AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Jen allows it to continue. Just watching, taking her time with the tea. He inches a drawer open and – God. All these years ago, he was doing just this. Her heart is pounding.
He pulls a piece of paper out of her drawer, then slides it back in again after he’s looked at it.
Her father emerges from his office just as Jen thinks she’s been far too long making the teas. He nods to Kelly and Jen stops herself joining them, just listens.
‘Thanks for the list earlier,’ Kelly says in a low voice to her father. ‘I wondered about this timeshare – this number here, is that an eight or a six?’
‘Ah,’ her father says, perfectly politely, unsurprised. He pats his suit uselessly, looking for his glasses. ‘A six.’
‘Okay – thanks,’ Kelly says. He is scanning the piece of paper.
Jen swallows. The timeshare conveyances her father pretended not to remember. Her father, facilitating organized crime. Her husband, investigating.
It was her father who was bad. The world seems to tilt and spin. Her father. A crooked lawyer.
And it was Kelly who was investigating him. All those questions on their first date. His intensity, part of their origin story, the way they fell in love.
Only it wasn’t.
‘What was that about?’ Jen has been to run some documents over to another law firm to cool down, to think things through. And now she’s back, and ready to ask her father while she can.
‘Nothing.’
‘No – what was on that paper you looked at? Was it addresses?’
Her father avoids her gaze. ‘Of unoccupied houses?’ she prompts.
‘It’s a small side project.’ His eyes shift to the side. But he’s no idiot. He can tell what’s coming, and he walks over to the window to close the blind, then brushes past her to close the door.
‘Of what? Selling data? To – criminals? Don’t lie,’ she says to him. ‘I’ll ask Kelly if you won’t tell me.’
Her father turns away from inspecting a filing cabinet and looks at her. ‘I …’ he starts to say. ‘I doubt Kelly would tell you,’ he says eventually.
Jen sits down in the chair in the corner of the room.
‘We couldn’t make rent,’ her father stammers. ‘I thought – it was just information. Like people who sell whiplash claims.’
‘But this isn’t whiplash claims.’
‘No.’
‘I thought you were as straight as they come.’
‘I was.’
‘But – until …’
‘Money, Jen.’ The force of this sentence makes him spin, just slightly, on the chair. ‘It was a bad decision. But, by the time you’re working with someone like that … you can’t extricate yourself. I regret it every day.’
‘So you should.’
Her father’s eyes flick towards her. This conversation is excruciating for him. Perhaps the strangest thing about travelling back through the past is the changes people themselves undergo. Kelly going from dark in 2022 to lightness and naïvety in 2003. Her father from openness to repression.
‘Do you remember before you started out here when we couldn’t meet the rent? We organized a longer payment window. You drafted the deed while you were at uni.’
Her first-ever contract. Of course she remembers. ‘Yeah.’
‘Well, after that, an old client came in. And – Jen, he made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. Passing those names and addresses kept us afloat for years. It paid for your LPC. It’s paying for your training.’
