Universally Challenged

by Anna Bell

  ‘What? Jilly’s firm? How did they know?’

  The penny suddenly dropped that Roger must have told Jilly during the ball last night.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Jake.

  ‘I bloody well do. Roger was hammered last night and he must have told Jilly about our amazing investment opportunity. But, don’t you see, that’s brilliant! LMG didn’t invest in SinoDam, meaning we’re not going to get pummelled by the Clarity fall out.’

  ‘Don’t you see that Roger is furious with me? Well, with both of us actually.’ Jake walked over to the concrete tree pot and sat down.

  ‘But why, when Clarity publishes...’

  ‘No, Jess, if. If Clarity publishes anything, let alone it being about SinoDam. There are probably hundreds of Chinese companies that are doing dodgy deals. Listen, all Roger cares about is the deal on the table today. In his eyes we ruined it. His boss Max Cummings was in on the meeting and he walked out saying he wanted to see Roger in his office on Monday, after he got things resolved.’

  ‘And by that he meant firing you.’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Right, and so I’m probably going to be fired, too then, when I get back in the office on Monday.’

  ‘Yep,’ said Jake, without any emotion.

  ‘Even though we were right?’

  ‘Yeah, but they don’t know we’re right, and to be honest it hardly matters anymore. I shouldn’t have bulldozed the meeting, no matter what I believed.’

  Jess sat down on the concrete pot next to him. ‘What a shitty, shitty week,’ she said.

  ‘You can say that again.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Jake, for causing all this, I really am.’

  Jake laughed out loud. ‘You know this time last week I was looking at the company intranet, looking at your profile and being so pleased that you were coming over. I was just hoping you were going to bring over some luck. But then ever since you’ve arrived it has been like one giant headache.’

  Jess could feel tears stinging behind her eyes. It hadn’t exactly been an easy week for her, either.

  ‘I mean, you turn up first of all, and start coming out with all this you’re from another life kind of crap, and then you don’t know what you’re doing work wise. I then hold your hand and coach you through the biggest keynote of your career. To have you then royally come and fuck up my one chance to be part of a gigantic deal, that would have been the injection my career, not to mention my bank balance, desperately needed. And then to top it off I started to have feelings for you. What an awful week.’

  Jess was taken aback. She’d never seen him being anything but understanding with her. She felt desperately sorry for him losing his job, but she couldn’t help what had happened to him. And besides which, how dare he just throw in that he had feelings for her as if she wouldn’t notice?

  ‘How can you have feelings for me; don’t you have a girlfriend?’

  ‘For god’s sake,’ muttered Jake under his breath. ‘The beginning of the week you tell me you have a god damn husband. And Elodie… Elodie is... well, Elodie is complicated. Look, I’m not getting into this. Do you have any idea how mad I am at you?’

  Jess looked down at his cardboard box on the floor. She could guess how mad he was. She knew she wouldn’t be any more understanding if the situation had been the other way round.

  Jess stood up to go. She guessed this would be the last she’d see of Jake. She was leaving on a plane back to London tomorrow, going back to goodness knows what. If she’d been sacked by LMG Global then she’d never get another job in the financial world, she’d never be able to bluff it through an interview. The only thing she knew how to do was teach, and she couldn’t rock up to a school in the UK with no qualifications other than seven years’ teaching experience in New York elementary schools that only existed in her head.

  ‘I’ll just leave you to it then, shall I?’

  ‘Yeah, you do that, Jess. Swoop in, ruin my life, and then fuck off back to England, why don’t you.’

  ‘What do you want me to do? I know I was bloody right about SinoDam, and I’m sure that Clarity are publishing something on them. All I was trying to do was save our arses.’

  ‘Well, you did a great job with that one, didn’t you, Jess? And to top it all off I checked the Clarity website whilst packing up my stuff and there was not a hint of a revelation coming out today. So much for hitting the press on Friday. Whatever nonsense you overheard, it was nothing to do with us.’

