Now You Know

by Nora Valters

  Now You Know

  Nora Valters

  For my grandma, Eileen

  JOIN THE INKUBATOR MAILING LIST

  You will be the first to learn about new releases plus the many FREE and discounted Kindle books we offer!

  bit.ly/3dOTSW2

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Inkubator Newsletter

  Rights Info

  Prologue

  Friday, 22 November.

  Lauren Cohen, I see you.

  There you are, in your perfect little life. Oblivious to anyone other than yourself. Oblivious to my feelings. Oblivious to me. Oblivious to the pain you’ve caused. Insulated from the real world, with layer upon padded layer that you’ve wrapped around yourself. Well, I’m going to unpeel them one by one. Strip you back until there’s nothing left.

  That bubble you’re in is about to burst. And I’ll be watching it all. I can’t wait to see your downfall. It’ll set me free. And to think you thought you’d got away with it. Ha! As if. I don’t let things slide. I don’t forgive and forget. No, I hold grudges. Why should you get away with it? Why should you happily carry on as if nothing happened? I’m out for revenge. With you taken care of, I can move on.

  I’ve got it all worked out, you see. You’re going to suffer, just like I did. Everything you inflicted on me is coming back to bite you, to gnaw you, to chew you up and spit you out. I’m a dog with a bone, unwilling to stop until it’s finished – until you’re finished.

  Now, you’ll know how it feels. Now, you’ll know what you did. Now, you’ll know who I am. And now you’ll know just what I’m capable of.

  Let the games begin.

  1

  “No. No, no, no, noooo.” I swipe my finger back and forth along my laptop’s mouse touchpad and frantically click the mouse buttons. “Aargh!” I slap the keyboard.

  Madeline looks at me from behind the desk in her office and over her compact mirror, mid nose-powder, and raises a questioning eyebrow.

  “The screen’s gone blue,” I exclaim.

  My pitch presentation, the one I’ve been working on for the past three weeks, and the one that was looking spectacular with a couple of small tweaks left to make, has disappeared into the void to be replaced with a fear-inducing blank screen. My heart attempts to leap out of my chest, and my body temperature gauge flicks to ‘furnace’.

  A high-pitched squeal erupts from my laptop, as if it’s being slowly tortured to death.

  “What the hell is that noise, Lauren?” Madeline says, dropping her make-up and grimacing. She presses her palms into her ears.

  I stab the power button. The screen goes from bright, angry blue to a dead black, and the noise painfully peters out. “It’s well and truly died.”

  Madeline sighs. “Well, you can’t have much more left to do to the deck?”

  I glare at my laptop as if it might magically restart, and then shake my head. “No, it was almost done. But the pitch is in three hours.”

  “I presume you saved it in the cloud?” Madeline eyes me.

  I swallow. My answer is the difference between being in my boss’ good books or jumping straight to the top of her out-of-favour list. And that’s not a place anyone wants to be. I’ve spent the last four years working to stay on Madeline’s good side. Saving to the cloud and not on personal desktops is company policy. Occasionally we all forget, but thankfully, this time I remembered, and she presumed correctly.

  “Of course,” I say.

  Madeline gestures her pristinely manicured hand at her second laptop. “Use mine to access it.”

  She swivels her chair to face her first laptop and nudges her immaculately blow-dried hair off a shoulder. It’s still black and thick, cut in a kind of Goldie Hawn shag, with the long fringe and layers perfectly framing her face, and belies her fifty-odd years.

  No one else in the agency has two laptops, but Madeline Whittaker is not only the managing director but also the founder, setting up MBW with her now-retired husband, Bill, twenty years previously and building it up to the full-service marketing agency that it is today – the largest in Manchester.

  Madeline can’t abide unplugging and replugging in a laptop every time she leaves work and needs to take her laptop home, so she has two. One for the office, one for travelling. She’s also the only one to have a private office, the rest of us working in the open-plan area outside her door.

  I put my disgraced laptop on the coffee table, stand from the sofa and walk to her desk. In the few steps, I can feel the sweat behind my knees making my tights damp. I gently lift up my elbows to air my hot armpits. The last thing I need is to head into the pitch meeting smelling of BO. I take a long breath in through my nose.

  It’s going to be brilliant, I tell myself. YOU’RE going to be brilliant.

  It’s the first time Madeline has let me lead such a critical pitch for the agency. If we were to win it, we’d have business in every department: PR, which I head up, as well as content, advertising, web design, video design, email marketing, planning, and social media. It’s the real deal – a major national supermarket chain. And Madeline knows as well as I do that I’m nailing it. Up until this technical glitch, the entire process has gone smoothly. And the pitch team crushed it in the presentation rehearsal yesterday.

  I know she wanted me to put the finishing touches to the presentation in her office so it looks to all outside that she actually had some input. In truth, I’ve done the entire thing with Madeline’s contribution being to request – sorry, demand – the agency’s logo to be bigger on the first slide.

