The One Read online

  ‘You make it sound so romantic,’ said Deepak and rolled his eyes. ‘But it’s not really up to you to make that decision for them, is it? If they ain’t broke, don’t try and fix them.’

  ‘The test worked for us, though, didn’t it? I mean, we knew anyway, but it gave us that added bit of security, that we’d always been destined to be with each other.’

  ‘Can we not turn into one of those smug, sanctimonious couples, please?’

  ‘You don’t need to be in a couple to be smug and sanctimonious, sweetheart.’

  Now it was Sumaira’s turn to roll her eyes. She swigged the remainder of the contents of her glass under her husband’s watchful eye.

  Nick rested his head on his fiancée’s shoulder and glanced out the window at the glare of cars’ headlights and figures milling about on the pavement outside the pub. They lived in a converted factory apartment and the windows were floor to ceiling – no escape from seeing the busy street outside, and what his life used to look like. Not so long ago, his usual evening would’ve been made up of bar crawls around Birmingham’s hip, up-and-coming areas, before falling asleep on a night bus and waking up many stops from where he lived.

  But his priorities had changed almost overnight when he met Sally. Sally was in her early thirties – five years his senior – and he knew from their first conversation about old Hitchcock films that there was something a bit different about her. In their early days together, she’d got a kick from opening his mind to new travel destinations, new foods, new artists and music, and Nick began to see the world from a fresh perspective. When he glanced at her with her impossibly sharp cheekbones, chestnut-brown, pixie-cropped hair and grey eyes, he hoped that some day their children would acquire their mother’s good looks and open-mindedness.

  Quite what Nick offered Sally in return he couldn’t be sure, but when he’d proposed to her on their three-year anniversary in a restaurant in Santorini, she’d cried so hard that he couldn’t be sure if she’d accepted or declined.

  ‘If you two are the best example of what being Matched is about, I’m quite happy for Sal and I to remain just how we are,’ teased Nick, and slipped his glasses down his nose to rub his tired eyes. He reached for his e-cigarette and took several puffs. ‘We’ve been together for almost four years now, and now she’s promised to love, honour and obey me, I’m a hundred per cent sure we’re made for each other.’

  ‘Hold on, “obey”?’ Sumaira interrupted, raising an eyebrow. ‘You should be so lucky.’

  ‘You obey me,’ added Deepak confidently. ‘Everyone knows I wear the trousers in our relationship.’

  ‘You do wear them, hunny, but ask yourself who buys them for you.’

  ‘What if we’re not, though?’ Sally asked suddenly. ‘What if we’re not made for each other?’

  Until then, Nick had listened with apparent amusement as Sumaira attempted to talk them into Match Your DNA testing. It hadn’t been the first time she’d raised the subject in the two years they’d known each other, and Nick was sure it wouldn’t be the last. Sally’s friend could be both belligerent and persuasive at the same time. But Nick was surprised to hear Sally say this. She’d always been very anti-Match-Your-DNA, as was he. ‘Excuse me?’ he said.

  ‘You know that I love you with all my heart and I want to spend the rest of my life with you, but … what if we aren’t actually soulmates?’

  Nick frowned. ‘Where’s this coming from?’

  ‘Oh, nowhere, don’t worry, I’m not having second thoughts or anything.’ She gave him a reassuring pat on the arm. ‘It’s just that I was wondering are we happy to just think we’re right for each other or do we want to know for sure?’

  ‘Babe, you’re drunk.’ Nick dismissed her and scratched at his stubble. ‘I’m perfectly happy knowing what I know and I don’t need some test telling me that.’

  ‘I read something online that said Match Your DNA is going to break up around 3 million marriages. But within a generation, divorce will barely be a thing any more,’ Sumaira said.

  ‘That’s because marriage won’t be “a thing” either,’ Deepak retorted. ‘It’ll become an outdated institution, you mark my words. You won’t need to prove anything to anyone because everyone will be partnered with who they’re destined to be with.’

