By noon, her office was empty, and Victoria was standing on the pavement outside the bank with a box of personal belongings and a growing sense of unreality. The heat was sticky, making the air thick and difficult to breathe. Tourists wilted in the shade, and even the pigeons looked listless.
She couldn't go home. Not yet. Home meant thinking, and thinking meant confronting the enormity of what had just happened. Instead, she found herself walking aimlessly through the city center, past shops and cafes and groups of office workers grabbing lunch in whatever shade they could find.
Her phone buzzed with a text from her mother:Looking forward to seeing you this weekend, darling. Grandmother is particularly excited to hear about your latest promotion.
Victoria stared at the message, her stomach churning. The Cornwall trip. Two weeks of family togetherness, of her parents' quiet pride in their eldest daughter's success, of her grandmother's approving nods when people asked what Victoria did for work. Two weeks of being the golden child, the one who had everything figured out.
Her stomach felt funny. She couldn't do it. She couldn't sit through family dinners and pretend everything was fine. But then she couldn't bear the thought of their faces when they found out that their perfect daughter had been unceremoniously dumped by the career she'd sacrificed everything for.
She also couldn't not go. The Cornwall gathering was sacred, a Sullivan family tradition that stretched back decades. Missing it would require explanations, and explanations would lead to questions, and questions would lead to the truth, and the truth was exactly what she couldn't bear to tell them.
Screw it. She had to go. She'd smile and deflect and pray that no one looked too closely. And maybe, if she was very lucky andworked very hard, she'd have a new job lined up before anyone had to know what had really happened.
THE TRAIN TO Cornwall was, mercifully, air-conditioned, though Victoria still felt like she was slowly melting into her first-class seat.
She'd been applying for jobs steadily for the last three hours, her thumbs flying across her phone screen as she crafted cover letters and updated her CV and tried to project confidence she didn't feel into every carefully worded message. Her laptop was open on the table in front of her, three different recruitment websites running simultaneously.
"Busy day at the office?" asked the woman in the seat across from her, nodding toward Victoria's array of devices.
Victoria looked up, realized she probably looked slightly manic with her intense focus on her screens, and managed a tight smile. "Something like that."
"I know the feeling," the woman said sympathetically. "I don't think I've taken a proper holiday in years. Always something urgent that needs doing."
Victoria grunted in response. As of Tuesday morning, she had no urgent business that needed doing, no clients who required her attention, no meetings that couldn't be missed. The revelation was oddly vertiginous.
Her phone rang. Her mother again.
"Darling! I just wanted to check what time your train arrives. Your father wants to know if he should send Davies to collect you from the station."
Victoria glanced at her ticket. "Half past five."
"Perfect. And how are things at work? You sounded stressed when we spoke last week."
Because I was about to be fired and didn't know it yet, Victoria thought. "Fine," she said aloud. "Just busy. You know how it is."
"I do indeed. Your father says you work too hard, but I tell him that's what success requires these days. Not like when we were young and people had time for proper courtships and long engagements." Her mother's voice took on the slightly wistful tone it always did when she started thinking about Victoria's non-existent love life. "Speaking of which, Archie's bringing someone again. Another one. I do hope this one lasts longer than a month."
"Mmm," Victoria murmured, only half-listening as she scrolled through another job listing. Senior Investment Manager, competitive salary, excellent benefits. She began mentally drafting her application.
"And Ambrose says he might bring someone too, which would be… lovely. It's been far too long since we've had a proper family gathering with everyone paired off nicely."
That got Victoria's attention. "Ambrose is bringing someone?" She wondered if her little brother would finally stand up to the rest of the family and bring a man. She rather hoped he would, it would take the attention off her, for a start.
"Apparently so. He was rather mysterious about it, but you know how he is." Her mother paused. "It’s, well, I think it’s a girl. Which is…"
"Confusing?" supplied Victoria. So not a man then. Still, at least her father would be happy. He was the one that insisted on keeping Ambrose’s sexuality on the down low. Afraid he’d lose the financial part of his inheritance, Victoria thought. Distasteful, but then, she’d just had her financial security pulled out from under her, and she sympathized with her father more than she might have before.
"Exactly. Still, I suppose Mama will be happy, and that’s what counts these days, isn’t it?"
Victoria wasn’t so sure about that. She had her suspicions that her grandmother wasn’t as delicate as everyone led her tobelieve. And she had definite thoughts on hiding things, but then, she supposed all families hid things.
She made appropriate noises until her mother rang off, then stared out the window at the countryside flashing past. Fields and villages and the occasional glimpse of the sea in the distance, all of it bathed in golden afternoon sunlight that would have been lovely if it weren't quite so relentlessly, stickily hot.
Her reflection in the window looked pale and strained, her carefully applied makeup beginning to show the effects of heat and stress. She looked, she realized, like exactly what she was: someone whose life had just fallen apart and who was trying very hard to pretend otherwise.
The train began to slow as they approached the next station, and Victoria felt her chest tighten with something that might have been panic. In less than two hours, she'd be back in the bosom of her family, surrounded by people who loved her and believed in her success and had absolutely no idea that the life she'd spent years building had just crumbled into dust.
She opened another job application and began typing with renewed desperation, as if the perfect position might materialize if she just worked hard enough to find it.
