A heavy silence slipped into Lily’s ears, and she felt untethered, as though she might tip forward out of her chair onto the gray-carpeted floor. She was aware of a need to fill the silence, aware that it was her turn to speak, but she couldn’t grab hold of the words spiraling in her head, couldn’t navigate them toward her mouth and out through her lips.

“I do realize this creates a lot of uncertainty but let’s not jump to too many conclusions until we’ve had this call with the US office.”

Nisha smiled with unnerving warmth and Lily looked at the floor, not wanting Nisha to see the heat she could feel in her cheeks. She waited for Nisha to say more, but when she looked up, her boss was standing by the office door, poised to open it, glancing at her watch.

“We’ll catch up again on Monday, OK?”

Lily managed to nod, understanding that the meeting was over and it was time for her to leave, but for a few disconcerting seconds she wasn’t able to communicate those facts to her legs. She sat pinned to the pale blue sofa wishing that she could somehow be spirited back to the privacy of her own office without needing to move a muscle.

“Lily?”

“Yes, of course. I . . . I’ll see you on Monday.”

Humiliation throbbed in her cheeks and she managed to push herself to her feet, walk toward the door, and glance only briefly at Nisha before heading out into the open-plan office where banks of desks sat empty, computer screens blank, telephones silent. All the way through the maze of desks, Lily kept her eyes fixed firmly forward until she reached her own office, stepped inside and closed the door behind her.

Blinking away the tears, Lily looked around the space that had been her second home for the past eight years. The room seemed to sway in front of her and she grabbed at the back of the sofa to steady herself, needing to hold on to something solid while her future spun out of reach.

She tried to order her thoughts, tried to imagine how her life might look in six months’ time, but couldn’t. Slumping into the chair at her desk and burying her head in her hands, Lily felt her life begin to unravel, like a loose thread on an old sweater, a feeling she had first experienced almost thirty years before and which she had spent the next three decades trying to ensure she would never feel again.

Chapter 24

Christmas Day 1988

“Will you two be OK while I make a start on lunch?”

Her mum sips the lemon and ginger tea that she has been drinking all morning, trying to fend off the winter cold that is threatening to ruin a Christmas Day already in jeopardy.

Lily nods and tries to smile in response but it is a question, all three of them know, that cannot be answered neatly.