  ‘You’re really not helping me here,’ Nick said, and dug his fork into the crumbly remains of Sally’s raspberry cheesecake.

  ‘Sorry, mate, you’re right. Let’s have a toast. To the certainty of chance.’

  ‘To the certainty of chance,’ the others replied and clinked their glasses against Nick’s.

  All but Sally’s glass reached his.

  Chapter 5

  ELLIE

  Ellie swiped the screen of her tablet and begrudged the extensive list of tasks she needed to complete before her working day was over.

  Her assistant, Ula, was ferociously efficient and updated and prioritised the list five times daily, even though Ellie never asked her to. Instead of finding this useful, Ellie often felt animosity for both the tablet and Ula for their constant reminders of her failing in reaching the bottom of the list. Sometimes she felt the urge to shove the device down Ula’s throat.

  Ellie had hoped that by now, being her own boss, she’d have hired enough reliable staff to whom she could delegate a large proportion of her workload. But as time marched on, she gradually began to accept the label of ‘bloody control freak’ that an ex-boyfriend had once thrown at her.

  Ellie glanced at the clock. It was 10.10pm, and she realised she’d already missed the celebratory drinks for her chairman of operations, who’d recently welcomed his son into the world. She doubted anyone had believed her promise to attend – she rarely found the time to fraternise – and while she encouraged it among her staff and even subsidised the company’s social club, when it came to her own participation, time had a habit of getting away from her, despite her best intentions.

  Ellie let out a long yawn and glanced out of the floor-to-ceiling glass windows. Her ostentatiously unostentatious office was on the seventy-first floor of London’s Shard building, and the panoramic view allowed her to see way beyond the Thames below, out towards the colourful lights illuminating the night sky as far as the eye could see.

  She slipped out of her Miu Miu heels and walked barefoot across the thick white rugs, which adorned the floor, towards the drinks cabinet in the corner of the room. She ignored the stock of champagne, wine, whisky and vodka and chose one of a dozen chilled cans of an energy drink instead. She poured it into a glass with a handful of ice cubes and took a sip. The decor of her office was as sparse as her home, she realised. It said nothing about her. But when you didn’t care enough about your own decisions it was far more convenient to pay interior designers to make them for you.

  Ellie’s business was her priority, not the thread count of the Egyptian cotton covering her bed, how many David Hockney paintings hung from her picture rails or the number of Swarovski crystals used in her hallway chandelier.

  She made her way back to her desk and reluctantly glanced at the next day’s to-do list, which Ula had already compiled. She waited for her driver and head of security Andrei to take her home, where she planned to read her PR department’s suggestions on her upcoming speech to the media about a new update to her app. This update would revolutionise her industry so she had to get it right.

  Then, at 5.30am the next morning, a hair stylist and a make-up artist would meet her at her Belgravia home ahead of the pre-recorded television interviews with CNN, BBC News 24, Fox News and Al Jazeera. Afterwards, she would sit down with a journalist from the Economist, pose for some photographs for the Press Association and hopefully be back home no later than 10am. It wasn’t the best way to begin her Saturday, she thought.

  Ellie’s publicist had forewarned the news agencies that she was only prepared to discuss her work, with strictly no questions to be asked about her personal life. It was why she’d recently turned down a profile featur
e with Vogue complete with a shoot with legendary photographer Annie Leibovitz. The column inches could have been vast and picked up by publications across the globe, but it wasn’t worth the expense of her privacy. That had already suffered enough over the years.

  Along with being notoriously aloof about her life outside of work, Ellie also didn’t want to publicly address the level of criticism her business received – she trusted her PR team to deal with any negativity on her behalf. She’d learned from mistakes of the late Steve Jobs concerning the handling of the iPhone 4 antenna issue, and how much damage it had, at the time, caused to the reputation of both the brand and the figurehead.

