Tess had been swept along on the wave of their enthusiasm. She’d been happy enough to resign from her job, but the first time she sat outside a potential client’s office, she had to cram her hands between her knees to stop them from trembling. Often she could actually feel her head wobbling. Even now, after eighteen months, she still suffered debilitating nerves each time she met a new client. Yet she was oddly successful in her role. “You’re different from other agency people,” one client told her at the end of their first meeting, as he shook her hand to seal the deal. “You actually listen more than you talk.”
The horrible nerves were balanced by the glorious euphoria she felt each time she walked out of a meeting. It was like walking on air. She’d done it again. She’d battled the monster and won. And best of all, nobody suspected her secret. She brought in the clients. The business flourished. A product launch they did for a cosmetics company had even been nominated for a marketing award.
Tess’s role meant that she was often out of the office, leaving Will and Felicity alone for hours at a time. If someone had asked her if that worried her, she would have laughed. “Felicity is like a sister to Will,” she would have said.
She turned from the whiteboard. Her legs felt weak. She went and sat back down, choosing a chair at the other end of the table from them. She tried to get her bearings.
It was six o’clock on a Monday night. She was right in the middle of her life.
There had been so many other things distracting her when Will came upstairs and said he and Felicity needed to talk to her about something. Tess had just put down the phone from speaking with her mother, who had rung to say she’d broken her ankle playing tennis. She was going to be on crutches for the next eight weeks, and she was very sorry, but could Easter be in Sydney instead of Melbourne this year?
It was the first time in the fifteen years since Tess and Felicity had moved interstate that Tess had felt bad about not living closer to her mother.
“We’ll get a flight straight after school on Thursday,” Tess had said. “Can you cope until then?”
“Oh, I’ll be fine. Mary will help. And the neighbors.”
But Aunt Mary didn’t drive, and Uncle Phil couldn’t be expected to drive her over every day. Besides, Mary and Phil were both starting to look frail themselves. And Tess’s mother’s neighbors were ancient old ladies or busy young families who barely had time to wave hello as they backed their big cars out of their driveways. It didn’t seem likely that they’d be bringing over casseroles.
Tess had been fretting over whether she should book a flight to Sydney for the very next day, and then perhaps organize a home helper for her mother. Lucy would hate to have a stranger in the house, but how would she shower? How would she cook?
It was tricky. They had so much work on, and she didn’t like to leave Liam. He wasn’t quite himself. There was a boy in his class, Marcus, who was giving him grief. He wasn’t exactly bullying him; that would have been nice and clear-cut and they could have followed the school’s sternly bullet-pointed “We Take a Zero-Tolerance Approach to Bullying” code of practice. Marcus was more complicated than that. He was a charming little psychopath.
Something new and awful had gone on with Marcus that day at school, Tess was sure of it. She’d been giving Liam his dinner while Will and Felicity were downstairs working. Most nights she and Will and Liam, and often Felicity too, managed to eat as a family, but the Bedstuff website was meant to go live that Friday, so they were all working long hours.
Liam had been quieter than usual while he was eating his dinner. He was a dreamy, reflective little boy; he’d never been a chatterbox, but there had been something so grown-up and sad about the way he mechanically speared each piece of sausage with his fork and dunked it in the tomato sauce.
“Did you play with Marcus today?” Tess had asked.