Chapter 24
Eve
I can feel the weight of concealer dragging my eye bags further into my cheeks. I’m five minutes away, on foot, striding across St. Peter’s Square with my phone pressed against my ear.
‘Lots of little Spanish children, aren’t there, Mike?’ my mum is saying, and I hear my dad’s muffled agreement in the background. ‘Not much fun for the British kids. A lot of them come on holiday to make friends, you know? And how can they do that when they don’t speak the language?’
I am too tired for this. I pulled an all-nighter working on Kirsty’s expo presentation, and when I finally took myself to bed at 3 a.m., I was awoken half an hour later by the cat curling up beside me. I’d left the downstairs window open a crack to let the air circulate, and the bloody thing had jumped in to come and find me.
‘Oh, and you should see the size of the prawns, Evie. It’s not natural, it really isn’t,’ my mum is murmuring down the phone, as if the King of Spain might hear her and have her arrested for hate speech.
‘Genetic modification!’ my dad shouts from somewhere else in the room. ‘Tell her, Carrie, Joe from the diner’s sure of it.’
‘Oh!’ I swear as someone’s bag smacks me across the arm as they run for the tram. ‘Sorry, Mum, I’m meeting Kirsty for coffee — can I call you later in the week?’
I stop a few steps away from Starbucks, leaning against the arches of Manchester Central Library and rubbing my forearm. Lack of sleep has made me irritable and weary, and I need a moment to compose myself.
‘Oh, is that your friend from work?’ Mum chirps, and I come to, surprised that she remembers. ‘The one we saw on FaceTime a few months back? Be sure to say hello from us!’
I assure them that I will and end the call quickly, conflict nudging at my resolve. A memory surfaces: Kirsty and I having lunch in my office, my phone ringing, her insisting she stayed to virtually meet my parents. We were friends, and not only in the forced-colleague-closeness sense. We were friends.
I take a step forward, and then push myself on with renewed force. I’m tired and it’s making me emotional. I repeat my mantra to myself: F Ups , false permission, complaints, betrayal. She’d do this to me tenfold — she is doing this to me tenfold. She’s slagging me off to Dev, playing just as dirty as I am. There’s no space in this plan for nostalgia and sentimentality. If I don’t fight my own corner, who will?
Kirsty is waiting for me at a little round table in the corner, two steaming coffees placed in front of her. I note this and almost stop — she’s bought me coffee, undoubtedly my usual order. Is she trying to make amends? A momentary flash of how things could be if we stopped this now, apologised and made up, crosses my mind. It’s tantalising.
‘Hi.’ I sink into the seat opposite her and she sits up.
‘Hey, how are you? I got you an Americano, triple shot.’
‘Perfect, I need it.’
As I take a sip I can feel her watching me, no doubt taking in my over-concealed under-eyes. Is she feeling as bad as I am? Is she regretting what she’s done?
‘So,’ I say, putting my cup down. ‘What did you want to talk about, specifically?’
She grimaces. ‘I know it’s awkward, after the confusion with the job vacancy.’ Not a vacancy, I think. ‘But we still need to do the best we can at the expo, don’t we? For the company’s sake. So I hope we can help each other.’
‘Oh.’ I raise my eyebrows, the coffee suddenly feeling cheap. She thinks I’m stupid enough to trade my dream job for a ￡3.45 Americano. I feel idiotic for thinking she might want to move on from this. This is why I never let my guard down. ‘Do you have something for me?’ I ask, managing to keep my voice neutral.
She reddens. Of course she doesn’t. ‘Well, no... I mean, I thought maybe you could give me a hand with my stuff, seeing as you were presenting it originally. I could try and help out with yours, but I’m not sure what use I’d be...’
In another life, I’d tell Kirsty that putting herself down is a shit way of getting what she wants, and that she should value her contributions and own the knowledge she’s worked so hard to accumulate. But this isn’t another life, and what she thinks of herself is rapidly becoming something I am not able or willing to assist with.
‘Of course.’ I sit up straight, switching to manager mode. ‘Have you got a notebook? Or your laptop?’ I pull my computer out. ‘I can tell you what I’ve got.’