  Her personal mobile phone lit up on her desk. Few people had the privilege of that number or her private email address: in fact, just a dozen of her 4,000 employees worldwide and family members who she barely had time to see. It wasn’t that she didn’t think about her relatives often – she’d thrown enough money at them over the years to compensate for her lack of presence – but it all came down to there not being enough hours in the day and a lack of mutual understanding. Ellie didn’t have children; they did. They didn’t have a multibillion-pound global company to run; Ellie did.

  She lifted the phone and recognised the email address on the screen. Curious, she opened it. ‘Match Your DNA Match confirmed’ it revealed. She frowned. Even though she had registered for the site a long time ago, her immediate reaction was still mistrust that one of her staff was playing a joke on her.

  ‘Ellie Ayling. Your designated Match is Timothy, male, Leighton Buzzard, England. Please see instructions below to discover how to access their complete profile.’

  She placed the phone upon the table and closed her eyes. ‘This is the last thing I need,’ she muttered to herself, and switched it off.

  Chapter 6

  MANDY

  ‘Have you heard from him yet?’

  ‘Did he text you or email?’

  ‘Where’s he from?’

  ‘What does he do for a living?’

  ‘What does his voice sound like? Deep and sexy, or has he got an accent?’

  The barrage of questions from Mandy’s family came thick and fast. Her three sisters and mother hunched around the dining room table, hungry for information about her Match, Richard. They were equally hungry for the contents of the four boxes of take-out pizza, garlic bread and dips spread out in front of them.

  ‘No. No. Peterborough. He’s a personal trainer and, no, I don’t know what his voice sounds like,’ Mandy replied.

  ‘Show us his photo then!’ Kirstin asked. ‘I’m dying to see him.’

  ‘I only have a couple I copied from his Facebook profile.’ In truth, there were at least fifty, but Mandy didn’t want them to know how keen she was.

  ‘Oh my God, you don’t want to show us them because he sent you a picture of his willy, didn’t he?’ her mother exclaimed.

  ‘Mum!’ Mandy gasped. ‘I told you, we haven’t spoken yet and I haven’t seen a picture of his willy.’

  ‘Talking of willies, I’m breaking into the meat feast,’ said Paula, and offered a slice to her sister. Mandy shook her head. It was her firm belief that, while her coupled sisters could afford to rest on their laurels and eat to their hearts and stomachs’ content, she had to be careful what she ate. It didn’t matter that it was a cheat day either; according to Grazia, the difference between a size fourteen and a size sixteen can sometimes be just one mouthful.

  Mandy selected the shirtless picture of a surfing Richard and passed her phone around the table for her family to see.

  ‘Bloody hell, he’s a fit little bugger!’ Paula shrieked. ‘Although he must be about a decade younger than you! You have a toy boy, you’re one of those cougars, aren’t you?’

  ‘So when are you going to meet him?’ asked Kirstin.

  ‘I don’t know yet, we’ve got to start a conversation first.’

  ‘She’s waiting for another picture of his willy to make sure he measures up,’ Karen said, and they all burst into laughter.

  ‘You lot have filthy minds,’ Mandy said. ‘I wish I hadn’t said anything now.’

  For once, she was pleased she had some good news to share with her family when it came to her love life. With three younger sisters who had settled down and married – all of them to their DNA Matches – she was riven by insecurities and she’d begun to feel like she’d been left on the shelf, especially since they’d started having children. Mandy was a thirty-seven-year-old divorcee and she was beginning to feel as if she’d never be anything else. However, since Richard had come into her life – albeit not yet in person – everything was now looking up and all she could think about was how things were about to change for the better.

  The confirmation email she’d received from Match Your DNA had informed her that Richard had ticked the box, which meant that, in the event of a Match, his contact details could be sent out. He would also have received a notification informing him of this as well as Mandy’s contact details, yet he hadn’t been in touch. The suspense was killing her. However, Mandy was old-fashioned at heart and believed it the man’s job to do the chasing.

  ‘Right, this is what you need to do,’ began Kirstin. ‘First off, send him a text. Be proactive and set a date when you’ll meet in person, at a restaurant or something … one of the fancy ones like Carluccio’s or Jamie’s. Then make him wait a few dates before you let him kiss you, let alone anything else.’

