Ed Kowalsky stared down into his coffee dregs as if trying to read his future there.
‘Of course they’re relevant, Anne,’ he said eventually. ‘But I worry you might be seizing on them to back up a narrative for Laurie you’ve already created in your head from things you’ve seen on the news. We have to be totally objective. That’s our job.’
On the way back that night to my little room in the student house I shared with three other girls, I stopped by the liquor store and stood looking in the window for a very long time.
34
Chloe
‘Chloe, where are those reports? I asked you to have them on my desk at ten thirty.’
‘Sorry, Rachel. They’re taking a bit longer than I’d thought.’
‘Try to keep to deadlines, please. I shouldn’t have to remind you.’
Chloe’s cheeks stung as if she’d been slapped. She focused her eyes on the plaster on Rachel’s forehead, half hidden by her hair, and tried not to cry.
‘Sorry,’ she mumbled to Rachel’s retreating back as the latter swivelled on her heel and returned to her office.
Chloe had never felt so wretched. She longed to talk to someone about what was going on, but her dad had had to fly off to the USA on business, and her mum had gone with him. They were so inseparable still. Chloe usually loved how close they were, but this thing with Ewan had her doubting everything she’d ever thought about relationships. She’d always just assumed things would happen for her the same way they had for her parents, but now she questioned if that was true. Maybe the men she loved would all turn on her, as Ewan had done. She’d tried to imagine her own mother being treated like that – rejected and then physically intimidated – thinking perhaps if she convinced herself it was a rite of passage it wouldn’t hurt so much, but she couldn’t. It must be something uniquely to do with her.
She glanced towards Paula, hoping for a reassuring look. She’d realized that Paula wouldn’t stick her neck out to defend her from Rachel’s barbs, but she could usually be counted on for a sympathetic eyebrow-raise. However, Paula was hunched over her desk, head down, as she had been ever since arriving that morning. Chloe had tried asking her where she’d got to yesterday afternoon, when she just disappeared without telling anyone, but Paula had given her a really strange look, as if she had no idea who she even was, and it had freaked Chloe out so much, she’d just said, ‘Oh well, never mind, you’re here now,’ or something equally silly, and retreated to her desk. Across the office, Sarah got up and scuttled off towards the double exit doors. Acting on a rash impulse, Chloe followed her. Rachel couldn’t stop her going to the loo, could she?
In the toilets, she glanced in the mirror, remembering her shock when she’d caught sight of her reflection in the hotel bathroom after Ewan had left, the ghostly pallor of her face. Her stomach spasmed as it always did when she thought back to Saturday night, the way his eyes had glazed over. She’d wondered if she should have reported him to someone. But then what exactly would she have said? That he’d been a little too rough? She’d been scared of him – she could remember that. And yet there was a small part of her, a part she was deeply ashamed of, that felt a kind of thrill that he’d felt strongly enough about her, passionately enough, to get carried away like that. And besides, as time passed, she started to wonder whether it had really been as bad as she remembered, or whether she had over-felt it, the way she did sometimes. Her mum was always telling her not to let her feelings carry her away, to be more self-censoring. Could she have exaggerated what happened? Ewan had tried to talk to her several times yesterday and this morning, but she’d ignored him. Still, it made her feel better in a way, that it was him pestering her for a change.
She heard retching sounds coming from behind the closed door of one of the cubicles.
‘Sarah? You OK?’
A noise. Something between a moan and a sigh.
‘Sarah?’
The door opened, and Sarah emerged, wiping her mouth on a length of toilet paper. Sarah had always been on the curvy side, and her body was still round but her face looked gaunt, as if someone had ironed the plumpness out of it so that her skin clung, grey and uncushioned, to her cheekbones.
‘You all right?’
Sarah shook her head. ‘Not really,’ she said in a small voice.
‘What happened in there this morning?’
When Chloe had arrived at 9 a.m., the blinds were down in Rachel’s office and Amira told her that Sarah and Mark Hamilton were esconced in there with Rachel and James Ellis, the head of HR.