill?" She turned a despairing face to Matt. "When did we become Shankill people?"

"I thought it would be nice, it's a community-"

"In suburbia, no one can hear you scream."

"All right, forget that one." It was obvious she already had her mind made up. "Look at the one in Drumcondra. It's nowhere near my parents, it's not in suburbia, it's perfect."

Maeve gazed at the photo of the house and Matt gazed at Maeve.

Eventually, she spoke. "Twelve," she said.

"Twelve what?" But he could guess.

"Five on the ground floor, six on the first story and an attic skylight. Windows. No way. What else have you?" She moved on to the fourth and final brochure. "Cripes, Matt? A gated community?" She read through the spec. "Coded gates, coded doors, a communal Jacuzzi?"

"I know it's not for us. I didn't even want to take the brochure but the girl made me."

"And the people, Matt, could you imagine the type who'd actually want to live in a place like that?" Soulless professionals with Thai-food fixations, acting like fish sauce had just been invented. "They'd be out at work all day."

The cluster of glassy towers would be like a ghost town.

"I know this place is full of comings and goings . . ." Maeve said and Matt saw her point. Unexpectedly, it seemed safer to live in a ground-floor flat in Star Street, even with creepy Fionn sniffing around, because at least there were always people nearby.

Maeve gathered up the brochures and handed them to Matt. "Trash."

Day 31 Conall Hathaway had to circle the block four times before he found a parking space with a good view of the front door of 66 Star Street. He switched off the engine and reached gratefully for his BlackBerry. The red light was flashing. Lovely. New emails.

Seven in total and nothing exciting in any of them, but still, communications were like oxygen to him-urgent phone calls, cryptic texts, detailed emails. He couldn't let too much time elapse between them or else he might die.

He drank his coffee and flicked through the radio stations and watched the blue front door and shifted in his seat and looked at his BlackBerry and wished the red light would start flashing again. He was feeling edgy. He couldn't remember the last time he'd rung Eilish and said the words I won't be in today. Naturally, he'd been absent from his desk many, many times, but only because he was sitting at another desk in another company, in the process of taking it over. And he went on corporate jollies, champagne-soaked days in Monaco or Ascot, but that was in order to stay on the inside track with those shadowy figures in the financial markets who knew when a company was failing long before the company itself knew. It was still work.

He'd never before just called Eilish and said he wasn't coming in because . . . well, he just wasn't coming in. It didn't feel good, it didn't feel right, but it had to be done.

He'd been fond of Katie, very fond if truth be told, and he hadn't been at all prepared for them breaking up. A woman finishing with him was a radical mutation in his pattern of romance. It hadn't happened in a long, long time, perhaps never, and it had shaken him. Not to his core, no; his core was sealed in titanium. But to quite near his core. Enough to cause the coffee cups on the tables of his core to rattle.

Worse than Katie dumping him was that she refused to be won back. He'd offered her the ultimate prize-marriage-and she'd spurned it. Spurned him. But instead of wasting time in hand-wringing regret, he asked himself what he could learn. That always worked when things veered off course in his job. He'd devised his own formula, "The Three As and the One M": Assess the situation.

Acknowledge where control had been compromised.

Adapt with a new, more appropriate response for the next set of dynamics.

Move forward.

He wished it was a catchier slogan. Four As would have been ideal. The first three were perfect but he just couldn't find an A that encapsulated the last point.

With Katie, he'd Assessed the situation and wasn't afraid to admit he'd made a mistake-it was what made him so good at his job-and he was man enough, in his opinion, to Acknowledge that being dumped was his fault.

Now it was time to Adapt: he'd have to become more flexible about his devotion to the job. Adapt to survive. He didn't believe in fate but he believed in maximizing opportunities, so when Lydia appeared and challenged him to take a weekday off work, he moved on it. Give it a go, see if the world ended; and if it did, well, he was always on the BlackBerry.

Even his clothes this morning had been chosen with a view to his survival. Lydia had accused him of being "too old" so he'd had a pair of fashionable jeans biked over from Brown Thomas and-after a lot of deliberation-he'd matched them with a Clash T-shirt, because the Clash were ageless. Weren't they?

