‘You always seemed so sorted, though – too smart to have your heart broken. I had a thing with him, but only for one night … He really wasn’t boyfriend material! God, what was his name?’
Suddenly Rachel felt as if she’d had a cool glass of something chucked over her head. Jessica didn’t remember her as Jack’s girlfriend … She remembered her as too smart to have been Jack’s girlfriend. It was an irony that stung.
And there was something else: Jack had always said that Jessica pursued him despite knowing he was taken – flirted with him for months, then talked him into bed when he was drunk and distressed after arguing with Rachel. Based on what Jessica had just said, there was no way that was true. All at once Rachel wasn’t sure why she’d ever thought it might be. But hadn’t Jack repeated his ten-year-old story when they’d first argued about working on the Lighthouse account?
‘Jack Harper,’ Rachel said. ‘That’s who you’re thinking of.’ Her throat was horribly dry.
‘Oh fuck,’ Jessica said, louder and more animated than she’d been all afternoon. She was staring at Rachel, giggling anxiously, her lush mouth wide open with worry. ‘You didn’t end up married to him, did you? Oh God, say you didn’t! See – this is why I usually keep my mouth shut.’
As soon as Dev, Sophie and Jessica had left, Tom began apologising.
‘I’m so sorry, Rachel. I tried to ring you as soon as I knew she was going to be here … Dev and I had already had some discussion about her coming on board – heated discussion, I might add – but I never thought he’d bring her today. He only told me an hour before the shoot started.’
‘You knew she was getting involved with the exhibition and didn’t TELL ME?’
Rachel had the dim sense that she wasn’t being fair – that she was about to blow her stack about one thing when really she was upset about something else entirely.
Tom’s eyes widened at her overreaction. ‘Steady on, Rach. I didn’t know – it wasn’t final. And I didn’t see the point in upsetting you by bringing it up until I was sure.’
‘You weren’t so bothered about upsetting me when you were flirting with her during the shoot!’
‘What?’
‘I’m not blind, Tom! It all looked very touchy-feely, even from the other side of the room. You were on the hook from the second she started pouting and fluffing her hair.’
‘Oh my God. Are you serious?’
She wasn’t, really, but she was indignant. And – oh fuck – here was the realisation she’d been trying to keep at bay all afternoon: she was jealous.
‘I couldn’t be less interested in Jessica!’ Tom ranted. ‘Frankly, I felt a bit sorry for her. In any case, I don’t know how you can justify having a go at me for being merely polite to her when you’re spending half your time cosied up to the bastard who couldn’t keep his hands off her. The man who actually cheated on you with her. Really, how am I the dickhead here? Do enlighten me.’
Rachel felt around for something to say – something impressive and clever that might obscure the fact that he was totally right.
‘I’m not “cosied up” to Jack,’ she yelled. ‘It’s not my fault we ended up working together!’
‘No. But, Rachel, I’m not blind either – none of your friends are. Don’t you think it’s a bit ironic, hating Jessica for her Insta-fakery and airbrushed ads, when you’ve spent the past six months mooning over a man who lives his whole life through some sort of … some sort of charm filter? Someone unbelievably selfish, but brilliant at playing the hero when it suits him. Someone whose scheming and manipulation has, unfortunately, started rubbing off on you.’
‘That’s not fair,’ Rachel said – though on what basis, she wasn’t quite sure.
‘Isn’t it? Last month I pretended to be your boyfriend in front of a room full of people, most of whom you were lying to, so you could make Harper jealous – intensify this twisted game of cat-and-mouse you’ve been playing. Yes, you’d been drinking – but you’d have kissed me, properly kissed me, just to wind him up. It makes me feel ill, and I wish I’d never been part of it. I wish I could stop thinking about it.’
Tom’s face was agonised. His blue-grey eyes were wild behind the lenses of his glasses, full of anger, hurt and – even more unbearably – disappointment.
‘I wouldn’t—That isn’t—It wasn’t—ARGH.’
