If I Never Met You: A Novel

It was half an hour until home time, and Laurie longed for 5:30 p.m. like a long-lost lover. She used to routinely work late, but she’d started to honor her official clocking off, to the minute. Who or what was going to stop her?

“She had a funeral, for her cat?” Bharat said.

“Noodle was twenty!” Di said. Laurie was Team Bharat on matters involving Di’s sister Kim, who did appear to be somewhat semidetached from reality, as a healing-crystal proponent and anti-vaxxer.

“It doesn’t get less ridiculous with each passing year.”

“Noodle was known in the area; she wanted to give people a chance to pay their respects.”

“Were there . . . readings?”

Di pursed her lips. “A couple of short ones.”

“Hahahaha! Oh, my life! Imagine if the neighbors looked over the fence. Oh, here I am, having a totally normal one, reciting a passage from Corinthians over the burial site of a Persian cat.”

The details of the passing of Noodle were interrupted by Kerry.

“Laurie. Mr. Salter wants to see you,” she said, wearing malignity and triumph like a heady perfume. “Are you free now?”

“Oh? Yeah.”

Laurie hard gulped and got up. This wa . . . not good. The timing suggested that he’d either heard about Jamie or the arsonist or both, and she was about to face a reckoning. Kerry was animated by an expectant energy that certainly suggested so.

“Go straight through,” Kerry said with a moue of her mouth, smoothing her pleated skirt under her behind as she sat back down at her desk.

Laurie knocked softly and waited for “Come in,” because Kerry was more than capable of sending Laurie in unannounced like that, to make her look bad.

Mr. Salter’s office was a strange separate realm, like being in Dumbledore’s.

You only ever saw this interior on hiring, firing, promotions, or significant bollockings, so it was impossible to disassociate it with quaking fear.

It probably looked a lot like many a provincial law partner’s lair—bookcases with deeply boring tomes on tort, a crystal water decanter, framed photos of privately schooled progeny. Mr. Salter had upright twenty-something identical twin sons, known among the workers as the Winklevosses. Mr. Salter himself was a ringer for Bernie Sanders.

“Ah, Laurie, hello,” he said, looking up from papers on his desk, putting down a pricy-looking pen. It remained a status symbol of fully private office space. If Laurie had a solid silver ballpoint, it’d mysteriously go missing within hours. He didn’t sound enraged. But then Salter never raised his voice; why would he, when his carefully chosen words could slice you into slivers like sashimi.

“You wanted to see me?”

He gestured for her to sit. Jesus, had Michael been in to see him?

“Yes.” He leaned forward on his desk, arms folded. Mr. Salter was about five foot five, so he had a chair that must’ve been jacked to the highest level so that he could try for a vague looming when you sat opposite.

“Now I want you to understand that everything we are about to say to each other is both entirely confidential and entirely of a voluntary nature. You are not in any trouble.”

“Oh,” Laurie said.

“You sound surprised?” He smiled.

“Hah, well . . . you worry, don’t you.”

“What goes on outside these offices is by and large, none of mine or Mr. Rowson’s business. It only becomes our business if it has any significant bearing on the company’s operational ability or reputation.”

“Yes.” Not quite tallying with what Jamie said, but go on.

“Yet we also feel we have a duty of pastoral care toward long-standing employees of great value to us. Such as yourself.”

“Thank you.”

“In the spirit of that care, not in feeling we are owed an account—I’m told that you and my head of civil Daniel Price are no longer in a relationship?” He waved at Laurie not to speak yet as she opened her mouth. “And that yourself and Jamie Carter are now involved. As a boss who would also like to think of himself as a friend . . .”

Whoa. Laurie had known she had a “favorite” status, but Salter getting so gooey as to claim himself her friend was, as Bharat would say, some next-level shit.

“I’d like to think that you feel you’re being treated well by young Mr. Carter. I think he’s very fortunate if he has secured your affections.”

“Thank you. Yes, very well. He’s great and we have a lot in common.” Laurie blathered this off the top of her head, as she’d rather die a thousand deaths than say anything to Salter that could be construed as code for rampant boffing.

“Do you?” he said, with a tone that was a real question, not courtesy.

“Yes, we’re both very serious about our work . . .” Laurie smiled. “And equally serious about eating and drinking well at the weekend.”

“Haha! Amen to that.”

Laurie’s main point of bonding with Mr. Salter when they had to make Christmas party small talk was always his wine cellar, and botched attempts at cooking.

“OK, good. Good. I’d never have put you two together, but if it’s working well for both of you, good. You’re attending the Christmas party, I hope?”

“Oh, yes, absolutely,” Laurie said. Gah.

“Good, good. Well, that was all. Marvelous stuff with the Brandon case.”

“Oh, thank you!” That was a Found Innocent of All Charges of weeks back.

Laurie beamed as she passed Kerry on her way out, who glared back with barely concealed disappointment and irritation. Hah, Kerry wasn’t as clued up as she liked to pretend, then, if she hadn’t known that was going to be benign.

Laurie waited until she was leaving for the day to WhatsApp Jamie and say she might’ve just given him a major boost to his hopes of promotion.

Jamie

Seriously? YOU BEAUTY. Thanks, L. Jx

Still glowing, she was stopped in the lobby by the office junior, Jasmine, their trainee legal clerk.

“Are you seeing Jamie Carter?” she said, pushing strands of her long, thin hair out of her moonlike face. She had hunted eyes and a tremulous demeanor that made Laurie worry for her.

“I’m not quite sure you’ve got the right to ask me that, Jasmine,” Laurie said, taken aback.

“No, sorry. Everyone is talking about that photo of you . . . together.” Jasmine somehow managed to make it sound like it was worthy of Pornhub.

“Well . . . yes,” Laurie said, shrugging.

“I didn’t think you liked him?”

“Hah, why?”

“You said he was, uh, untrustworthy. You said he could never be trusted. You said he was like a tomcat that had not been neutered.”

Jasmine sounded as if she was reading a translation from the original Turkish and Laurie bit back the impulse to shrug: Did I, so what? as this clearly mattered to Jasmine.

“Ah. Snap judgment, I suppose? Don’t pay too much attention to me.”

Jasmine’s expression spelled confusion and betrayal and she searched Laurie’s face intently for something. Oh, no. Laurie realized what Jasmine was searching for—nothing about Laurie, per se, but what specifically Jamie Carter had fallen for. Thanks to Laurie verbalizing her antipathy to Jamie, Jasmine’s fevered imaginings had never gauged her as a threat, and yet there Laurie was, suddenly by his side.

Poor Jasmine. She had the strained look on her face of the stricken boy band groupie who was about to let out a primordial howl of longing and be wrestled away by burly security.

“He’s nice . . . but it’s very new,” Laurie said. “Who knows where it’ll go. If anywhere.”

“Oh?” Jasmine said, at first in surprise, and her look of horror deepened. Laurie was messing with Jasmine’s future husband and captain of her heart for nothing serious, the facetious whore!

What was left to Laurie to say, as comfort?

“I’m sure he’d say the same,” Laurie said.

“Actually, he told Jemma you were the funniest, cleverest person he’d ever met.”

“Aw, did he?” Laurie said, genuinely touched.

“Don’t hurt him!” Jasmine said in a sudden impassioned cry, and rushed out, apparently with “something in her eye.”

She left a bemused Laurie staring at three receptionists, for whom Christmas had come early.