He shouldn’t even be thinking about how far she might go to achieve that objective. Or how happy he would be to lie back and let her try.
* * *
‘Dad’s really worried about you, Tash. You’ve been working so hard and all this stress...well...you know...’ Her mother never actually said what she was thinking out loud. ‘He thinks you should come home for a while so that we can look after you.’
Tash sighed. She’d known that whatever she said, they’d half believe the newspaper story, convinced that they had been right all along. That she would be safer at home. No matter how much she told herself that they were wrong, it was hard to resist that kind of worry.
‘Mum, I’m fine.’
‘Tom thinks a break would do you good. We’ve booked the house down in Cornwall for the half-term holiday.’ So far, so what she’d expected. Her dad the worrier, her brother the doctor prescribing a week at the seaside and her mother trying to please everyone. ‘You know how you always loved it there and you haven’t seen the children for ages. You won’t believe how they’ve grown.’
Twenty-five and on holiday with her family. Building sandcastles for her nieces during the day and playing Scrabble or Monopoly in the evening. How appealing was that?
‘I saw them at Easter,’ she said. ‘Send me a postcard.’
‘Darling...’
‘It’s all smoke and mirrors, Mum. I’m fit as a flea.’
‘Are you sure? Are you taking the vitamins I sent you?’
‘I never miss,’ she said, rolling her eyes in exasperation. She understood, really, but anyone would think she was still five years old and fighting for her life instead of a successful career woman. This was just a hiccup.
‘Are you eating properly?’
‘All the food groups.’
When the taxi had delivered her to her door, she’d gone straight to the freezer and dug out a tub of strawberry cheesecake ice cream. While she’d eaten it, she pulled up the file on her laptop so that if, in a worst case scenario, it came to an unfair dismissal tribunal she had a paper trail to demonstrate exactly what she’d done. Except that there it all was, word for word, on the screen. Exactly as printed. Which made no sense.
The proof copy she’d seen, approved and put in her out tray had been the one she’d actually written, not the one that was printed.
Either she really was going mad or someone had gone out of their way to do this to her. Not just changing the original copy, fiddling with the proof and intercepting the phone call from the Chronicle, but getting into her laptop to change what she’d written so that she had no proof that she’d ever written anything else.
Okay, a forensic search would pull up the original, but there would be no way to prove that she hadn’t changed it herself because whoever had done this had logged in using her password.
Which meant there was only one person in the frame.
The man who hadn’t let her know he was back a week early from a six-week rugby tour. The man who hadn’t come rushing round with pizza, Chianti and chocolate the minute he heard the news. Who hadn’t called, texted, emailed even, to ask how she was.
The man who was now occupying the upstairs office that should, by rights, be hers.