Rachel scrubbed her face with the palm of her hand, then decided to try again.
‘I’d never have done that. I would never have kissed you just to upset someone else. I couldn’t kiss you and be thinking about someone else … I don’t think that’s possible.’
Suddenly she knew that it wasn’t. For the brief moment Tom’s lips had been on hers, she’d forgotten Jack even existed. It had just taken her a while to admit it to herself.
Tom shook his head, still furious – but sad now too. His whole frame seemed to have sagged, weary and defeated, and when he turned his head to look at her the motion was slow and strained.
‘Six months ago you would have said you’d never fake a relationship. Six months ago you swore you wouldn’t get pulled back into all this Jack drama – yet here we are. I don’t think you know what you’re capable of any more … And it kills me that I don’t either.’
Without waiting for her to respond, he turned his back on her. Then, without another word, he picked up his canvas bag of photography equipment and left the studio.
29
Anna didn’t come home on Saturday night, or on Sunday. She sent several texts asking Rachel to contact her, but Rachel didn’t have the heart.
She didn’t call her parents either; she couldn’t face more questions about her future living arrangements, and a single kind word from her dad might see her break down entirely. It wasn’t fair to distress them when there was nothing they could do about the mess her life was in. They couldn’t take away her work troubles, repair her relationship with Anna or fix things with Tom. What was the point in making them worry?
Alone in the flat, Rachel spent the weekend alternately weeping, napping, picking at leftovers and trying to work out how and when she’d developed feelings for someone who, until a month ago, she’d have said was only a friend.
When she arrived at the R/C building on Monday, she was visibly subdued. She plodded across the office to her desk without greeting anyone, ignored Donna’s obnoxious smirk, then slumped into her chair and started setting up her laptop.
A moment later Greg was beside her.
‘Ray, you look terrible. I take it you’ve heard?’
‘Heard what?’
‘Oh God, listen – let me take you out for a coffee. We really need to talk.’
Greg had covered her left hand with his, and his eyes were round with concern.
‘Greg, what on earth is going on?’
‘Not here,’ he muttered, looking around. Rachel’s eyes followed his, and with a chill she realised that almost everyone in the office was staring at her.
Greg pulled her up out of her seat, then guided her back the way she’d just come, towards the door. Something was very wrong here, and she had no idea what.
Once they were settled at a corner table in Java Jo’s, Greg waved at the barista – a young girl he seemed familiar with – and asked for two flat whites.
‘Ray, you’re scaring me,’ he said. ‘You look traumatised and I haven’t even said anything yet. Or have you heard from him yourself?’
‘Heard from who?’ Rachel asked, waking up a little.
‘Jack, of course, the absolute bastard.’
‘Greg, you’re not making any sense,’ she said. ‘And what’s Jack done to upset you?’
‘He’s taken advantage of a good friend of mine. Someone I care about a lot.’ He sighed. ‘He’s in Manchester. His wife summoned him back up there yesterday, apparently. She heard rumours that he’d taken up with an old flame and couldn’t handle the thought of him with someone else.’
‘Rumours? What …? I don’t understand.’
‘Clara – that’s his wife – used to work for Mountaintop, so she still has plenty of friends there. Some of your less discreet R/C colleagues appear to have shot their mouths off about you and Jack while they’ve been up there for meetings, or in emails and IM conversations. You’d think they’d have better things – or perhaps some actual work – to do, instead of speculating on who their co-workers might be sleeping with. But apparently not.’
Rachel put her head in her hands and groaned.
‘It seems Clara and Jack have a very … volatile relationship. Very up and down. Apparently they’ve split up several times before because one or the other of them’s cheated – but this time Clara got serious. Told him to move out because, although they both wanted kids, she didn’t trust him to stick around and raise them.’
Rachel remembered Jack’s claim in the pub, months ago, that he wanted children but his wife hadn’t been keen. She remembered how deftly he’d implied that this time he’d been the one who’d been let down.
