If I Never Met You(59)

What did she have to lose, she’d asked, in devil may care manner. The answer: her good name.

And when she’d said she craved making Dan jealous, she’d omitted a crucial question, one Emily told her she used with her clients: what would success look and feel like to you? (‘Expectation management is crucial or they shoot the messenger, every time,’ she said. ‘That is rule number one. Get them to define it, so the result is provably what they ordered. You’d be amazed how many people aren’t careful what they wish for.’)

What did she need from this revenge campaign? Laurie knew. She absolutely knew, but because it was so silly, so ugly – given a blameless baby was involved – so desperate and beneath her, she had pushed the thought away. And yet. There it was.

She had to face it directly.

She wanted Dan to want her back.





23


It was half an hour until home time, and Laurie longed for 5.30 p.m. like a long lost lover. She used to routinely work late, but she’d started to honour her official clocking off, to the minute. Who or what was going to stop her?

‘She had a funeral, for her cat?’ Bharat said.

‘Noodle was twenty!’ Di said. Laurie was Team Bharat on matters involving Di’s sister Kim, who did appear to be somewhat semi detached from reality, as a healing crystal proponent and anti vaxxer.

‘It doesn’t get less ridiculous with each passing year.’

‘Noodle was known in the area, she wanted to give people a chance to pay their respects.’

‘Were there … readings?’

Di pursed her lips. ‘A couple of short ones.’

‘Hahahaha! Oh my life! Imagine if the neighbours looked over the fence. Oh here I am, having a totally normal one, reciting a passage from Corinthians, over the burial site of a Persian cat.’

The details of the passing of Noodle were interrupted by Kerry.

‘Laurie. Mr Salter wants to see you,’ she said, wearing malignity and triumph like a heady perfume. ‘Are you free now?’

‘Oh? Yeah.’

Laurie hard gulped and got up. This was … not good. The timing suggested that he’d either heard about Jamie or the arsonist or both, and she was about to face a reckoning. Kerry was animated by an expectant energy that certainly suggested so.

‘Go straight through,’ Kerry said, with a moue of her mouth, smoothing her pleated skirt under her behind as she sat back down at her desk.

Laurie knocked softly and waited for ‘Come in’, because Kerry was more than capable of sending Laurie in unannounced like that, to make her look bad.

Mr Salter’s office was a strange separate realm, like being in Dumbledore’s.

You only ever saw this interior on hiring, firing, promotions or significant bollockings, so it was impossible to disassociate it with quaking fear.

It probably looked a lot like many a provincial law partner’s lair – bookcases with deeply boring tomes on Tort, a crystal water decanter, framed photos of privately schooled progeny. Mr Salter had two upright twenty-something identical twin sons, known among the workers as the Winklevosses. Mr Salter himself was a ringer for Bernie Sanders.

‘Ah, Laurie, hello,’ he said, looking up from papers on his desk, putting down a pricey-looking pen. It remained a status symbol of fully private office space. If Laurie had a solid silver ballpoint, it’d mysteriously go missing within hours. He didn’t sound enraged. But then Salter never raised his voice; why would he, when his carefully chosen words could slice you into slivers like sashimi.

‘You wanted to see me?’

He gestured for her to sit. Jesus, had Michael been in to see him?

‘Yes.’ He leaned forward on his desk, arms folded. Mr Salter was about five foot five, so he had a chair that must’ve been jacked to the highest level so that he could try for a vague looming when you sat opposite.

‘Now I want you to understand that everything we are about to say to each other is both entirely confidential and entirely of a voluntary nature. You are not in any trouble.’

‘Oh,’ Laurie said.

‘You sound surprised?’ he smiled.

‘Hah, well … you worry, don’t you.’

‘What goes on outside these offices is by and large, none of mine or Mr Rowson’s business. It only becomes our business if it has any significant bearing on the company’s operational ability or reputation.’

‘Yes.’ Not quite tallying with what Jamie said, but go on.

‘Yet we also feel we have a duty of pastoral care towards long-standing employees of great value to us. Such as yourself.’

‘Thank you.’

‘In the spirit of that care, not in feeling we are owed an account – I’m told that you and my head of civil Daniel Price are no longer in a relationship?’ He waved at Laurie not to speak yet as she opened her mouth, ‘And that yourself and Jamie Carter are now involved. As a boss who would also like to think of himself as a friend …’

Woah. Laurie had known she had a ‘favourite’ status but Salter getting so gooey as to claim himself her friend was, as Bharat would say, some next level shit.

‘I’d like to think that you feel you’re being treated well by young Mr Carter. I think he’s very fortunate if he has secured your affections.’