  I pick up her second laptop. Madeline ignores me, looking at something on her screen. Her calmness makes my emotional, stressy outburst a few moments ago look ridiculous. I sit back on the sofa that faces her desk and open the laptop, powering it on.

  “You need to put in your password,” I say as nonchalantly as I can manage considering the pitch is mere hours away and it’s the contract of a lifetime. I move to stand again, but Madeline holds up a palm to stop me.

  “It’s Whittaker123,” she says, still not looking at me. “With a capital W.”

  I type in the password, and her laptop whirs to life. I log in to the cloud and click until I get to the New Business folder, find the name of the supermarket chain and navigate to my ‘Lauren’ folder within it. I scroll through all the numerous iterations of the PowerPoint presentation, looking for the one labelled ‘Final Final FINAL’. I can’t see it. A spike of fear lands squarely between my shoulder blades.

  Calm down. It’s there. It has to be there. I’m just stressed and not looking properly. I scan through the contents of the folder once again.

  But it’s not there.

  “Oh, shit,” I blurt.

  This gets Madeline’s attention. She finally looks at me. “Is there a problem?”

  “The final versio
n of the presentation isn’t there.”

  “What do you mean… ‘isn’t there’?”

  I hear the tinge of iciness in Madeline’s tone and know I need to handle this delicately. I gulp back the anxiety that threatens to engulf me to evenly project my voice. “The final presentation isn’t in the cloud anymore. It’s gone.”

  Madeline purses her lips. “Oh, for goodness’ sake. Call Rob. It’ll be somewhere. You’ve probably accidentally saved it or moved it to the wrong folder.” She looks away from me, as if problem solved.

  But my panic spills over. “But what if he can’t find it, the pitch is in three hours!” I bring my hand to my mouth.

  “Lauren, Rob is excellent. I had a tech issue a few weeks ago, and he solved it in minutes. He was a great hire. Imani recommended him, you know.”

  I smile tightly. Imani is so high up in Madeline’s good books that she’s practically a saint. She’s my most junior team member. Smart, sharp, and stunning. But also very, very lazy with absolutely zero interest in applying herself. She’s Madeline’s daughter’s best friend. And that’s how she got the job.

  I take my mobile off the table and dial Rob’s number. I have the IT guy’s mobile phone saved in my contacts, as everyone in the agency does, for emergency issues. I’ve never had to call him before, only ever emailed. My technical issues have never been urgent.

  Rob answers with a less-than-confident hello.

  “Hi, it’s Lauren. I have an emergency. My laptop has died, and my extremely important pitch presentation isn’t in the cloud where it should be. Madeline told me to call you because we need the presentation in a few hours’ time.” I name-drop the MD. It’s bound to make things happen quicker.

  There are a few moments of silence before Rob replies. “I’m working from home today. Can you come here? I’ll text you the address. I’m about a thirty-minute drive from the office.”

  “Sure. I’m on my way,” I say.

  “Don’t forget your laptop,” Rob replies, with a strange haw haw.

  It takes me a while to realise he’s cracked a joke. An awkward, unfunny joke that I’m in no mood to humour. “Err, yeah. I’ll see you in thirty.” I hang up before he can say anything else, grab my laptop and practically sprint from Madeline’s room, saying, “I’ll be back shortly,” to her as I leave.

  I get to my desk in the open-plan office. My coat’s hanging on the back of my chair, and I whip it off and put it on. As I wrap my scarf around my neck, Imani also stands and puts on her coat. It’s 11 a.m. on a Friday. No one else in the PR department moves. It’s too early for lunch, and Imani rarely goes out without a more senior member of staff to meetings.

  “Where you off to?” I say as casually as possible as curiosity overcomes me.

  “To get my nails done,” she replies brazenly. “I’ve got a hot date later. Need to prep.”

  Cleo, my account manager, glances up at me, and I can sense the other three on my team listening to this conversation with indignation. Even the intern cocks an ear. Not one of us would dare to take off in the middle of a workday for a nail appointment. Not even me, and I’m the head of this department.

  “Imani, you don’t have this afternoon booked off as holiday,” I reply.

  I can feel my usually steady temper fraying. It’s like I’m on a race-against-the-clock game show and can hear the tick counting down every second before the pitch meeting at 2 p.m. It’s pounding in my ears, and the last thing I need is a headache. I need to be on form.

  She snorts. “Holiday, pah.” She pushes in her chair and gathers up her handbag.

  I snap, “Imani, you are not leaving this office until 5.30 p.m. Your working hours are exactly the same as everybody else on this team.”

  She sighs dramatically, flicking her long, braided hair over one shoulder. “I just told you, I have a date.”

  “And I just told you, you aren’t leaving this office until 5.30 p.m.”

  Imani tilts her head and screws up her lips. We stare at each other. The ticking booms in my ears. I don’t have time for this. Sternly, I say, “Sit your arse back down.”