  Jake stood up, took his jacket off and threw it in his box as if he was slam dunking it. He bent down and snatched his box away from the floor.

  ‘I’m sorry, Jake, I really am,’ said Jess at her last feeble attempt.

  ‘Whatever.’

  Jake stormed off out of the plaza and left Jess stood watching him go.

  She couldn’t believe how much of a different person he’d become in the last twenty-four hours. He’d gone from the most understanding human being she thought she’d ever met, to being a complete arsehole. She was only trying to protect them from SinoDam. She’d never in a million years thought he’d lose his job or else she would have interrupted the meeting. Even if it had meant that she’d been the one getting escorted from the building. She cursed herself for having not having thought of that.

  She watched Jake go out of view and she finally let the tears roll down her face. That would be her last look at Jake Harrington, and she surprised herself at how much her heart felt like it was breaking.

  Chapter 39 – Jessica Anderson

  Jessica was on her third latte. She’d had to switch to decaf; she was on edge anyway and the caffeine was hampering her ability to sit still. Every time the door opened Jessica jolted her neck up, checking for Jake.

  She’d seen the delegation from SinoDam walk past the coffee shop window twenty minutes earlier. She’d been so tempted to go and talk to them. She’d also desperately wanted to go back to the receptionist and demand to see Jake, but she knew she couldn’t.

  She still couldn’t believe Jake had a girlfriend. She knew it shouldn’t matter, as she did have a husband. Both were facts that prevented Jessica and Jake from being together. There was a slight niggle in her head wondering why she was sat waiting for Jake. But she kept justifying it to herself that it was because of the SinoDam deal. She just wanted to know what had gone on.

  Jake walked into the coffee shop, taking Jessica by surprise. She’d got so lost in her thoughts about Jake and Elodie that she had missed him leaving the LMG building. She smiled and waved him over to the table. It was then that she noticed he was holding a large brown box and he had a face like thunder.

  Jessica had seen the scene too many times before. People messing up deals and being shown the door with the all-familiar box. But this time she knew Jake losing his job was her doing.

  He sat down opposite her at the table and placed his box by his feet. Jessica stared into the contents and thought it looked pathetic, a couple of books, a stapler and a half-dead pot plant.

  ‘Coffee?’ said Jessica.

  Jake didn’t look at her, he simply nodded and looked out of the window. Jessica approached the bar and ordered Jake a coffee. She tried to smile at him whilst the barista made the drink but he didn’t want to make eye contact. She was sure he could see her looking at him out of the corner of his eye, but he didn’t want to find her eyes. Jessica, instead, stood nervously on the spot, fiddling with a loose fibre of her t-shirt, wondering just what an earth had happened to him.

  She placed the steaming hot cup of coffee in front of him and waited for him to talk. When it became obvious that he wasn’t going to, Jessica took a deep breath and decided to start and try to get him to talk.

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘I got fired, that’s what happened,’ said Jake, in a monotone voice.

  ‘I sort of guessed that. Do you want to tell me what happened, or shall I leave you to drink your coffee in peace?’

  ‘You want to know what happened? Ok, I’l
l tell you what happened. I got to work about half an hour before the meeting. I picked up your note from the reception, I Googled the dams, I saw what you were saying. I asked Patricia about whether she’d actually been to the dams, and she said she’d been to one. When I asked her about the others she threw a fit at me. So I went to Roger, and he didn’t want to know. I knew he would just see dollar bills and bonuses.’

  Jessica shook her head. ‘Eric was so sure that SinoDam had committed fraud.’

  Jake took a drink from his hot coffee mug and Jessica winced and wondered if he had a Teflon mouth. Either that or he had so much adrenaline pumping round his veins that he didn’t notice his mouth burning.

  ‘Something in my gut made me believe that what you said was true. And when Roger wasn’t going to help me, I did the only thing I thought I could do.’

  Jessica stared at him, willing him to finish his sentence. Jake sighed deeply.

  ‘I went to Max Cummings.’

