Juliet’s beautiful balcony needed repaired – but did that mean her love life was broken, too?
BY GILL MCKINLAY
How was your weekend, Juliet?” Ben pressed buttons on the vending machine. “Did you meet Romeo?” He’d asked her that every Monday morning since she’d started working at Bradley and Johnson Solicitors six months ago.
And if he wasn’t asking about Romeo, he was waxing lyrical about balconies, currently a sore point for Juliet.
“But, soft! What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun…” Ben quoted.
Just then, Harry Johnson came out of his office.
“Maybe you should consider acting, Ben,” he said.
“Legal work can be boring…”
“I’ll see you around, Juliet,” Ben muttered, heading for the lift.
She didn’t know anything about him, but whenever she visited the vending machine, Ben always showed up.
Harry’s phone started ringing, so he left to answer it, shutting his glass-panelled office door behind him.
Collecting coffee from the machine, Juliet smiled at Ben’s question.
No, she had not met Romeo; she hadn’t met anybody at all.
And all because of the balcony. The railings around it had come loose, meaning she couldn’t sit outside.
The weather had been beautiful, too; frosty mornings and weak sunshine, a reminder that spring was on its way.
Mark, the man from the rental agency, arrived early Friday evening, and she’d asked if she could sit outside.
“I’ll have to contact the owner, and act on his instructions,” he said. “But to keep safe, stay off the balcony.”
Mark photoed the damage and sent it to whoever owned the flat but there was still no word from him by Wednesday.
“I chose the flat because of the balcony,” Juliet told her colleague, Val.
“It seemed the next best thing to a garden. And now I can’t use it. What if Romeo wanted to serenade me? He’d have to knock on the outer door, wait for somebody to let him in, then sing to me in the hallway – it wouldn’t be the same.”
“But that’s not going to happen,” Val laughed. You can’t keep waiting for Romeo or Mr Right to show up.
“Real life doesn’t work like that.”
“You found your Mr Romeo Right, though,” said Juliet as she logged on to her computer. Val had married her long-term sweetheart last year.
There were thirty-five emails
