“No,” I stated.
Eliza stepped back, like she’d been slapped in the face.
“Maybe for a little while we were, but not now.”
Margot looked to Eliza, then to me.
Max folded his arms across his chest. “This is all making a bit more sense to me now. I didn’t think my normally rational, business-savvy daughter would suddenly turn on a deal we’d agreed on months ago. But you slept together. Feelings got involved. It all becomes clear.”
He shook his head and sighed.
As for me? Max had just answered all my questions in one go. I wanted to go sit on the grand piano stool to my left, lean over and vomit on Max’s pristine Italian tiles.
Instead, I said: “A deal you’d agreed on months ago?”
Eliza shook her head in double-quick time, then dropped her gaze to the floor. Maybe she was thinking about vomiting on her dad’s tiles, too.
“It was the original plan, yes. To let you have a go so that you couldn’t say we didn’t let you try.” Her voice was so quiet I had to strain to hear it.
She cleared her throat and finally looked at me.
“But you have to understand, nobody thought you were going to pull off something this big. Plus, I thought you hated me. I thought our relationship would blow up long before now. I thought I could persuade you because, as far as I knew, you hated the company and never wanted to work for them.”
Each word was like another cut, deeper than the last. I took a step back. “But you planned to manipulate me right from thestart.” A chill ran through me. This was deception beyond words, almost beyond feelings.
“I thought you were faking it at the start,” Eliza said. “Then I found out you’d changed. And then, when I got to know you and what the company meant to you, I changed, too. You have to believe me.”
She stepped closer, and I could see tears gathering in her eyes. “You changed me. These past few months have changed me for the better. You made me confront my life, made me move forward instead of just drifting. If you want to think the worst of me, you can, but I would never do anything to hurt someone I love. And I do love you, Poppy. Even though you’re standing here looking as if you want to rip my head off.”
“Everything you’ve said and done has been based on a lie.” I shook my head, numbness creeping through me. I turned to Margot. “And you. My own aunt selling me down the river. What happened to giving me a chance, to seeing what I could do?”
Margot stepped forwards and grasped both my arms with her hands.
“You don’t know what’s best for you sometimes. Giving you a poisoned chalice that’s killed your mum and Gran? I wasn’t going to do that.” Her words were choked.
“You might be mad now, but you’ll thank me in the long run. Plus, Max isn’t even the buyer now. Thanks to your efforts, the price tag has gone up and we’ve managed to get a new party in the watch space. Voss will be folded into SwissTok and our range kept on as a legacy range. It’s a great bit of business and means that you can now do what you really want to.”
“This is what I really want to do!” She still didn’t get it. “You’ve seen how hard I’ve worked over the past few months. It wasn’t to spite you. It was to inspire myself and everyone in the company. I went to SwissTok to learn, not to showcase my skills.”
“He’s interested in keeping you on. He was impressed by you. If that’s something you want, Gabriel is open to it. Everyone wins. No responsibility, but you still get to work on whatever’s next.”
“Nobody wins. I don’t win. Mum and Gran don’t win.” And what about all the staff at Goldloch? What about Roka’s contract? The more I considered all the implications, the angrier I got. Maybe Mum had been warning me about Margot, not Eliza.
“The only people who win here are you, Eliza for getting the deal done, and no doubt Max is taking a consultancy fee.”
He held up both hands, his smile showing me he had no remorse. “Business is business, Poppy. You know that.”
But I shook my head again. “Not the way I do business.”
Eliza ran her hands through her hair, and for the first time since I’d known her, she looked genuinely rattled. “I’ve been trying to make this right since we got back. Trying to talk these two around, thinking about my future and where it’s going to be. I wanted to work it all out before I came to explain to you. But then SwissTok got involved, and it all got far too complex. So yes, I have been avoiding you.”
“No shit.”
“It’s why I moved out of Dad’s house. I told him I wasn’t going to do this anymore, that I wouldn’t manipulate you into selling. We’ve been fighting about it for weeks.” She glanced towards Max, and for a moment, his mask fell. “We were just arguing half an hour ago. I’m fed up of arguing, so I went for a walk. When I came back, you were on the doorstep.”
I stared at her, trying to process what she was saying. “None of this changes the fact that you signed up to deceive me. You, Max and Margot all had a plan to let Poppy play at being in charge, before telling me no anyway.”
Her calling me Playgirl Poppy in our train carriage came back to me now, like someone was shouting it through a megaphone. Anger sloshed through my veins. She’d never changed her view. She still saw me as a stupid kid who knew nothing.