  Jessica ran the name over in her mind. She knew that name but she couldn’t immediately place him. ‘Max Cummings? Roger’s boss?’

  Jake nodded.

  ‘And he fired you for what you told him?’

  ‘No, he listened intently and asked me for proof. When I told him about Google Maps, he was sceptical. He told me it wasn’t proof, as there could be any number of explanations: old maps, Chinese secrecy. So he asked me what else I had.’

  Jake looked directly at Jessica and then out to the window, as if he was too angry to look at her.

  ‘And so I told him I had nothing else. I told him that I’d checked with a friend in China and that he said they weren’t built. And you know what? He laughed at me. I tried to argue that I had a gut feeling. And he of course told me that gut instincts were important, but that this was a huge deal and I couldn’t come to him minutes before signing with just a gut feeling.’

  ‘He called Roger and Patricia into the office and asked them what they thought and of course they both told him that I was just getting a little bit of cold feet and there was nothing to worry about.’

  ‘And they fired you over that?’ said Jessica.

  ‘No, it gets worse. The SinoDam delegation turned up and we were all sat in the board room when I interrupted Patricia, and I asked them straight out about the dams. I could see that I had ruffled their feathers. It was only a tiny flicker of the eyes, but that’s all I needed. So I told them what I knew. They told me I was being absurd and then Roger asked me to leave and wait for him in his office.’

  ‘They signed it, didn’t they?’

  ‘Aha, $10 million dollars. Just like that. Roger came out of the meeting. He was fuming. He said I’d let the whole side down. He said I was just lucky that they’d signed the deal and not walked from the room or else he’d be firing me without a reference.’

  ‘Jake, I’m so sorry, it is all my fault.’

  ‘Yes, Jessica, it is.’ He said it so loudly and with such force that the other customers in the coffee shop all looked round and stared at them. Jake shook his head angrily at Jessica and picked his box off the floor and walked out.

  Jessica hadn’t seen this side of Jake before and she didn’t really know how to handle it. She felt embarrassed by the pitying looks from the people in the coffee shop. She had to go after him.

  ‘Jessica, don’t. Just leave me alone,’ he said, raising his arm to signal her to go away.

  ‘But, Jake, I am really sorry.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure you god damn are. You know this time last week my life was just fine. And then you waltz into my life with your crazy stories and drag me into this bullshit with Clarity, and doom and gloom about SinoDam. Then there was the picnic in the park.’

  ‘Which was one of the most romantic evenings of my life,’ said Jessica. She hadn’t meant to interrupt but he’d mentioned the picnic with such venom and she couldn’t stand to hear it described that way. It had been one of those nights that she knew she’d remember forever. She wouldn’t let him dismiss it like it meant nothing.

  ‘Right, well that’s great, but in case you’ve forgotten you’re married.’

  ‘Ok, but you’ve got a girlfriend,’ said Jessica, finding her feistiness.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Elodie, your girlfriend.’

  ‘Who told you about Elodie?’

  ‘The receptionist, Anouska.’

  Jake laughed out loud with exasperation. ‘I bet she told you with great delight, huh?’

  ‘Well, she did look a little smug.’

  ‘I turned Anouska down for a date about six months ago. She’s a bitter little witch.’

  ‘So it’s not true? You don’t have a girlfriend called Elodie who had an emergency last night?’

  ‘I was with Elodie, but she’s not my girlfriend: it’s complicated.’

  ‘Just like my marriage.’

  ‘Not quite. Elodie and I broke up last year. She is bipolar. Remember how we were supposed to meet some of my friends in the park on Wednesday night?’

  Jessica nodded.

  ‘Well, she was going through one of her manic cycles, but after I calmed her down on Sunday night she seemed to be coming out of it. One of our friends had managed to get her out of her apartment on Wednesday night, for the picnic in the park. They saw us kissing before the carriage ride, and she freaked out. They thought she’d been alright that night, but on checking on her the next day she threatened to harm herself and the only way they could get her to stop threatening was to call me up. I then spent the whole night with her raging at me about who you were, and then I spent this morning at Dr Rosenthal’s office.’