Speaking of the Clash, he stuck in his ear buds and listened to half a verse of "Rock the Casbah" before getting bored and changing to Johnny Cash. He sang along with "Walk the Line" and stared at the door of number 66 and eyed its banana-shaped knocker with irritation. He'd never liked it. Now that he and Katie were kaput he wouldn't have to look at it ever again. Unless, of course, things worked out with Lydia . . .

He couldn't explain why but he was extremely taken with her. Her beauty wasn't the first thing you'd notice because she was so angry but, actually, she was a doll. He liked her angular little face and her scornful eyes. He liked seeing her, small and furious, behind the wheel of her taxi. He liked her "Gdansk!" and "Outttt!" and all that mad stuff. She was a one-of-a-kind.

And she was the right age. Katie was spot-on: a girl in her twenties would suit him. The two girlfriends he'd had before Katie had been in their early thirties, and they'd been . . . how could he put it? Expectant. Yes, expectant and watchful. He'd thought of both those relationships as a straight line; he'd found a level he was happy with, and was comfortable with it continuing like that, unfurling out in front of them without any changes, forever. Well, perhaps not forever. But indefinitely.

Whereas, with the benefit of hindsight, he saw that both Saffron and Kym had visualized the relationship as wedge-shaped, like a piece of Cheddar. Starting from a small point, they expected things to improve exponentially, expanding outward and upward, three-dimensionally, with bonus add-ons every month or so. Add-ons such as: meeting their friends; meeting his friends (the few he had); accompanying them to a charity ball and bidding in a flash fashion at the auction; listening to their suggestions for how he should decorate his house; agreeing to let them do one room; fighting his way through the cluster of beauty stuff that appeared overnight in his bathroom; being persuaded of the wisdom of leaving a couple of ironed shirts in their wardrobe; then the big cheese itself: talk of moving in together.

As for Katie? How had she visualized their relationship? He hadn't felt the same pressure from her. Some, certainly, but perhaps the angle wasn't so steep. More like a slice of Brie, than a wedge of Cheddar.

And Lydia? Christ alone knew. She probably had no angle of expectation. Hers might be totally flat, like a packet of Easi-slices. In fact, and he wasn't sure how comfortable he was with this realization, it mightn't be cheese at all.

It was coming up to 8:30 and if Conall had read Lydia right, she'd exit the house soon, looking to put many miles of road behind her before he showed up at ten o'clock. But he was already here!

He lifted his coffee and was shocked to discover it was all gone. Maybe there was a can of Coke somewhere. A thorough foraging in the side pocket of his door yielded nothing more exciting than four squares of Honeycrisp and seven green American Hard Gums. He ate them without enthusiasm; green was his least favorite flavor and he'd obviously left these for dead when he'd eaten all the other colors from a full bag. He'd love a full bag now. He was bored and Johnny Cash was no longer doing it for him. He whipped out the ear buds and scrolled down his screen, reading bulletins, checking sites, assessing the financial markets, looking for anomalies in share prices. Who was underperforming? Overperforming? A bulletin popped up with a rumor that H&E Enterprise, a large clothing company, was about to announce quarterly losses. Nothing too catastrophic and they'd turned in profits for the last eleven quarters. But Conall had been watching the rise in the cost of the raw materials they sourced in the Far East and he'd been made aware, discreetly, that their fourth biggest customer was making overtures to someone else. To have one loss-making quarter was no cause for panic but Conall was getting that tingly feeling. Two of H&E's biggest competitors had been circling at a distance for over a year and if there was to be a takeover or a buyout, he wanted in. Especially because H&E had most of their operations in Southeast Asia, his specialty. He'd do Eastern Europe or Scandinavia if necessary, but the Philippines, Cambodia and Vietnam were where he did his best work.

He looked at his phone, then he looked at the blue front door. Could he make a quick call to one of the shadowy figures to assess H&E's damage and risk Lydia coming out at the same time?

