Chapter 2
Helena’s week started the way every week started: too early, too much coffee, and a meeting at eight thirty that could, and definitely should, have been an email.
The S?o Paulo office of her consulting firm occupied four floors of a glass tower in Faria Lima, the financial district that had been the beating heart of Brazilian business for as long as Helena could remember.
Her father had worked two blocks from here for thirty-five years before retiring, as had his father before him, and there was something grounding about walking these streets in the morning, weaving through the suited crowds, knowing that her family’s fingerprints were all over this part of the city.
She’d been back from Houston for nine months and in that time her career had quietly accelerated.
The secondment had done precisely what secondments are advertised as doing…
broadened her experience, put her name in front of senior people in other offices, given her a line on her CV that said she could operate internationally.
Her manager, Rafael, had made it clear that she was on what the firm called the ‘leadership trajectory’, which as far as Helena could tell meant more responsibility and significantly more meetings, with the carrot of more pay at some vague point in the future.
Some managers she’d have struggled to trust with that, but Rafael was a partner himself and heading for great things, so he was more reliable than most.
This particular Monday morning meeting was Rafael running through the quarter’s pipeline: potential new clients, active engagements, staffing allocations.
Helena contributed where she needed to and let her mind wander where she didn’t.
The S?o Paulo office was smaller than Houston, unsurprisingly given that Houston was the firm’s global HQ, with a character that reflected the Brazilian approach to business…
relationships first, everything else second.
She liked that about it. You knew everyone, for better or worse.
“Helena, the Pactuali engagement.” Rafael looked at her over his glasses. “Where are we?”
She straightened in her chair. “Scoping phase is done. We’ve built the financial model and stress-tested it against three scenarios.
We’re presenting to their board next Thursday.
” She paused. “I’d recommend we lead with the conservative scenario.
Their CFO is reputed to be risk-averse, and we’ll lose her if we come in too aggressive.
We can pivot to something more aggressive once she’s bought in if need be. ”
Rafael nodded. “Good. Lead on the presentation. Take Mateus for support but it’s your show.”
“Understood.”
It was her show. More and more things were her show lately.
She’d led two client engagements since Houston, both successfully, and she was getting a reputation in the office as someone who could manage difficult stakeholders with a combination of analytical rigour and the interpersonal warmth that Brazilian business culture demanded.
She was good at reading people, she always had been, and in a consulting context that translated into knowing when to push a client and when to pull back, when to present the hard truth and when to let them arrive at it themselves.
Reading people. She was good at that in every context, not just professional ones. She’d read Caitlin within hours of really talking to her, had seen the hidden submissive beneath the dominant surface, had understood instinctively what Caitlin needed before Caitlin herself had known.
Don’t. Not at work. Not now.
She forced her attention back to the meeting, which had moved on to a discussion about a potential engagement in Argentina that nobody seemed particularly enthusiastic about volunteering for.
After the meeting Helena spent the morning at her desk, deep in the financial model for Pactuali.
It was absorbing work, the sort of work where she could enter a flow state and left no room for stray thoughts, which was precisely why she liked it.
Numbers didn’t ambush you with memories.
Spreadsheets didn’t make you wonder what might have been.
Her phone buzzed just before midday. Isabella.
Lunch? I’m nearby. That place you like with the salad bowls.
Helena smiled. Isabella worked in marketing for a luxury fashion brand, which seemed to mean that some weeks she was absolutely, hectically busy, others she barely seemed to work at all and would suddenly pop up suggesting lunch out of nowhere.
They’d been friends since school and had the sort of relationship where months of absence changed nothing…
you picked up exactly where you left off.
In practice, though, they saw each other in the evenings at least weekly, often more, it was just the daytimes that tended to be somewhat random.
Perfect. 12:30?
The reply was instant.
See you there x
***
The restaurant was a five-minute walk from the office, a light, airy room that catered to the more health conscious of the working crowd. Helena arrived first and secured a table by the window, the midday sun shaded by the awning outside.
Isabella arrived as her usual bundle of energy, oversized sunglasses pushed up into her dark hair, a shopping bag from somewhere expensive dangling from one wrist. She kissed Helena on both cheeks and collapsed into the chair opposite.
