Wrong Place Wrong Time(35)

It cannot be a coincidence that Jen has woken up on this day, the day Gina is in her office. Maybe this isn’t about seeing Mr Sampson at all. ‘I’ll come in,’ she says. ‘Tell her to wait.’ She hangs up and turns back to Mr Sampson. ‘Sorry, sorry,’ she says hurriedly. ‘When was this falling-out?’

‘A week ago, maybe? He said he’d had a domestic. That’s all …’

‘With who?’

‘He didn’t say. He was talking to someone – I just overheard.’

‘Who was he talking to?’

‘Connor.’

The same names. The same names keep coming up over and over. Connor, Ezra, Clio, Joseph himself.

‘He also said something about a baby?’

‘What?’

‘I’m not sure – it just came to me. Something about a baby.’

‘Right. It would have been good to know before now,’ Jen says, one of the very first times she has said exactly what she thinks to somebody like this, to somebody outside her immediate family or colleagues. How liberating it feels. Next, she will be telling clients to go fuck themselves.

‘Right …’ Mr Sampson says awkwardly.

She stares out of the window. It’s foggy out, but still mild. Summer still feels just within reach. She watches as the shallow mist moves like a tide back and forth over the playing fields.

She gives a friendly but helpless shrug, saying nothing, the kind of stony silence Kelly would impart. It is so therapeutic, not having to deal with the consequences of her actions. This meeting is contextless, like a dream, like a conversation with a drunk person who will not remember.

‘I’ll check in with him tomorrow,’ Mr Sampson says, and Jen hopes maybe that’ll help, somewhere, in the future.

The mist becomes mizzle becomes rain as Jen heads to her car. She looks absent-mindedly for Todd’s and spots it immediately. As she watches, Connor arrives, too. He’s late. She stands there with one hand on her car door, looking, hoping to see something.

But nothing happens. He locks his car and smokes a cigarette on his way into the building. His tattoo is hidden, today, under a round-neck jumper. At the door, he turns to Jen, raises a hand in greeting. Jen waves back, but she’s surprised: she didn’t know he’d seen her.

The police badge, the missing-baby poster and the phone were not on Todd’s wardrobe when Jen went home just now. She searched and searched for them, but they were gone. She assumed at first that he has not yet acquired them, but the texts on the phone date back to the fifteenth of October. Nevertheless, they’re nowhere to be found, and so she has nothing to show Gina, who she is now well over an hour late to see.

Gina is sitting in the chair in the corner of Jen’s office wearing a beige trench coat and a muted expression.

‘I’m so sorry – I’m so sorry,’ Jen says. ‘I’m having a family drama.’

She puts down her umbrella, leaving damp droplets on the carpet. ‘That’s fine, don’t worry,’ Gina says cordially. Jen had been wary of crossing the boundary from professional to friend with clients, but she has, in these past few weeks, with Gina. They’ve even texted a bit. It doesn’t matter – Jen is the business owner, after all – but Jen now wonders if all of that happened for a reason.

She tries to remember what she said in this meeting the last time. ‘Can I just ask,’ she says, removing her coat and powering up her computer, trying to step back into Jen the professional adviser, ‘what your plan is if you succeed in preventing your ex-husband’s access to the children?’

‘He’d come back to me, wouldn’t he?’ Gina says. ‘So he could see the kids.’

Jen bites her lip. ‘But – Gina. It doesn’t work like that.’

Gina looks around Jen’s office with panicked eyes. ‘I know I’m being mad.’ She drops her head. ‘You’ve helped me to see that.’

Jen feels choked up, despite herself. God, she relates to this, now. This desperation, this denial. This urge to exert some kind of crazy control, somehow.

‘That’s what I’m here for,’ Jen says thickly. ‘But – you know. It’s better to move on, isn’t it? Forwards.’

‘God, I’m getting all anxious again,’ Gina says, wafting her hands at her eyes.

‘The reason I’m doing this for free,’ Jen says gently, ‘is, really, because I don’t plan on doing it.’

‘Right,’ Gina says. She crosses and uncrosses her legs in the chair. She has on wrinkled clothes. ‘I know. I know. I realized when we were’ – she wipes her eyes – ‘when we were talking about fucking Love Island. I thought – those girls would never beg. How sad is that, taking lessons from a bloody TV show?’

‘It’s very informative,’ Jen says drily.

Gina looks down at her lap. ‘I just need to … I don’t know. I just need a bit of time. Okay?’

‘Okay – good,’ Jen says. ‘Good.’ This has gone better than it did the last time.

‘Fancy distracting me with your family drama?’ Gina says wanly.

‘Maybe?’ Jen says with her own wobbly smile. She glances at Gina as she straightens up in the chair.

‘Hit me,’ Gina says.