Chapter 7
The email arrived on a Wednesday morning a week and a half later, sandwiched between a client update and a reminder about the office’s annual community day.
Helena almost scrolled past the generic subject line from a no-reply mailbox (“Annual Global Partner Conference: Invitation”) as she got several of those a week from external vendors who’d worked out her email address from her online profile and were spamming her firm looking for an in, any in they could get, to try to pitch for their business.
But this time she hesitated, because the sender purported to be the Managing Partner’s office… not the local Managing Partner but the head of the whole firm. She checked and, heart suddenly beating a little faster, she opened it once she could see it was legitimate.
Dear Helena,
On behalf of the Global Leadership Committee, I am delighted to invite you to this year’s Annual Global Partner Conference, to be hosted by the Miami office.
As you know, this event is typically reserved for Partners and Senior Leadership.
However, each year a small number of high-potential consultants from across our global offices are invited to attend as part of our commitment to developing future leaders.
Your outstanding performance over the past year, including your successful international secondment and your leadership on recent engagements, has identified you as one of these individuals.
You will find full details below. Travel budget has been pre-approved by the Global Leadership Committee. Please confirm your attendance by…
Helena read the email twice, then a third time to make sure she hadn’t misunderstood.
The annual global partner conference, three weeks from now.
The partners-only event that was spoken about in the S?o Paulo office with a mix of reverence and irreverence…
reverence for the networking opportunities and career implications, irreverence for the stories that filtered back about what partners got up to when they were let loose in whichever city was hosting that year with a seemingly unlimited expense account.
She’d known it existed, obviously. Rafael had mentioned it in passing a few times, usually in the context of dropping heavy hints about Helena’s trajectory.
But she’d assumed it was at least two or three years away for her until she might be invited, with partnership itself a possibility a few years after that.
Being invited now, at twenty-five, was a significant statement from the firm’s leadership.
Helena hesitated for a moment. She was thrilled, genuinely thrilled, but she sent a screen shot to Rafael asking if it was a hoax, just in case, and only really let herself believe it when he replied in the affirmative.
Once she’d had that confirmation, she found herself grinning like an idiot…
this was a career milestone, the sort of thing that if she made the most of the networking opportunities and was able to impress would accelerate her path in ways that were hard to overstate.
She scrolled excitedly through the agenda, the dinners, the networking drinks, the speakers and discussion groups, and then she stopped, suddenly.
One name leaped out from the page.
The sole speaker for a session on Adoption of Modern Data Environments.
Caitlin.
Caitlin will be there.
Of course she would. She’d made partner this year, the youngest in the firm’s history, and her nickname even before then had been Future Managing Partner, a nickname that was known even in Helena’s office.
She was a legend already, and of course she’d be there to network and to cement her place in the firm’s leadership structure.
The conference was where partners went. Caitlin was a partner with great things ahead of her. Therefore Caitlin would be in Miami.
Helena stared at the email for a long time.
Nine months. Nine months of near silence, of brief messages and professional distance, of Helena slowly, painfully coming to terms with the possibility, no, the likelihood that what happened in Houston was a closed chapter.
And now she was going to be in the same hotel, at the same event, for two nights.
Her first impulse was to call Isabella. Her second was to close the email and pretend she hadn’t seen it. Her third, the one she went with, was to sit quietly for five minutes and think.
What do you want from this?
It was a complete no-brainer to confirm her attendance.
Professionally there was literally no downside unless she went there, spent the whole conference drinking, and made a fool of herself.
Obviously, that wouldn’t be the case. There’d never be another professional decision as easy and obvious as this one.
And yet…
Caitlin complicated everything.
As Isabella had said, silence is a choice.
Unfortunately, though, knowing it wouldn’t make it any easier when she saw Caitlin for the first time.
How would Helena react? She’d like to think that she would be calm, mature, oh don’t worry, I’ve moved on too.
But that was always easier to say than do.
And how would Caitlin be with her? What if she’d grown to deeply regret that crazy week they’d shared, what if she’d written it off as an aberration and she was deeply embarrassed to encounter Helena again?
Helena wasn’t sure how she could cope with that.
She pulled out her phone and fired off a message to Isabella.
Hey, I need to ask you about something. Free for lunch?
She got her reply a few minutes later.
I know that tone and I’ve moved what I had. See you at twelve? x
***
Isabella was there already when Helena arrived. She greeted Helena warmly, as ever, and then sat looking at her expectantly… Helena asking to meet last minute was a once-a-year kind of event, so it clearly had her attention.
Helena smiled. “Thank you for rearranging whatever it was you had to meet me.”
“Pah.” Isabella waved her hand dismissively. “It was a good excuse, you saved me from a very dull and likely very long lunch. You’ve done me a favour.”