“I have been on my feet since seven.” She shook her head in disbelief. “It’s criminal. A photoshoot in Pinheiros that needed different shoes or else the model wouldn’t pose.” She flagged down a waiter. “I need carbs.” She grinned. “And gossip. In that order.”
They ordered and fell into their usual rhythm.
They had, after all, been having lunch together for near on fifteen years.
Isabella talked about the photoshoot, then about a guy she was seeing that night who’d managed to get her number out of her at the bar on Friday, then about her mother’s increasingly unsubtle campaign to get her to settle down.
“That article about egg freezing,” Isabella said. “She just sent it. No message. Just the link. What do you reckon: passive-aggressive or just aggressive?”
Helena laughed. “Luckily my parents have already concentrated all their grandchild hopes on my sisters.” Helena had come out to her parents in her teens and while there’d been a brief flicker of hope for her mother when she dated a man a couple of years back, that had soon dissipated when they’d understood that everyone before and after was female.
“Lucky you. Maybe that’s what I need to do… stage a fake coming out.”
“Your mother wouldn’t cope…”
“No, you’re right, she’d drop dead on the spot. Don’t give me ideas…” Isabella smiled, then focused in on Helena. “Speaking of families, I saw you leave with Juliana again.”
“So what if I did? And as you well know she’s not family.”
“No, but Mariana is. She seems surprisingly cool about what you’re doing with her best friend.”
“She is.” Helena thought for a moment. “No, I’m oversimplifying. She’s cool with it because I’m cool with it and Juliana’s cool with it. I suspect she’s dreading what might happen if it got difficult between us.”
Isabella was nodding. “Could it?”
“How do you mean?”
“I suppose, how’s all that going? You said at the weekend it was just fun, but is it really? It’s been a while now between you.”
Isabella asked it lightly, the way she always did when the subject came up.
She knew that Helena and Juliana were in some kind of casual arrangement, Helena had told her that much, and she knew it had started through Juliana approaching Helena.
She didn’t know the specifics and, to her credit, she didn’t push for them.
“It’s good. Casual. We enjoy each other.” Helena paused. “Mariana knows we’re seeing each other but she doesn’t know the details and I’d like to keep it that way. She’s my little sister, there are limits.”
“Understood. Lips sealed.” Isabella mimed zipping her mouth shut. “But… you didn’t really answer my question?”
Helena took a moment. “Juliana’s… oh, God, you know Juliana. She’s great fun and…” Helena felt her cheeks reddening. “She’s great fun in private too. If you follow.”
“Oh, I do.” Isabella was grinning. “I really do. So could it get serious?”
Helena shrugged. “I like her, but she’s not…” She trailed off.
“She’s not her,” Isabella finished for her.
“Yeah.”
Neither of them needed to say who her was.
Isabella had been there from the beginning, or at least from as close to the beginning as Helena had allowed.
She’d listened through the weeks after Houston, had watched Helena go through the motions of moving on, had noted with concern and without comment the way Helena checked her phone far too often in those weeks and jumped for her phone whenever a message notification came through.
Isabella knew that someone in Houston had got under Helena’s skin in a way that nobody else had managed.
Ever. She knew it was a woman, though that was expected with Helena…
Isabella had been complicit with trying to keep Helena’s first relationship out of sight of Helena’s parents from the start.
She knew Houston had been intense and that Helena had feelings that went beyond the physical.
She didn’t know the full extent of what had happened between them. Some things were Helena’s alone.
“It’s been nine months,” Isabella said gently. “Maybe you need to move on. Juliana’s nice, even with the whole Mariana thing.”
“I know… Juliana’s great but she’s great because it’s fun and easy. It’s just… it’s hard for me to accept that what happened in Houston wasn’t the start of something.”
“Have you heard from her?”
“Not really. She made partner a few months ago. I sent congratulations.” Helena pushed a piece of tomato around her bowl. “She said thank you.”
“That’s it?”
“It was warmer than that, obviously. But professional.”
Isabella reached across the table and squeezed Helena’s hand. “I’m going to say something and you’re not going to like it.”
