Chapter 34
The drive to Max’s house was like travelling towards my own execution. I nearly turned the car around twice, until I persuaded myself it was better to know the truth than live in ignorance. I wasn’t sure if I believed it, but my foot stayed on the accelerator.
The email sat folded in my passenger seat like evidence of a crime. Which, in a way, it was. I put the radio on, but even Radio Six’s lunchtime show didn’t soothe me.
I’d rehearsed what I was going to say a dozen times, but now I was pulling into Max’s still-very-large driveway, my carefully planned words scattered like leaves in the wind.
The anger that had sustained me throughout the drive was giving way to something more complex: hurt, betrayal, but underneath it all, a desperate hope that somehow I’d misunderstood everything.
Eliza’s car was parked outside. At least the drive wasn’t in vain.
But then, disappointment sank through me. Was this where she’d come to discuss exactly how she was going to fuck me over?
I got out of the car, then walked the ten steps to the door at the slowest pace possible, my legs made of lead.
I rang the doorbell, but then heard gravel crunching behind me. When I turned, Eliza was there, a frown creasing her forehead. Her cheekbones could still slice bread, but there was a real sadness behind her ocean-deep gaze.
Despite my plight and the reasons for me being there, my body responded to her the way it always did. With an internal high five, and an immediate need to touch her. I physically yanked myself backwards to stop that happening.
“Poppy.” Her voice was barely a whisper. “What are you doing here?” She glanced left to right, as if expecting three of me.
“We need to talk.” I pulled out the email, and held it between us like a weapon. “About this.”
Her eyes dropped to the paper, and the colour drained from her cheeks.
Right at that moment, I so wished I didn’t have to do this.
“Where did you get that?”
This was the bit where I had no excuse. I hadn’t actually snooped, but I hadn’t exactly not snooped either. I gulped, then tried to find the words. Anger fizzed up my system. I was here now, and I’d seen the email. Did it matter how I found out?
“You’ve been distant since we got back from Switzerland.
You know that.” I paused. “I wanted to get to the bottom of it. I decided to go round to your house, but you weren’t there.
The builder invited me in, so I had a look around, just to see how it was going.
I was curious, I guess. I wasn’t snooping.
But then I went to your room and found this. ”
She didn’t say anything, just stared at me, her mouth slightly open.
“Was it all a lie? Did you get me into bed just to make sure I played the game your way and got your dad the best price for the company?” My voice cracked as I spoke. Now I said it out loud, it was absolutely worse than I thought.
Right at that moment, the door opened, with Max behind it. The absolute last person I wanted to see right now. Then, seconds later, Margot walked up behind him.
When she saw me, her face fell. I expected a better poker game from her. Max, though: his game was perfect.
“Poppy! What a nice surprise. Come in, come in.”
I turned and stared at Eliza. I’d come to talk to her, to see what defence she had. But Max and Margot were all tied up in this, too. Should I get it all over in one go? Rip the plaster off right away? Unless I ran now, I didn’t really have a choice.
Eliza gestured for me to go inside, and against my better judgement, I did. But once the door was closed, I struggled to breathe.
“What brings you this way? It’s not exactly local.”
“This email.” I waved the piece of paper at Max.
He frowned just like his daughter had when she saw me, then held out his hand. “I don’t know what this is about, but can I see?”
But Eliza stepped between us. “I know this looks bad, but it’s not what it seems…”
“Isn’t it?” I waved the email again. “Because it looks like it is exactly what it seems to me. ‘Sweet-talk her.’ ‘Don’t let personal feelings cloud your judgment.’ ‘This is business’.
” Each quote felt like swallowing glass.
“You told me I wasn’t business. That Switzerland wasn’t business.
But this? This makes it way harder to believe. ”
“Switzerland was real. Everything between us has been real.” She looked me in the eye. “I couldn’t fake that if I tried.”
I heard a gasp from my left, then realised Margot didn’t know about us. Nobody did.
Well, they did now.
“Then why is this email even in existence? You’ve been tense and avoidant, and I kept thinking, ‘it’s not what it seems’. However, it turns out, it’s even worse.”
Margot stepped closer. “Poppy, what does the email say? And what’s this about you two? Are you together?”
“No,” I stated.
Eliza stepped back, like she’d been slapped in the face.
“Maybe for a little while we were, but not now.”
Margot looked to Eliza, then to me.
Max folded his arms across his chest. “This is all making a bit more sense to me now. I didn’t think my normally rational, business-savvy daughter would suddenly turn on a deal we’d agreed on months ago. But you slept together. Feelings got involved. It all becomes clear.”
He shook his head and sighed.
As for me? Max had just answered all my questions in one go. I wanted to go sit on the grand piano stool to my left, lean over and vomit on Max’s pristine Italian tiles.
Instead, I said: “A deal you’d agreed on months ago?”
Eliza shook her head in double-quick time, then dropped her gaze to the floor. Maybe she was thinking about vomiting on her dad’s tiles, too.
“It was the original plan, yes. To let you have a go so that you couldn’t say we didn’t let you try.” Her voice was so quiet I had to strain to hear it.
She cleared her throat and finally looked at me.
“But you have to understand, nobody thought you were going to pull off something this big. Plus, I thought you hated me. I thought our relationship would blow up long before now. I thought I could persuade you because, as far as I knew, you hated the company and never wanted to work for them.”
Each word was like another cut, deeper than the last. I took a step back. “But you planned to manipulate me right from the start.” A chill ran through me. This was deception beyond words, almost beyond feelings.
“I thought you were faking it at the start,” Eliza said. “Then I found out you’d changed. And then, when I got to know you and what the company meant to you, I changed, too. You have to believe me.”
She stepped closer, and I could see tears gathering in her eyes.