He made the call. He couldn't help himself. The coffee was gone, the sweets and chocolate were gone, the music wasn't working; he needed something, so a quick shot of adrenaline would have to do. Saffron used to say that he should pretend he was allergic to wasps and would go into anaphylactic shock if he got stung, because then he could get adrenaline injections from his doctor, which he could administer himself whenever he got bored. She didn't say it at the start of their two years together, she was happy back then; she only said it toward the end when she seemed considerably disillusioned with him and his devotion to his work.

He listened to the ringing tone and idly kicked his accelerator. Answer, for the love of Christ! God, he was bored.

Someone picked up. "Hello?"

"Shadowy Figure?"

"Conall?"

"Where are you?"

"Playing golf."

"Where?" He was in the mood for a chat.

"Syria. What do you want?"

"Story? H&E? Buckling?"

"Could be. I'm waiting to hear. I'll let you know."

The shadowy figure hung up and Conall's ennui dissipated. He was always on the hunt for the next project. It was imperative to have a new job lined up before he finished the current one because the gaps between his projects made him very unhappy. He needed new challenges. And yet whenever a fresh prospect hove into view, his fear was as strong as his excitement.

Every takeover was different. Experience from previous jobs was useful but there always came a point when he had no idea how to proceed, when he had to build the path he had to walk on. People thought it was easy, doing what he did. That he just went in and sacked all around him and made the staff move to a building with much cheaper rent. They assumed he was paid his vast bundle to deal with the guilt of having to ruin people's lives.

At a dinner party, when he'd still been with Saffron, Conall was asked by another man, "That job you do? How do you sleep?"

Before Conall could defend himself by offering his-sincerely held-belief that if he didn't sack some of the staff, then, sooner or later, all of them would be out of a job, Saffron jumped in. "We find that a million euro a year helps greatly," she had replied. Of course, those were the days when she had celebrated his ability to make far-reaching decisions free of emotion.

In the middle of a project when he was trying to visualize a complex enterprise in a three-dimensional way, in order to make the right decisions, Conall sometimes wished he was a postman like his brother. Every single judgment he made had huge financial implications but he never had the time to follow all possible permutations down to ground zero because, more important than anything else, decisions had to be made fast.

With each evaluation he signed off on, he felt the fear. Had he sacked the wrong people? Closed down the wrong office in the wrong country? Sold off the wrong assets? What if this was the one where he removed the vital organs and the whole thing died?

So far it never had. But it felt like playing Ker-Plunk! Every time he removed a stick he held his breath and waited for a massive avalanche, signaling that it had all collapsed on him.

And when everything was completed, the satisfaction of having done the best possible job, of having dismantled a company down to its bare bones and reconfigured it into a new sleek, streamlined entity, lasted only for an evening, before the hunger started up again. Kym had said he was like a shark, always moving, always hunting. (She'd also said he'd stolen the best years of her life.) Conall didn't know why he worked like he did. It wasn't for the money. He probably had enough money now, whatever enough was. He didn't do it for the respect of his peers because he had all that. He did it because he did it.

He was prepared to admit that his work/life balance wasn't perfect-he had very few friends. But then most people had very few friends. He had Joe, his brother, of course, but he suspected his success was a barrier. That's why he needed a girlfriend.

Day 31 . . .

Get up, Katie urged herself. On your feet and face the world.

She'd just emerged from one of the worst night's sleeps of her life, the genesis of which could be traced back to last night, at a launch, when she'd jettisoned all pretense of professionalism and attached herself to the free bar. She drank grimly and with purpose until the hard edges slipped off life.

She had a fuzzy recollection of standing way too close to Danno and saying, "Really am quite spectacularly drunk. It'll garntee me good ni'sleep."

Somehow she'd got home and tumbled way down into a drunk, dreamless coma.

Then, in the dead of night, she'd jerked awake. She'd been having a terrible nightmare in which she had landed on a deserted planet, a lump of barren, gray rock, swept by howling, perishing winds. Alone, all alone, stranded for eternity.

She waited for the terror of the nightmare to disperse, but it didn't-because, she realized with a terrible thud, it was all true. She was alone, all alone, stranded for eternity. No one would love her ever again.