“You always say that before you say something I don’t like.”
“Because it’s always true. Helena, you told me that you told this woman to take time to work things out. You told her to explore, to figure out what she wanted. You gave her space.” Isabella paused. “She’s taken the space, and maybe that’s your answer.”
Helena felt herself recoil from the truth that she’d suspected deep down. “Maybe.”
“I’m not saying she doesn’t care about you.
From everything you’ve told me, what you had was real.
But you can’t spend the rest of your life waiting for someone to text you back.
You’ve got Juliana who is clearly into you, you’ve got half the eligible women in S?o Paulo who’d jump at the chance, not to mention the men if you wanted them.
At some point you have to decide whether you’re waiting or you’re living. ”
“I’m living,” Helena said, a little more sharply than she intended. “I work, I go out, I’m having fun with Juliana, I see my friends, I see my family. I’m not sitting in my apartment staring at my phone.”
“No, you’re not. But you’re comparing everyone to her, and that’s not fair on them or on you.” Isabella’s voice was gentle. “Whatever she was to you, whatever she could have been, you gave her the choice and she’s made it. Silence is a choice, Helena.”
Helena looked out of the window at the lunch crowd passing by, the usual mix of suited professionals and tourists, not to mention that breed of S?o Paulo socialite who seemed to exist in a permanent state of looking incredible while going nowhere in particular.
She thought about what Isabella was saying and knew, in her rational mind, that it was right.
Nine months was a long time. The communication between her and Caitlin had been professional and warm yet sparse: a congratulations here, a work-related question there, nothing that remotely suggested that Caitlin was lying awake at night thinking about Helena the way Helena lay awake thinking about her.
And yet.
The necklace. In Caitlin’s most recent professional headshot, her new partner portrait, Helena had spotted it.
The thin silver chain, the green jewel clasped in interwoven strands.
The necklace Helena had bought her in the Heights on that Sunday afternoon, the one Helena had commanded her to wear and nothing else.
It was there, visible, in a professional photograph that thousands of colleagues could see.
It could mean nothing. It was a beautiful necklace, even if Helena said so herself. People wore beautiful jewellery in professional photos.
But Helena couldn’t help wondering if it meant something more. If Caitlin wore it every day. If she touched it sometimes and thought about what it had represented.
She hadn’t told Isabella about the necklace and the photos, she wouldn’t tell anybody, because some hopes were too fragile to share, and she knew that if she said it it would sound exactly like what it probably was: clutching at straws.
“You’re right,” Helena said, looking back at Isabella. “I know you’re right. I just need a bit more time.”
“You’ve had nine months, querida.”
Helena smiled wryly. “I know. A bit more. Not lots. A bit."
Isabella looked at her with the exasperated fondness that only a lifelong friend could manage. “Fine. But I reserve the right to stage an intervention if you’re still moping at the one-year mark.”
“I’m not moping.”
“You’re a little bit moping.”
“I’m reflective. It’s different.”
“That’s just moping with better vocabulary,” Isabella grinned, and Helena couldn’t help but laugh, the tension breaking. “Come on, eat up and tell me about what’s going on at work.”
Helena was grateful for the shift to professional ground, and they spent the rest of lunch talking about her upcoming presentation, and then about Isabella’s upcoming product launch.
When Isabella left, kissing Helena goodbye at the door, making her promise lunch again next week and with a loose plan to do something together that weekend, Helena walked back to the office alone, the early afternoon sun warm on her skin, the city bustling around her.
Silence is a choice.
Maybe Isabella was right. Maybe Caitlin’s silence was all the answer Helena needed, and the sooner she accepted that, the sooner she could stop checking her phone the moment she woke up each morning just in case there was a message waiting for her.
Right now, she had work to do, she had a personal training session tonight, and tomorrow she had Juliana coming over. Full days, full evenings. A full life.
She was fine. She’d be fine.
Her phone buzzed as she reached the office lobby. She glanced at it reflexively, her pulse spiking the way it always did before she saw the name on the screen. Just in case.
A calendar reminder. Team meeting at two.
Helena slipped her phone back into her pocket and took the lift to her floor, trying not to think about how disappointed she felt.