Day Minus Seven Thousand One Hundred and Fifty-Eight, 12:00
It’s the day Jen meets Kelly. She’s always known this date, when the
handsome stranger walked into the law firm. But, today, sitting at her desk working on the enormous 2003 desktop computer, she waits to meet him for the first time.
She has that March feeling. Fun in the sun and laughing with him. She will always feel that way – whatever happens. Whoever he is. Whatever his reasons for his betrayal, his secrets, his lies.
She never liked working in the reception area of her father’s law firm –
people always thought she was a secretary – but today, she likes the vantage point. The plate-glass windows. The bleak March high street outside. The
silence of the reception, ancient and sweeping and hers.
‘Jen,’ her father says, walking into the foyer. She turns her gaze to him. He’s forty-five. Strapping. Big, happy, healthy. She can’t bear it. His youth and his betrayal. His connection to Joseph. When she visited him in 2021, had the garlic bread with him – he must have known … he must have known what Kelly had been up to. Surely?
‘We need to file the Part 8 by four o’clock,’ he says. ‘Sure, sure,’ she says, no idea what he’s talking about.
As she’s pretending to type, clicking around on the fucking enormous and antiquated computer, she notices movement outside.
And there he is. It’s Kelly. Trying to look inconspicuous but, because she knows him, she sees him. He sticks out.
And he’s watching her. Trying to look like he isn’t. In a hoody, the same denim jacket he wears tomorrow on their date. That hair …
‘Jen?’ her father says. ‘Part 8?’
But Kelly’s coming in. A head poked around the propped-open door. A March gust whooshes in. They never liked the door closed, didn’t want to deter patrons.
‘All right,’ Kelly says. Her husband, who doesn’t yet know her name.
Whose motivations she doesn’t yet know. ‘Just wondering if you want any painting and decorating done?’
They’re walking back from the pub lunch. The shared umbrella. Kelly has brushed his shoulder against hers several times.
‘We’re so late,’ she laughs. ‘I’m a bad influence.’
It’s quiet in the reception, only the noise of her computer whirring and, in the depths of the building, her father on the phone. ‘Tea?’ she says to Kelly.
He blinks, not expecting it, but nods anyway. ‘Sure.’
She disappears into the tiny kitchen off the reception, but this time she waits, watching him. And that’s when he does it: the thing she now knows he will do but that breaks her heart regardless. He slowly begins to root around on her desk. He’s good. His head bowed. Hands barely moving as his fingers sift gently. Unless you were looking at his hands, you’d never know.
Jen allows it to continue. Just watching, taking her time with the tea. He
inches a drawer open and – God. All these years ago, he was doing just this. Her heart is pounding.
He pulls a piece of paper out of her drawer, then slides it back in again after he’s looked at it.
Her father emerges from his office just as Jen thinks she’s been far too long making the teas. He nods to Kelly and Jen stops herself joining them, just listens.
‘Thanks for the list earlier,’ Kelly says in a low voice to her father. ‘I wondered about this timeshare – this number here, is that an eight or a six?’
‘Ah,’ her father says, perfectly politely, unsurprised. He pats his suit uselessly, looking for his glasses. ‘A six.’
‘Okay – thanks,’ Kelly says. He is scanning the piece of paper.
Jen swallows. The timeshare conveyances her father pretended not to remember. Her father, facilitating organized crime. Her husband, investigating.
It was her father who was bad. The world seems to tilt and spin. Her father. A crooked lawyer.
And it was Kelly who was investigating him. All those questions on their first date. His intensity, part of their origin story, the way they fell in love.
Only it wasn’t.
‘What was that about?’ Jen has been to run some documents over to another law firm to cool down, to think things through. And now she’s back, and ready to ask her father while she can.
‘Nothing.’
‘No – what was on that paper you looked at? Was it addresses?’ Her father avoids her gaze. ‘Of unoccupied houses?’ she prompts.
‘It’s a small side project.’ His eyes shift to the side. But he’s no idiot. He can tell what’s coming, and he walks over to the window to close the blind, then brushes past her to close the door.
‘Of what? Selling data? To – criminals? Don’t lie,’ she says to him. ‘I’ll ask Kelly if you won’t tell me.’
Her father turns away from inspecting a filing cabinet and looks at her. ‘I
…’ he starts to say. ‘I doubt Kelly would tell you,’ he says eventually.
Jen sits down in the chair in the corner of the room.
‘We couldn’t make rent,’ her father stammers. ‘I thought – it was just information. Like people who sell whiplash claims.’
‘But this isn’t whiplash claims.’ ‘No.’
‘I thought you were as straight as they come.’ ‘I was.’
‘But – until …’
‘Money, Jen.’ The force of this sentence makes him spin, just slightly, on the chair. ‘It was a bad decision. But, by the time you’re working with
someone like that … you can’t extricate yourself. I regret it every day.’ ‘So you should.’
Her father’s eyes flick towards her. This conversation is excruciating for him. Perhaps the strangest thing about travelling back through the past is
the changes people themselves undergo. Kelly going from dark in 2022 to lightness and naïvety in 2003. Her father from openness to repression.
‘Do you remember before you started out here when we couldn’t meet the rent? We organized a longer payment window. You drafted the deed while you were at uni.’
Her first-ever contract. Of course she remembers. ‘Yeah.’
‘Well, after that, an old client came in. And – Jen, he made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. Passing those names and addresses kept us afloat for years. It paid for your LPC. It’s paying for your training.’
‘People being robbed.’
‘How did you find out?’
‘That doesn’t matter,’ she says.
She almost wishes she hadn’t found this out, she thinks, looking at her father, thinking about how she can never un-know it. But finding out that Kelly discovered this dark secret right in the centre of her family and never told her … it is a kindness. Kelly kept his identity, his transformation, secret from her.
Because he loves her. And because he walked into the law firm one day in 2003, fell head over heels in love with her and didn’t want to look back.
