Dean sighs, and then he smiles, and I know it’ll be alright. I know he’ll never make me give up on my dreams, not while this little guy is depending on me to get us through this mess.
He grabs my elbow before I go to scoop up my Joe, and his voice is just a whisper, right in my ear.
“Henley won’t think that, I promise you. Not about you, Lissa.”
I could kiss him. Kiss him for the way he’s looking at me, as though I’m still the girl with straight-As and a big future ahead of her.
“Thanks,” I say.
“It’s the truth,” he whispers. “And that’s what worries me shitless. That it’s gonna be you who ends up hurt, and broken and retracting your comments when you make it a whole lot further than floor eighteen. Because you will. You will make it.”
Hope.
It’s a beautiful feeling.
I shouldn’t smile, not when he’s so worried, so I pretend it’s all for Joe, and choo-choo trains, and the cruddy second-hand trainset I picked up with my first month’s wages.
He deserves so much more than this. And I’m going to get it for him.
If Dean really pushed me, I’d tell him I really don’t have a plan beyond floor eighteen, and I wouldn’t be lying, not technically. The plan post being up close to the area Alexander Henley spends most of his working life is hazy. More a feeling. A feeling that I’ll know what to do when the time comes. Doors opening into darkened corridors, and more doors, deeper and deeper. Like the detective novels I used to pick up from the charity shop as a kid, there were always so many breadcrumbs, a trail unfolding as you flipped the pages, and then BAM, at the end it would all come together, a sense of satisfaction as the whole picture came into view.
That’s how I feel right now. Like I’m at the beginning of something, armed with nothing but that sense of knowing.
Maybe it’ll be a late night. Mr Henley working late as I stumble into his office, and there’ll be a meeting of eyes, a simmering recognition in the darkened room, just him and me, and maybe I’ll tell him, tell him I’m the girl he bummed the cigarette to, the girl who was late.
Maybe he’ll remember.
Maybe he’ll invite me to sit down and ask me all about my life, and I’ll pull the crappy cap from my head and shake my hair loose from my hairnet, and he’ll see something in me.
Something.
Something he wants.
I’m such a fool. Even the thought makes me laugh as I whizz Joe’s crappy train around the track and make the noises.
I’m pretty sure that’s not how a run-in with Alexander James Henley, the puppet master, is going to go down. Maybe sniffing his seat and laughing about it with Sonnie will be the end of it, nothing but a crazy fixation until I find a way up and off this crappy rung on the life ladder.
Before some asshole going thirty over the speed limit ploughed into my parents I was a girl on a mission. Determined to qualify as a criminal lawyer and run into the man who’d stolen my heart over an Insignia cigarette. It was supposed to be one hell of a different story to the way this one’s panning out.
See, we’re from here, Joe and me. From this shitty rundown part of town. My parents too, and their parents before them. Mum and Dad worked shitty jobs they hated, struggling to make ends meet for me and Joseph. They never moaned, not once, not ever. But I was going to be different. I told them so, and they believed me.
Lissa’s going to be a swanky lawyer, they’d say. Not like us.
But I am like them. They kept on going, day after day, working hard, just like I’ll keep going, just like I’ll keep on working hard.
They wanted so much better for me. For both of us.
Our Lissa would run through a wall if there was something she wanted on the other side. She’ll never give up. She’s that kind of kid.
I heard Mum say that once, to Mrs Manning who lived across the hallway.
She was right.
I wanted to step up after the accident. Wanted to hold the pieces together for Joseph, quitting my own A-Levels and taking on my parents’ rent. I wanted to do all of this, and I did.
I want Alexander Henley, and I’ll have him, too.
I just don’t know exactly how.
Yet.Chapter FourAlexanderIt’s days like these I wish I still smoked more than one a day.
Another last-minute fucking plea bargain as my client wrung his shaky hands in the corridor outside, and Cyril Westerton, prosecution lawyer, flapped his saggy jaw and told me my proposal was preposterous. An outrage.
Nothing’s fucking preposterous as far as I’m concerned.