She examined herself in the mirror. At least she had put the weight on in easy to conceal areas and with her new way of dressing - lovely floaty tops which emphasized her narrow shoulders and pretty dresses which covered up the growing stomach. She most of the time felt okay about it all.
That was until Jack Fitzgeralde had been thrown back into the conundrum that was her life. As the thought of seeing Jack again kept flitting in and out of her head, the voice of some nurses in the toilets when she’d first been going out with Luke, taunted her. Frump. Really let herself go. She only really cared about Luke’s opinion, but there was also a little voice whispering that she wanted Jack to think to himself that he might have missed out on something really very good and being a frump wasn’t part of that. And there was absolutely no way she wanted Jack to smirk to himself that Juliette had let herself go.
Luke had always vehemently dismissed anything that she ever said about weight. Telling her that he loved her curves, couldn't stand it when his ex-wife had constantly gone about calories and would barely eat a carrot without jumping on the scales and seeing the damage it might do to what she thought had been a model-like figure. But what Luke thought wasn’t helping her in the slightest with Jack Fitgeralde’s reappearance looming in the distance.
Juliette walked into the spare bedroom still in her underwear and rummaged around in the back of the cupboard for the scales. She couldn't even work out why she’d bothered to keep them - the last time she’d gone anywhere near them, which had been daily, sometimes twice daily in the Jeremy Years, was when out of interest a year or so after she’d left him she’d stepped on just to see the difference.
She found the unpacked box and pulled off the brown packing tape. This would be interesting. She rummaged around in the box until she found the scales, wiped them off, checked on the back to see if they were still working and miraculously they were. She placed them on the stripped floorboards, braced herself, stepped on, took a deep breath and looked down.
Yeah. This is not good. Breathe and calm.
There was one thing being a bit plump, feeling happy and comfortable. It was quite another thing to be erring on an unhealthy weight. Spooning chocolate spread from the jar did that for a girl.
Boring, though, she thought. Boring and hungry. That’s what she used to be, and she couldn't face ever being that person again. That person who looked on the back of packets, turned over flavoured water to see if it had any calories. The person who looked down a menu trying to decide on what would cost the least in exercise the next day.
No, she would never go back to that. But the impending doom of seeing Jack and him thinking to himself just like those nurses had in the toilets all those moons ago that she was frumpy and had let herself go was filling her with dread.
If she was going to go anywhere near Jack Fitzgeralde who didn't look a whole lot different by the looks of his profile than he had when she’d last seen him then she wanted to look passable. With his very handsome jawline and lovely skin he still looked amazing - shame he actually wasn’t amazing in the morals department, but he wouldn’t be thinking that. She knew that deep down he would be judging her, analysing his decision to not have been part of her life, and thinking that he had done the right thing not to end up with an overweight, droopy, frump who had dropped her game.
Chapter 47
Juliette scanned down through the orders for A Christmas Sparkle and finished wrapping the last parcel. All up to date.
She opened up her emails, answered a question about one of the excruciatingly expensive vintage baubles on her site, replied to an enquiry about wholesale prices, and then opened up the email she had been waiting for from Victoria at Lellery.
She’d been in for another meeting with Lellery since the baubles had arrived and thank goodness Adrian Liellcock had not been present. In fact, Victoria had told her that she was in the process of initiating Liellcock’s move to another part of the business to give him a more rounded experience. Victoria told Juliette that what she really meant was that she wanted him well and truly out of her hair.
The meeting had gone well and everything with the collaboration was sorted and documented. Which just left the window styling contract she’d signed to brainstorm. Victoria had been very casual with a ‘whatever you do will be fine’ attitude, but as Juliette opened the email and saw the five attachments, her heart raced a little bit. This didn't look quite as straightforward as Victoria had led her to assume.
There was a spreadsheet on timelines, a document to outline the main aesthetics of her idea (she didn’t yet have an idea), and another three attachments with outlines requiring her to document her proposal on how she was going to progress her idea into a working plan that other people could operate from and with. Woah, way, way out of my depth here, Juliette thought as she scrolled further and further through the documents and sheets. What had she expected,