  ‘Oh, to hell with that,’ interrupted Paula, who took a long drag from her e-cigarette. ‘The beauty of being Matched with someone is that you don’t have to faff around with all that game playing. You know that you two are perfect for each other, so go and shag each other’s brains out.’

  Mandy felt her face turn scarlet.

  Her mother shook her head and rolled her eyes.

  ‘Mandy’s not like you, Paula,’ said Karen. ‘She’s always taken things slowly.’

  ‘And look where that’s got her.’ Paula turned to Mandy and said, ‘No offence. But what I’m saying is that she doesn’t need to be that slow any more. Mum would give her right arm to be a grandmother again, and Karen and I have spent enough on designer vaginas to not want to push another kid out. And Kirstin, yes I know lesbians can have babies too, but you’re too busy playing the field to even think about settling down. Mandy, grandchild number four rests on your shoulders. Just think, by this time next year, you could be married and pregnant.’

  All eyes flashed a wary look at Paula, who quickly said, ‘Sorry. I didn’t think.’

  ‘It’s OK.’ Mandy looked down at the table.

  Mandy had always longed for a child of her own, and when she had been married to Sean they had had a couple of near misses. She and her childhood sweetheart had married straight out of school, saved hard, bought a house together and had tried to start a family. It had completely shaken her world to lose those babies and this had been part of the reason why the marriage had fallen apart. Sometimes there were times at night when, with only the silence to keep her company in her bedroom, she swore she could hear her biological clock ticking. She had probably less than a decade left to conceive a child naturally and, even then, her body was prone to complications. During the many evenings she’d spent babysitting her nieces and nephew, she’d ached to have the same for herself, someone to love unconditionally. Of course she loved her sisters’ kids, but it wasn’t the same at all. She dreamed of having someone she had helped to create and mould, someone who depended on her, who needed her, who would always seek her out for guidance and who, until her dying day, would call her ‘Mum’.

  The thought of becoming a childless spinster was a terrifying prospect, and as the years sped past, Mandy worried that instead of a possibility, it was becoming more and more of a probability.

  ‘I think you’re getting a bit ahead of yourself,’ Mandy said. ‘I’m going to let him make the first move, and let’s see how we get on from there, OK?’

  The others nodded reluctantly
and Mandy recalled how, not so long ago, she’d been wary of registering with Match Your DNA. Her marriage had become unsteady because of the miscarriages, but the final nail in the coffin had been when Sean suddenly left her for another woman eleven years her senior. He had taken the test without Mandy’s knowledge and been Matched. He promptly ended their marriage and once their house was sold, he had moved to a country chateau in Bordeaux to be with his French Match. Mandy had been left to pick up the pieces – a tiny starter home and a broken heart.

  Match Your DNA was no longer the enemy – time had healed Mandy’s relationship with the thought of it. And now, after three years as a singleton, she was ready to share her life with someone again, this time with someone who’d been made for her, rather than leaving it to chance. What could possibly go wrong?

  She hoped her Match was thinking the same thing, although he was taking his time getting in touch. She prayed that he wasn’t already married and that she wasn’t about to break up a happy home, like Régine had done to her, just to get the husband and child that was rightfully hers.

  Chapter 7

  CHRISTOPHER

  Christopher sat at the antique wooden desk in the box room which was situated at the rear of his two-storey apartment.

  He turned on both computer screens and his wireless Bluetooth keyboards, and adjusted their positions until they were perfectly parallel to each other. He opened up his emails on the first screen, and on the second he flicked through several programmes before clicking on the Where’s My Mobile Phone? link he’d downloaded some months ago. Twenty-four different phone numbers appeared on his screen, but just two flashed in a bright green colour to indicate their users were on the move. That was about usual for this time of the evening, he reasoned.

  It was the penultimate phone number that piqued his curiosity. He opened a map in his toolbar and added a red ring to indicate where the user was. Her phone’s GPS system offered her current location as the street where she lived.