“Well thank you anyway.”
“Forget about it, seriously. So… what is it you need to ask me?”
Helena opened up her phone, pulled up the invitation to the conference, and slid it across the table for Isabella to read.
She read the email, then read it again, then glanced up at Helena. “This is very cool, wow… I guess this is a big deal getting invited?”
“Very. I’m really excited. Thrilled. Delighted.”
Isabella studied her face for a few moments. “You don’t seem it. What’s the catch? There has to be a catch, right?”
“Scroll down to the agenda, the session on Adoption of Modern Data Environments.”
“Ok…” Isabella scrolled down and read it. “Sounds riveting,” she added, smiling. “But I don’t get what the catch is.” She looked at it again. “Oh.”
“Oh?”
“Oh.” She looked back up at Helena. “The speaker’s from the Houston office.”
“Yeah.”
“You were on secondment in the Houston office.”
“Yeah.”
“You met someone from the Houston office.”
“Yeah.”
“She’s incredibly cute from that photo…” She nodded. “I see. Caitlin, right?”
Helena nodded herself. “Caitlin. The one and only.”
Isabella shook her head, laughing. “She is hot. Really hot.” Isabella looked up at Helena again. “What was it that attracted you to her?”
Helena pursed her lips, knowing that Isabella was teasing. Knowing too that Isabella knew that it went far deeper than looks. She stayed silent, waiting for Isabella to continue.
“Sorry, but I’m straight and even I’d be tempted. So, your problem is…?”
“It’s obvious, isn’t it? She’ll be there, I’ll definitely see her, and I have to assume as you said that her silence is a choice.
I’m…” Helena hesitated. “I guess I’m terrified, because I don’t know how I’ll react.
I’m worried I’ll make a fool of myself.” Helena looked down and played with her napkin on the table. “I’m thinking of declining the invite.”
“What?” Isabella was incredulous. “Are you serious?”
Helena nodded. “That’s why I needed to talk to you. I don’t know who else to discuss it with and I can’t work it out on my own.”
“Ok, it’s a good job I’m here. Talk me through it, all of it, and we’ll work this one out.”
“It might take a while.”
“For you I’ll cancel my afternoon. Seriously.”
They ordered their food and then Helena explained the situation as fully as she dared, filling in the gaps that she’d deliberately left opaque when telling Isabella in the past, albeit glossing over the more intimate details.
It helped for Isabella to know about how they’d ended up sleeping together that first time, how it had built over a crazy week from there, how they’d left it, but she absolutely did not need to know how Helena had made Caitlin willingly crawl naked to her in her own home, nor any of the other ways in which Caitlin had surrendered to her so completely.
When she got to the end, Isabella sat back and grinned. “Wow… I knew you were missing her, but… wow.” She gave Helena’s hand an affectionate pat. “And seeing your face light up when you talk about her… look, Helena, I can see it.”
“So what do I do?” Helena asked. “Do I follow my gut and decline the invite?”
Isabella looked at her intently for a few moments. “I’m going to ask you some questions. Answer me truthfully. Ok?”
“Ok.”
“If she wasn’t going, would you go?”
“Yes. Without hesitation.”
“Right, remember that. Next, do you ever want to see her again?”
“Of course.”
“Ok, remember that too. Final question, and this is actually a really easy one… are you out of your fucking mind?”
Helena sat back, shocked, then saw Isabella was smiling. “That was it, after all I just told you, two and a half questions?”
“Half is being charitable for the last one… but seriously. Imagine if you don’t go, you’ll always wonder what might have been for your career and what might have been with Caitlin. Even if you go and Caitlin blanks you and it’s terrible, at least you know.”
Helena nodded slowly. Isabella was right, and it was blindingly obvious. Of course she’d go.
Their bill arrived and Helena insisted on paying. “I needed you to make me see that,” she said.
“Any time,” Isabella replied, giving her a friendly goodbye hug.
“Just one other thing… work out where Juliana sits in all this before you go. You owe it to her, you owe it to you, you owe it to Caitlin because if Caitlin does feel something still for you then you need to know what you can and cannot do. Promise me you’ll think about that. ”
Helena nodded slowly… it was wise counsel, and where Juliana fit into her life after that insane encounter in the alleyway that Sunday evening was becoming increasingly blurred.
They’d seen each other once more since then, on Friday night, and it had been intense.
Both women had kept up the pretence that this was still an education, but for the first time Juliana had taken charge from the start right through to the end and Helena had been her willing submissive.
It hadn’t felt to Helena like she was pretending, it had felt like she was genuinely submitting to a dominant mistress, and she didn’t really understand where that left things between them or what the future might bring.
Helena needed to speak to Juliana, she realised, openly, honestly, and soon.