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“Okay.” Harriet sounded almost bored, focused on the oatmeal she was stirring. Rachel wasn’t sure what she felt—strangely sad, a deeper emotion than her usual frustration or annoyance or even hurt, which at this moment she would have preferred. It would have been easier, less alarming, than the unsettling sense of sorrow and even grief that she felt.
“All right, then,” she said after a pause. “See you Friday?” She hadn’t meant to make it a question, but somehow it had come out as one.
“I’ll be here,” Harriet replied, in a tone that suggested Rachel was the one who wouldn’t be.
“Okay,” Rachel said, and then with no other reason to stick around, she took her mug, grabbed her coat that she’d hung over the chair, and walked out of the kitchen. Harriet didn’t say goodbye.
All right, fine,Rachel thought, trying and failing to not feel just a little bit hurt. She wastrying, not that Harriet noticed—or cared. She had a feeling that nothing she ever did would be enough for her sister, which begged the question, why was she doing anything in the first place?
“I’m not a quitter,” Rachel said out loud as she got into her car. Although, in some ways, for the last twelve years, she had been, at least when it came to her family. She’d certainly stopped trying with the people she was supposed to love the most, beyond the bare minimum.
Perhaps it ran in her genes, she mused as she bumped down the rutted track to the lane. Her mother had certainly been a quitter, walking out when Harriet was seventeen, Rachel just one year older, and not looking back once, or so it had felt at the time.
Although she tried not to think about her mother, because it made her equal parts sad and angry, and left her feeling both fractious and empty inside. No, best not to think about her.
It was another lovely day, and the drive southward through the moors was pleasant, the rolling hills, farmhouses tucked away in valleys, glimmering under the autumn sunshine. As she hit the motorway, Rachel’s thoughts turned from home to her work, her life. She was going to have to ask her boss, Danielle, if she could work remotely for an indefinite period of time, something she suspected her boss wouldn’t like.
Danielle had been good to her over the years, offering equal parts tough love and sympathy since Rachel had started in an entry-level position just after university. Investment management could still seem like a man’s world, and women often had to struggle to get so much as to the middle of the pack, never mind on top. Danielle had advised her to get her MBA while still working; she’d directed her to certain funds and investments that had paid off; she’d excoriated her for her mistakes while making sure higher-ups didn’t hear of them.
Rachel didn’t want to let her down, and she also didn’t want to lose her job. Take your eye off the ball for so much as a minute and it was rolling away, forever beyond you. It was why she hadn’t taken much holiday in the last three years; the trip to Ibiza had been somewhat enforced, as her company, under the guise of wellbeing, had made a new policy of employees having to take all their days of annual leave.
But a week of earned annual leave was very different from potentially months of remote working, even in this new culture where it seemed everyone wanted to go hybrid. At Wakeman and Wallace, you only worked from home if you were lazy, unambitious, or both.
With a sigh Rachel decided to grasp the nettle, and she dialled her boss’s mobile on speakerphone.
“Rachel?” Danielle answered briskly after the second ring. “How’s Ibiza?”
“Lovely, but I’m not actually in Ibiza anymore,” Rachel replied, trying to sound upbeat and suspecting she was failing. “I came home early, due to something of a family crisis.” She heard Danielle’s sharply indrawn breath and she continued quickly, “Everything’s fine, but my dad has had to undergo some tests. He’s had some issues with memory, balance, that sort of thing.”
“I’m sorry.” Danielle sounded sincere, which Rachel appreciated. It was easy for a line manager to think only in terms of how personal problems affected the business, and while Rachel knew Danielle would absolutely be thinking about that, she also knew her boss cared—although, she suspected, notthatmuch. She was still all about the bottom line.
“It’s okay,” she said, keeping her tone breezy. “But I was wondering if I could talk to you about some short-term possibilities? I need to handle some stuff back home and I was wondering about working remotely, just for a little while.”
“How long?” Danielle sounded wary.
Rachel wondered whether it was better to over or underestimate. “I don’t know,” she admitted honestly. “A couple of weeks, to start, I suppose, and maybe only that. Maybe a bit longer.”
“You know working remotely isn’t the same as coming in, being seen, no matter what people like to say.”
“I know.” The buzz of the office, the industry gossip by the coffee machine, the occasional drink after work, talking shop…setting up an office in the gloomy dining room of her father’s farmhouse was definitely not the same at all.
“Are you back in London now?” Danielle asked.
“I’ll be there in a couple of hours.”
“Why don’t we meet for a coffee this afternoon, then? Have a chat about it all.”
Rachel was taken aback, because her boss was not really a chatty sort of person. “All right,” she agreed after a moment, and Danielle named a coffee place around the corner from the office, in Blackfriars, before they ended the call.
What exactly, Rachel wondered, did Danielle want tochatabout? She hoped it was just going over the particulars of a remote working situation, and not asking Rachel to rethink her priorities, or her commitment to working at Wakeman and Wallace.
A few hours later, Rachel was back in her tiny flat in Putney, dropping her bag in the hall and looking around the space she’d decorated so proudly, and yet spent so little time in. It was tiny—a narrow living room with a sliver of balcony, a galley kitchen, a bedroom that only just fit a double bed and bureau, and a bathroom that was smaller than a public toilet cubicle. But it was hers, minus a hefty mortgage, and she’d been so thrilled to buy it, this little oasis of modernity, on the sixteenth floor of a high-rise apartment building, all glass and chrome and unnecessary skylights.
Now her flat smelled stale, and there was nothing in the fridge but a couple of slices of cheddar that had turned hardened and yellow. Rachel only had time to change into something slightly smarter, brush her teeth and add a slick of lip gloss before she headed back out to take the Tube to Blackfriars—and her boss.
Danielle was already waiting in the sleek little coffee shop by the office, a black Americano at her elbow.
“What can I get you?” she asked Rachel briskly, standing up, purse at the ready.