‘I had a long conversation with the Mountaintop MD early this morning. According to him, when they started looking for a London agency to buy out, Jack was the one who helped the exec team research and assess the options. I’m sure there were lots of reasons why R/C ended up at the top of the list – but Jack was well aware you worked here long before the day he and the rest of them came down to announce the merger. Your photo’s on the team page of the R/C website.’
Rachel groaned again, the sound ripping painfully from her throat. ‘He told me the opposite – that he had no idea I worked at the agency until he saw me in that meeting.’
‘I figured. I guess he also told you that he had nothing to do with you getting promoted and ending up on the same team as him. I had to do some digging to confirm this, but it seems that’s not entirely true either. He made his boss aware that you two knew one another, so it was suggested to Isaac that you might be well matched. Then, without knowing it, I sealed the deal by singing your praises – saying how great you’d be at charity work.’
This was too much to take in. Fully alert now, Rachel took a large gulp of coffee and tried to digest Greg’s revelations.
‘I still don’t understand where the rumour that Jack and I are an item has come from. We aren’t. And I might as well tell you …’ She sipped at her drink again, deciding the time had come to be honest. ‘… Tom and I aren’t together either; we actually never were … But, under the circumstances, that’s probably a story for another time.’
One of Greg’s eyebrows hitched up by a clear inch. ‘Okaaaaay, we’re going to park the Tom thing – but only because desperate times call for desperate measures. As for why people believe you and Jack are having an affair … He’s hardly been restrained around you, has he? He’s ignored every woman in the office who ever tried it on with him – and believe me, there’ve been many. Every time you’ve been out together in a group, he’s made sure to be seen leaving with you. Kemi told everyone who would listen that he walked you home after you guys took her back to her flat on the night we went to the speakeasy. There were Manchester people there that night too, and he didn’t leave your side the whole evening.’
In fact, Rachel remembered, Jack had been delighted to squire her around, topping her up with drinks and intermittently pressing his hand into the small of her back. He’d introduced her to his old colleagues as his partner – a word so obviously ambiguous she couldn’t believe she hadn’t noticed it at the time.
‘So let me guess: I’m a homewrecker,’ Rachel sighed. ‘The scarlet woman who’s tried and failed to break up his marriage for good. But what about the “old flame” thing? Where has that come from? You aside, neither Jack nor I have told anyone we used to go out … At least, not that I know of.’
‘Clara had heard your name in conversations between Jack and his old college pals, apparently – she knew you were an ex-girlfriend. Then, when you were mentioned as someone he was working with, she supposedly freaked: told her friends there was history between you. It’s filtered down through them to people here in London. Unfortunately, the fact that you kept your prior relationship with him quiet …’
‘… makes it seem like I’ve been dishonest,’ Rachel finished. Greg nodded, then reached over the table to pat her arm.
‘The rumour is that Clara finally lost it when Jack posted an Instagram photo of you guys from your birthday night out.’
‘My birthday was weeks ago,’ Rachel said, frowning.
Greg shrugged. ‘He’s only just put it up.’
Rachel picked up her phone and clicked into his profile – accessible to her since they’d begun following one another – and saw that it was a shot he’d taken of her and Anna just after he arrived at the piano bar. Anna had been completely cropped out.
Rachel was smiling into the camera, a glass of celebratory fizz raised in her hand. He’d captioned it: Birthday drinks with this one @rach_ryan_1988. So happy we found each other again x
‘Oh my God. No.’
She was incensed – not to mention enraged with herself for turning off all her social media notifications. She’d have spotted this earlier otherwise.
Jack was devilishly clever, though, and his post was brilliantly ambiguous. If she’d seen this without knowing all the things Greg had just told her, she had to admit she’d probably have thought nothing of it. Jack was rightly confident that she wouldn’t suspect his ulterior motives for tagging her.
‘I’m sorry to be the one to tell you all this,’ Greg said, stroking her arm again. ‘But I wanted you to hear it from a friend – not fucking Donna or one of her feeble-minded followers.’
