“Sure.”
“Chloe. Would you have… if she’d wanted to turn it into something real would you have?”
Sarah thought about her answer. “If you’d asked me then, yes. I left her place that morning convinced that it was the start of something special. I think she thought that too. But then I think my mistake was to leave it too long, I gave her long enough to get scared. And once she was scared that was it. If she hadn’t got scared I think we’d have started something. But now, looking back, I’m not so sure, or at least I’m not so sure it would have lasted. We’d been good friends for months and whether we could have made the shift to girlfriends, I don’t know.” She shrugged. “I guess I’ll never know.”
“But you’d have left Hugo for her?”
“I feel awful saying it, but… yes. I thought about it. And it’s terrible but I think that was a turning point. When I went back to work on the surface we were this amazing couple, me a high flyer in the city, we bought our house near the school, much bigger, character in spades, we bought my apartment… the one you know. We could have it all. Beneath it though it’s not like we were struggling, but we became more like friends who lived together and coparented rather than lovers. Kids can do that to you though, I know that. I think that’s what he tells himself. I know there’s more and… he doesn’t know about any of it.”
“Were you tempted to tell him?”
“Yes… once or twice, but what would I tell him?”
“The truth? Doesn't he deserve to know?”
“If it was just him… maybe. But it’s the kids too. They’re so important to me, I… what if I lost them? Or saw them less?”
Amy watched Sarah as she talked and could see the emotion… this wasn’t a new topic for her, obviously, and it was clear that she’d given a lot of thought to it.
“Tell me about after maternity leave.”
“About a year after coming back, I signed up to the firm’s mentoring scheme. Completely from the perspective of giving back, no ulterior motive whatsoever. I got paired with two mentees, one man, one woman, both recently qualified.” She looked at Amy. “I didn’t count on falling for the woman. Hard. And her for me. I won’t name her because while she left the firm you’ll have come across her professionally, but we had what I can only call a torrid affair. Me in my thirties with a husband and kids at home, her in her mid-twenties, beautiful, confident, we worked well together.”
“What happened?”
“She wanted us to move in together, and… I liked her a lot. Really a lot. We had a lot of fun together… and no, I don’t mean just like that. But was she Jess? Or Chloe? No. It got messy, like her threatening to tell Hugo messy. Like her threatening to tell the partners messy. There was a moment when I nearly said yes, but it wasn’t right. She deserved more than I could give her.”
“What’s she doing now?”
“She moved firm so that we didn’t have to see each other every day. The last time I saw her, a couple of months ago, I bumpedinto her at an industry event. She’s living with someone, she seemed happy.”
Amy watched Sarah for a long moment. “Do you wish it had ended differently?”
“No… no, I don’t. It was this passionate affair we had, it was crazy. I learned things. She liked to be more submissive in the bedroom and that’s where I discovered that I tended towards the more dominant side.” She hesitated and smiled, her cheeks reddening. “Well, until you came along anyway…”
Amy smiled back, her head tilted. “Happy to be of service.”
There was a few moments of silence while they each drank their wine. “And after her is, I think, where it all started going wrong. I think, looking back on it, that I panicked. I realised… I guess I realised that I’d screwed Jess up and I’d screwed Chloe up, and I’d kind of screwed it up with my mentee too. I was a lesbian playing at being straight, I was living pretty much the exact opposite life to what I wanted, and I was already the wrong side of thirty five and not getting any younger.”
“That shouldn’t matter…” Amy started to say, but Sarah interrupted her.
“It does. Trust me, it does. You’ll understand more when you’re my age. You start… you realise that what you’ve taken for granted won’t last forever. And I know I’ve got a look that suits me at my age, I know I’m still only in my thirties, but I’m terrified of when I become invisible to women who would’ve been interested before.”
“So you built your mentoring program?”
“Exactly. Not right away though. After that I told myself never again. Too messy, too dangerous, and I meant it. For all of six months…”
Sarah looked a little sheepish. “There was another woman approached me to help with something. She actually came on to me, out for a drink one evening, and I went with it. And then I thoughtwhat if I do this differently? What if I’m upfront at the outset?No ambiguity, no catching feelings, no one getting hurt. Adults, clear terms, everyone knows where they stand. The power imbalance… it didn’t even occur to me, I’m embarrassed to admit now. I think I underestimated what that dynamic meant.
“And it worked, or I told myself it worked. That woman was grateful for the help and she seemed happy. I got to feel… wanted. Like I still existed as a woman that beautiful women desired, rather than invisible as another working mum back at work. It built from there, usually three or four mentees at any one time. And there were some, of course, who didn’t want to take those terms and that was fine, we’d been clear that there was no come back and it’s always been true… I’ve been scrupulous in ensuring that.
“Over time I refined the approach, I suppose. This sounds awful when I say it, but the initial chat, the drinks or dinner, the reveal of the quid pro quo. I’ve got good at spotting and tapping into any latent tendencies, creating the right environment.” Sarah smiled wryly. “You might recognise some of that.”
“I think I might…”
“By the third or fourth I’d stopped even questioning whether it was right, because nobody complained and everybody seemedhappy. Their careers genuinely benefited and I’d built all these safeguards in my head. You asked me how many the other night. Eleven, including you. Eleven women. And I was so convinced the system worked that I never once stopped to look at it from their side. I turned heartbreak into a system, Amy. That first mentee nearly destroyed me, so I made sure it could never happen again by stripping out the feelings and making it transactional. No one gets too close, no one gets hurt. Clean.” Sarah paused. “Until you made me look at it properly.
“And here’s the core of it. When you asked me on Monday how I’m different to the senior associate, I couldn’t answer. I can now. I’m different because my motivations are different… I’m not trying to get another notch on the bedpost. I’m not trying to make myself feel good just because the hot twenty something associate with a boyfriend performed some sex act on me. I’m not trying to fuel my ego. All I’ve been trying to do is make the most of my time while I’m still young enough, driven by fear.” She grimaced. “That’s not pretty, is it? But it’s true. Not ego, not conquest, just fear. Fear of getting old and fear of regret.”