“You changed me. These past few months have changed me for the better. You made me confront my life, made me move forward instead of just drifting. If you want to think the worst of me, you can, but I would never do anything to hurt someone I love. And I do love you, Poppy. Even though you’re standing here looking as if you want to rip my head off. ”
“Everything you’ve said and done has been based on a lie.” I shook my head, numbness creeping through me. I turned to Margot. “And you. My own aunt selling me down the river. What happened to giving me a chance, to seeing what I could do?”
Margot stepped forwards and grasped both my arms with her hands.
“You don’t know what’s best for you sometimes. Giving you a poisoned chalice that’s killed your mum and Gran? I wasn’t going to do that.” Her words were choked.
“You might be mad now, but you’ll thank me in the long run.
Plus, Max isn’t even the buyer now. Thanks to your efforts, the price tag has gone up and we’ve managed to get a new party in the watch space.
Voss will be folded into SwissTok and our range kept on as a legacy range.
It’s a great bit of business and means that you can now do what you really want to. ”
“This is what I really want to do!” She still didn’t get it. “You’ve seen how hard I’ve worked over the past few months. It wasn’t to spite you. It was to inspire myself and everyone in the company. I went to SwissTok to learn, not to showcase my skills.”
“He’s interested in keeping you on. He was impressed by you. If that’s something you want, Gabriel is open to it. Everyone wins. No responsibility, but you still get to work on whatever’s next.”
“Nobody wins. I don’t win. Mum and Gran don’t win.” And what about all the staff at Goldloch? What about Roka’s contract? The more I considered all the implications, the angrier I got. Maybe Mum had been warning me about Margot, not Eliza.
“The only people who win here are you, Eliza for getting the deal done, and no doubt Max is taking a consultancy fee.”
He held up both hands, his smile showing me he had no remorse. “Business is business, Poppy. You know that.”
But I shook my head again. “Not the way I do business.”
Eliza ran her hands through her hair, and for the first time since I’d known her, she looked genuinely rattled.
“I’ve been trying to make this right since we got back.
Trying to talk these two around, thinking about my future and where it’s going to be.
I wanted to work it all out before I came to explain to you.
But then SwissTok got involved, and it all got far too complex. So yes, I have been avoiding you.”
“No shit.”
“It’s why I moved out of Dad’s house. I told him I wasn’t going to do this anymore, that I wouldn’t manipulate you into selling.
We’ve been fighting about it for weeks.” She glanced towards Max, and for a moment, his mask fell.
“We were just arguing half an hour ago. I’m fed up of arguing, so I went for a walk.
When I came back, you were on the doorstep. ”
I stared at her, trying to process what she was saying. “None of this changes the fact that you signed up to deceive me. You, Max and Margot all had a plan to let Poppy play at being in charge, before telling me no anyway.”
Her calling me Playgirl Poppy in our train carriage came back to me now, like someone was shouting it through a megaphone. Anger sloshed through my veins. She’d never changed her view. She still saw me as a stupid kid who knew nothing.
“If what you’re saying is true and you didn’t use me, why didn’t you tell me this was the plan once everything changed? You could have done that. That would have been the right thing to do.”
My anger came and went, swiftly replaced by total, chilled numbness.
“Did you think about telling me just before you fucked me in Switzerland? Or did you think that every orgasm I had would get you that step closer to the perfect deal? Was I just a stepping stone? A convenient fast-track to taking over your dad’s company?”
“No!” Eliza’s voice echoed through the hallway.
“Everything I told you was true. I’ve been considering my future.
I printed out the email to show Dad his own words written down, hoping they might jog some piece of his conscience.
Show him what he was asking me to do.” Her head slumped forward.
“But then I left it at the house. I wanted to put this right before you ever found out. That was my logic. I can see now that it was flawed.”
“You were colluding with the enemy all along.”
“If we’re honest, you knew the situation from the start,” Max added, his voice not quite so cocky now. “That there was a strong possibility Voss would be sold.”
“I didn’t know it was a foregone conclusion.” The hurt bled through again, making my voice crack. “I trusted Eliza. I trusted Margot until she got together with you. Even in my wildest nightmares, I wouldn’t guess you were all just waiting for the right moment to cash out.”
“It’s not a foregone conclusion,” Margot told me, not looking at Max.
“It is if Max has brainwashed you. I’m not yet 30, so I don’t have a say. Katy wants what’s best for her daughters, and a lump of cash would suit her just fine.” The full scope of my powerlessness hit me now. “I hope you all had a good laugh at me trying to make everything right.”
Eliza’s face crumpled, her usual polished composure dissolving in an instant.
“Everything I’ve ever said to you has been real. About the business, about my life, about how I feel about you.” She glanced at her dad, then Margot.
“I love you, and that makes doing this deal problematic. I think Margot should listen and take into account what you’ve done since you took over. The Voss brand is on everyone’s lips and that’s down to you.
“As for me?” She turned to her dad. “Take this as my verbal resignation. I think we’ve come to the end of the road with our business pursuits. It’ll be better to have you just as a dad, not as my boss. This is one deal I can’t finish.”
I gaped at her words.
The problem was, I loved her right back. Even standing here, feeling like my heart had been fed through a shredder, I could feel that treacherous pull to her. But love wasn’t enough when the foundation was built on lies.
“You know what the problem is?” I said, my voice breaking completely now. “I fell for you, too. Hard.”
Hope flickered across her face, but I crushed it before it could take root.
“But how can I ever trust you again? How can I know what’s real and what’s just part of some elaborate game?” I took a step back, putting physical distance between us before I lost my resolve. “There’s only one thing I can do.”
“Poppy, please—”
I shook my head. “It’s too late, Eliza. I have to go.”
I turned and walked away before she could say anything else, before the sight of her tears could break down what was left of my defences.
I didn’t trust myself to look back.