  Cleo whistles. Imani huffs, then yanks out her chair and sits on it, giving me an unimpressed smirk and pulling off her jacket. “You’re always pissing on my life,” she mumbles under her breath, but I have no time to reprimand her.

  “Off somewhere?” Cleo asks me as I scoop up my handbag and stuff my laptop and charger into the top of it.

  “Yes. I have to go see the IT guy quickly,” I reply. “I’ll be back shortly,” I say pointedly at Imani, who completely ignores me.

  I dash for my car, which is parked in allocated parking next to the office building – a sign of MBW’s success: a city-centre office with attached car park. I see Rob has texted me his address. I plug it into Google Maps and curse at every set of traffic lights that turn red and at anyone going slowly or taking ages to turn. I attempt to focus on my bit of the presentation, mentally running through the order of the slides and what I’ll say, but I can’t concentrate, and it flitters away.

  After a thirty-minute drive, the app tells me my destination is on the left and that I have arrived. I look left to see a farmhouse and outbuildings surrounded by quite a bit of land. Not what I was expecting. I make a note to ask Rob about this place at the next work function. Not now, though. There’s no time for polite chit-chat.

  I pull into the driveway, parking behind a few industrial-sized containers and heavy equipment. It’s a grey, overcast late November day, and I thank my lucky stars it’s not raining. I got up an hour earlier this morning to blow-dry my shoulder-length blond hair and carefully apply make-up to look and feel my best for the new biz meeting.

  There are a few buildings, and I read Rob’s message again:

  - Come round the back of the main farmhouse building. Back door is always open.

  I pick my way through the damp gravel and knock on the door, pushing it open. “Rob?”

  “In here,” comes the reply.

  I step into the cosy kitchen and then through into a large room with a fire crackling in the hearth. The room is filled with tech hardware: screens, laptops, desktop towers, boxes with flashing lights and speakers. It’s a complete contrast to the exposed brick walls and cottagey feel of the building. Rob sits at a long desk with his back to me, staring at something indistinguishable on the screen in front of him.

  I clear my throat, but Rob doesn’t turn or even acknowledge my presence. I try a second time. His concentration breaks, and he swivels his chair around to look at me. He says nothing. I realise I’ve never really paid him much attention before, even though he’s been working at MBW for nearly a year now.

  He’s almost exactly how I would picture an IT support professional, and I chastise myself for such stereotypical thinking. He’s slim, mid-height, probably in his mid- to late-twenties with balding, fluffy, mousy-coloured hair and a tufty, sparse beard with the chin hairs growing a touch too long, curling under and sticking out in odd directions. He has a wide forehead, which tapers to a prominent V-shaped jaw. His facial features are all slightly too petite, and his small, round eyes are a little too far apart.

  He wears impossibly unfashionable rectangular metal-rimmed glasses that don’t suit his face shape, a grey jumper, baggy mid-blue jeans, grey socks with some ancient dark-green Adidas Gazelles and a black plastic digital watch that reminds me of something I had as a child.

  “Lauren Cohen, right?” he says, then leans forward to look at something on another screen. “PR group account director, right?”

  “Yes, that’s me.” I smile, but this is taking too long. “Here’s my laptop. It died earlier – blue screen, weird noise. But more important is finding my presentation that’s gone missing from the cloud.”

  “Mmm hmm,” he replies, with zero urgency. He takes the laptop and puts it on the desk without opening it.

  “I need the presentation for a meeting at 2 p.m. today,” I say.

  He hands me a pad and a pen. “Can yo
u write down the name of the presentation and the folder it was in? And I’ll take a look.”

  I scribble the information and hand both back to him.

  Then he gives me a yellow Post-it note and the same pen. “And can you write your laptop password on here, please.”

  I do as he says. He takes the Post-it note from me and sticks it to the top of my laptop. He places my laptop next to two others, each with Post-it notes on top. Broken machines from other MBW employees, I assume. He spins so his back is to me and starts tapping on his keyboard. His screen is black with white text.

  My patience evaporates after a few seconds, and I pace. Rob hasn’t offered me a drink or suggested that I sit down on the ancient-looking sofa in one corner of the room. I wonder if I should sit anyway and whether the lumpy sofa cushions will swallow me up, when my phone rings.

  It’s my brother, Toby. “Just going outside to take this,” I say to Rob, but he doesn’t react.

  I head back through the kitchen and stand outside the back door, welcoming the cool air on my flustered face.

  “Hey,” I answer.

  “Hey, sis. You okay? You sound stressed.”

  “I’ve got a pitch meeting in a couple of hours, and I haven’t finished the presentation, and my laptop died, and it’s missing from the cloud.”

  “Oh,” Toby replies.

  Everything I just said probably went right over Toby’s head. He’s fifteen years younger than me at twenty-three. We share the same father, who divorced my mother when I was seven. Even though I’m thirty-eight, we’re really close. He works in a fancy gin bar in town and has never stepped foot in an office.