‘I’m glad you told me. I’m grateful,’ Rachel said. To her surprise, she didn’t feel like crying.
She was humiliated, but a cool rage had settled in her stomach – and she found that she didn’t care whether Jack’s attentions to her had been real or all for show. It was probably some mixture, she thought, but it didn’t matter – because it wasn’t Jack she wanted. Perhaps it never had been.
And in the end, how much worse was Jack’s behaviour than her own? Hadn’t she misrepresented things, manipulated people and twisted the truth for her own ends?
Yes, Jack was the sort of master schemer she’d never be – he’d gone further than she had, been prepared to dredge up long-buried pain and reignite old feelings, probably without a thought for how that might affect her. But what had Anna said on the night of Rachel’s birthday? You’re messing with other people’s emotions … And it seems not to have occurred to you that someone might get hurt. She’d been right – and it was time Rachel admitted as much.
‘Hold on a minute,’ she said, snapping back into the now. ‘Did you say Jack had gone to Manchester? If so, I presume he’s on his way back? We have a huge meeting with Lighthouse this afternoon. Awful Olivia wants to go through the whole content plan again before signing it off.’
Greg made a disgusted face and shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t bank on him coming back today. Maybe not tomorrow either. Do you think you can lead the meeting if I come with you as back-up?’
Rachel hesitated, then said, ‘Yes, I can. I don’t need him.’
She felt the truth of her own words as Greg smiled and nodded approvingly.
‘Atta girl. Now … are you ready to head back?’
‘Ready as I’ll ever be,’ Rachel said.
‘Shoulders back, head up and tits out,’ Greg told her. ‘You’ve done nothing to be ashamed of. And Jack’s boss says he’s going to set up a call with you and Florence, in her role as HR director, so they can listen to your side of all this. When that meeting happens, hold absolutely nothing in. Truth will out, Ray – and the truth shall set you free.’
Rachel spent the remainder of the morning ignoring her colleagues’ whispers and furtive glances. She put her headphones in and concentrated on preparing for the Lighthouse meeting.
Predictably, Kemi had IM’d her within five minutes of her return from Java Jo’s.
Kemi Percival
Is it true about you and HH? What happened to your scientist guy?
Rachel Ryan
No, it isn’t true. And Tom is not a scientist
After that, Rachel had set her IM status to Do Not Disturb.
The Lighthouse meeting was at their HQ in Bayswater, and Rachel used the journey over there to update Greg on the project’s progress.
‘Editorially, we’ve stuck to exactly the brief she gave us back in March.’
‘Nothing’s changed at all?’ Greg rolled his eyes.
‘She won’t hear of it,’ Rachel said, ‘and Jack was keen for us not to rock the boat by challenging her. Isaac’s clearly terrified of her as well – his priority is keeping the account because, in time, it could help us land other things. My view, if you want it, is that we’re missing opportunities to reach more readers – and the charity is missing opportunities to do more good – because she won’t add in content that even their own research shows they need.’
‘Hmm,’ Greg said with a frown. ‘That seems like the easiest strategy in the short term, but when we’re eighteen months in and their visitor numbers are shit it’ll be our heads on the chopping block. Isaac has stars in his eyes – he isn’t thinking straight. He should have brought me in on this earlier.’
When they got to the Lighthouse office a harried-looking blonde woman greeted them, then ran off to inform Olivia they’d arrived.
They were shown into a meeting room whose walls were covered in posters promoting the charity’s work. Forlorn but grateful faces stared down from brightly coloured frames, flanked by statements of thanks. Rachel tried not to look at them, instead concentrating on her laptop.
She connected it up to the overhead protector and screen on the first attempt. Screw you, Harper, she thought.
‘No Jack today?’ Olivia asked, acerbic as ever, when she stalked into the room. ‘Is he ill?’
‘Yes, he’s sick today, unfortunately,’ Greg said smoothly. ‘It’s nice for me to be here in his place, though, Olivia – and not an unwelcome surprise for you, I hope.’
Rachel Ryan's Resolutions Page 33
