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The healing process always drains me, and combined with the nightmares I’ve been having, it’s left me grouchy and irritable. Not a good way to feel when your job requires you to paste a smile on your face and be pretty and cheerful and welcoming.
Nevertheless, by the time I arrive at Head Office I make sure to put on a smile. I’ll need it for my boss Mr Smithers, because I’m going to have to beg him to let me use one of the spare shirts. Both my spares were burned in Rosalie’s little accidents.
It is Smithers’ job to make sure the staff are pristine, as accidents do happen in catering. I know he has shirts available. But he keeps them, like everything else, under lock and key. I am really not looking forward to the lewd comments Smithers is bound to make about my wet shirt.
A soft whistle of sympathetic surprise stops me in my tracks. It is my colleague Ben. He looks rather impressed with the ghastly state of my shirt. Seeing the harassed and worried look on my face, his brown eyes soften. He wastes no time in saying, “I have a spare you can borrow if you like? It’ll probably be big on you.” He looks a little apologetic at this.
It is all I can do to not throw my arms around him in relief. “Thank you, Ben. You’ve saved me!”
Ben blushes a rather sweet pink. I pretend not to notice, looking away from his face to make him feel less awkward. By the time I have cleaned up and put on his shirt, which is too big but is at least crisp and clean, I’m ten minutes late. I sidle into the staff meeting, cringing as the door hinges squeal loudly on my entry.
Smithers looks right at me. “Late again, Diana?” he says. He makes a little note on his clipboard.
I try not to glower at him. I have only been late once, and that was only by three minutes and on my first day when I couldn’t find the meeting room. Two whole years ago. But to hear him, you would think I was late all the time. Rosalie is standing beside Smithers as if she is his right-hand woman. She giggled at his snide little quip, and is still smirking at me.
She didn’t like me right from the start. She liked me less when I got the Ambassador’s Ball shift this week and she didn’t. The tips will be immense. I badly need the money for my rent but I suspect Instagram-junkie Rosalie planned to use the shift to make some new celebrity pals. She is pissed to miss out, and she isn’t one to pull her punches.
She is the one who dug up a certain viral video of me off the internet and emailed it around to everyone at work my first week here.
I ignore her smirk, and pay attention to the instructions for the day. Smithers drones on and on. When he is finally finished I am not the only one who is fidgeting, impatient to get on with the work. I rush to get started on checking the inventory we need to take to the venue. I am helping Ben load crates of china onto a van when Smithers comes to find me. He does not look pleased.
“You’ve got a phone call,” he snaps.
“Me?” I ask, surprised.
“You,” he practically snarls.
As I follow him back to his office, he complains at length that I am not supposed to have phone calls at work, and demands to know how this person, who refused to divulge their name but who insisted the call was very important, had got hold of his phone number.
I know that he expects me to apologize, but I cannot recall giving his number to anybody. I have barely given my own pay-as-you-go phone number to anybody. I can’t afford to use my phone except for emergencies. My phone is currently in my locker. I wonder if this person tried calling me on that first. If they had to track down my work number, the call must be important.
My heart skips a beat. The only person who would have an important reason to call me is Storm. But I have not heard from him in two whole years. In those first few weeks after losing my Agency job I had hoped it was him every time my phone rang. I had hoped he would offer me my job back, telling me the Agency had decided to give me another chance. He never called. Not once.
I hurry anxiously into Smithers’s office, and get an unpleasant shock. Rosalie is in there and she is hanging up the phone.
“No!” I say, but it is too late.
“I thought you’d left it off the hook,” she trills at Smithers, batting her eyelashes.
She proceeds to explain how she came here because she thought Smithers might like some help with the paperwork. She raises a finely arched eyebrow at him suggestively. I clench my fists, wanting to scream at her for hanging up my call. I know that she must have known it was my call. She would never have hung it up otherwise.
Smithers is grinning at Rosalie in a way that makes me sick. “You can go,” he tells me curtly.
Suddenly the phone rings again. Smithers snatches it up before I can. He listens to the person on the other end and then wordlessly hands it over to me. He takes a seat at his desk. He does not leave to give me the courtesy of privacy. Not that I expected him to. He glowers at me as I pick up the phone and say, “Hello,” in a voice that emerges embarrassingly squeaky with nerves.
“Diana!” says a relieved voice on the other end. It is Remi Bronwyn. I am surprised and disappointed all at once. I had convinced myself it would be Storm.
“Thank goodness,” Remi continues in a rush. “I tried your number but there wasn’t the option to leave a voicemail, and I was so worried that I would miss you. Then I finally got this number, and then that girl hung up on me!”
Remi had stayed in touch, calling me intermittently. Then her calls turned to text messages. Lately her messages had dwindled to one every few months.
Her current urgency makes a little knot of anxiety twist in my stomach. “What is it?” I ask her. “Has something happened to Storm?”
Not that she would call me if it did, I realize with embarrassment.
She sounds surprised. “No, nothing like that. It’s about erm… Magda.”
She doesn’t call her my mother. Only Storm’s team at the Agency know that Magda was my mother. They hadn’t made this fact public in case it put me in danger.