‘Yes, brilliant, that’d be great.’ She scrambles for her laptop and I watch her carefully. After the Summer Bundle drama, there’s no way she’s drinking this in like she appears to be.
I give her accurate information, going through the presentation I prepared weeks ago and reeling off data protection laws and future security development plans.
‘That’s a really good idea,’ she muses. ‘Making a campaign entirely about how we protect our customers’ data.’
I nod. It is a good idea. It’s the kind of idea that makes a great Head of Marketing. I’d have given it to her with no strings, if she’d asked a few weeks ago.
She scribbles a few notes down and taps at her laptop, and I drain my drink. ‘Just nipping to the toilet,’ I say, scraping my chair back.
I close the single-stall bathroom door behind me and lean against the sink. Kirsty’s positioned herself so that she’s facing the door, so there’s no way I can look to see what she’s doing, but I’ve left my cursor directly over the word ‘encryption’ on my PowerPoint presentation, and I have a tissue folded in the top of my bag, right below the zip. I’ll know if she’s been digging.
I look in the mirror and tap under my eyes, smoothing out the makeup that has found its way into the creases. I wash my hands slowly, rubbing the soap under my nails, and then dry them, watching as the paper towel drops softly into the bin. When a good amount of time has passed, I swing the door open and stride back across the café. Kirsty is bent over her laptop, typing. As I sit down, she closes it.
‘This has been great, thank you,’ she says, and for a second, her eyes make it seem like she means it. If only.
‘No problem. Just give me a shout if you need a hand with anything else.’ I smile. ‘I’m going to grab another coffee and fire off a few emails, so I’ll see you in the office?’
‘Sure.’ She packs her bag and then hesitates, her eyes flicking towards me. I think she’s going to say something, but then she swings her bag onto her shoulder and walks out of the door.
I watch her through the window, her steps confident and her head high. When she disappears round the corner, I finally look at my computer screen.
The arrow of the cursor is still hovering over the word ‘encryption’. I pull open my handbag, and the tissue snags against the zip. Something in me sags with relief. I gave her good information; it was her loss if she decided to double-check it. Now neither of us have done anything wrong. I go to close the lid of my laptop, half smiling, but as I do, I notice that two new words have been added randomly into the middle of the paragraph, making the sentence nonsensical.
Good luck.
* * *
I am so angry as I reach my front door that I almost walk straight into Will.
‘Shit!’ I stumble backwards, grabbing the fence post for balance.
‘Sorry.’ He holds up his hands and rises from where he’s been sitting on the doorstep. ‘I wanted to catch you.’
I hold my hand to my chest, my pulse slowing. ‘Couldn’t you have called?’ Will looks hurt, and I mentally slap myself. What kind of thing was that to say? I’m all over the place — it’s beginning to scare me. ‘I mean, I’m sorry, no, it’s OK. What’s up?’
‘I just needed a break. Jess is in a session, so I thought I’d come over and see if you were working from home.’
‘Right, of course. Are you alright? Do you want to—’
I stop as a movement down the street catches my eye. It’s the cat. She pads softly up the path of the house two doors down and slinks through their open front door.
‘Oh, hang on.’ I hold my hand up to Will as I walk backwards towards the street. ‘Can you give me five minutes? Literally, five minutes? I just need to speak to those people about that bloody cat.’
Will opens his mouth to respond but I’m already moving, rushing quickly up the road. ‘Go and sit in the garden!’ I call over my shoulder, realising belatedly that I should have given him my keys. ‘Five minutes, I promise!’
I stride up the garden path of the house the cat went into and knock loudly on their open front door. I can see directly down the hallway, and raised voices are filtering down the stairs.
‘Hello?’ I call. The voices stop. I look back down the street to my house. Will has gone, he’ll be in the garden.
Footsteps sound on the stairs, and I turn my head back around. Piece by piece, a man appears: dark, curly hair, sharp blue eyes, a short, untidy beard.
He stops when he sees me, and we stare at each other. There’s something familiar about him.
I shake my head, suddenly forgetting what I’m doing. I pull myself up. ‘I need to talk to you about your cat.’