  Jessica tried to stroke Jake’s arm to comfort him, but he shrugged her away.

  ‘You see, Jessica, everything was much better before you came along. Now Elodie is back to where she was six months ago, and I don’t have a job to pay for all her treatment.’

  ‘You’ve been supporting her?’

  ‘Not fully, her parents pay for bits, but she can’t work when she’s depressed or when she’s manic, for that matter. I just help her out when I can.’

  Jessica felt her heart swell. She wanted desperately to pull Jake into her, but she knew he wouldn’t come. She couldn’t believe that she could have caused so much heartache without realising it. All because she didn’t know who she was. Before she knew it tears were rolling down her face and she couldn’t stop them.

  ‘Don’t you start. I’ve had it up to here with crying,’ he said, raising his hand above his head.

  ‘I just can’t believe I did this all, I caused all of this trouble. How am I going to fix it?’

  ‘Oh no, don’t you even talk to me about fixing it, Jessica. I want to walk away from this conversation and I never, ever, want to see you again. Do you hear me? Go back to your husband. Whatever fantasy you’re having about being in a parallel universe or having a different life, I don’t want to be part of it. You’ve already done enough damage to my life.’

  Jessica wanted desperately to tell him how she felt about him; that she didn’t care about Benjy and she wanted to be with him. Above all she wanted to look after him – he’d obviously been through so much with Elodie and she wanted to help. But she knew it would fall on deaf ears.

  She had barged into his life with no warning and completely turned his life upside down. If she hadn’t gone to the picnic with him on Wednesday Elodie wouldn’t have taken a turn for the worst. And without her speaking to the man at Clarity, or finding out about SinoDam, he wouldn’t have taken her word for it and got himself in a situation that found him stood outside LMG Global with his brown cardboard box.

  Jessica watched him turn and walk slowly away from her. The tears fell faster down her cheeks but she made no effort to go after him. It was the least she could do, after what she’d done to him. She knew this would be the last time she’d ever see him and her heart burned where it felt like it was breaking in two.

  Chapter 40- Jess Burns

  Jess walked into the hotel room
. She let the wave of tears fall over her face. She needed to cry. It had been one of the best and one of the worst weeks of her life. And right now she couldn’t keep hold of her emotions. She slumped down to the floor and hung her head in her hands.

  This time tomorrow she’d be at the airport checking in for her flight back to London. Back to London, a place she hadn’t been for years, back to goodness knows what.

  She finally had to accept that this was her life and she had to put everything else behind her. Maybe this would be like a fresh start. She’d leave New York tomorrow and leave thoughts of Benjy and Jake behind.

  She got up and walked over to her suitcase. She found her travel wallet and scanned the contents, looking for clues to her home life. She picked out her driving licence and read the address. 2 Dukes Mead Court, Herne Hill. Where on earth is Herne Hill? She picked up the bunch of keys in the wallet and leafed through them, wondering what the keys unlocked and what she’d find behind the locked doors. Would she have a flatmate? Did she have many friends? It was all too much to think about.

  Jess went over to the wardrobe and started packing quietly and methodically, almost on autopilot. She just needed something to keep her busy and something that wouldn’t allow her to think. She placed suit after suit in the case, stroking the soft materials as she did so.

  Once the clothes were packed she looked around the room for other bits and pieces, and then she saw the snow globe. She picked it up and shook it, watching the snow fall over the buildings of Manhattan. The snow was falling at the same rate as her tears.

  She placed the snow globe back on the table. She couldn’t do this. She couldn’t stay in the hotel room all night by herself. She was going to go out of her mind. She had to go out.

  She gave herself a once over in the mirror in front of her. She looked awful. Her eyes were red and puffy and her hair a sweaty mess. After forcing herself into the hot shower she dressed quickly and put on a pair of jeans and a tank top. She wasn’t bothered that her wet hair was going to dry frizzy, she just needed to get out of the hotel room.