The Passionate Mistake (20 page)

“Is that really what you think of me?”
she said softly in horrified wonder.

“Of course.
” He said it like it was nothing. Like she should have known that would be his attitude. “Only I know you did it for the right reasons. For family. I understand it. It’s a sacrifice. But
he
won’t. For him it’s betrayal. The only way he wouldn’t hate you is if you’re just an office fling. Then he won’t bother to hate you. He’ll just have you thrown in jail for industrial espionage.”

It was her turn to be poleaxed.  

“If you feel that way about what I was doing, how could you let me go ahead with it? How could you let your
own sister
take a fall like that?”

“You’re a grown-up. You can take care of yourself. And you certainly have taken care of yourself, haven’
t you? In bed with the big boss.” His lips was curled in a sneer of open contempt, and it was such agony to hear the love she cherished spoken of like that by
him
. “But you’ve screwed it up, Kate. The only way you can make this good is if you stick with us, because what you’re trying to set up with him will never last. Don’t fool yourself.”

“This isn’t . . . it isn’t like that,” she faltered.

“It’s just idiotic, is what it is. I can’t believe you’d do something so dumb. Give it up already!”

She stared at him, not knowing what to say, what to do,
brimming over with hurt and anger and defiance. He hadn’t swayed her from her path. Only made her feel infinitely alone, knowing that no one stood with her in this.

In the end she just walked to the
front door, picking up her bag from the hook there and letting herself out of the place that had been her home for all her childhood. A hand caught the door before it could close behind her, and for a moment she thought it was Dad or Damian, come to apologize. But it was Janet, and the brief flicker of hope died.

Then she felt ashamed, and offered her sister a hand to clasp. Janet ignored it and wrapped her arms around Kate, pulling her into a hug that abruptly made Kate feel small as she measured the
womanly clasp of a girl who was no longer a child, offering her comfort as an equal.

“Don’t mind them,” said Janet, rubbing her back, and after a frozen moment Kate relaxed and accepted the hug, hot tears welling to run down her face and into Janet’s hair.
“Don’t mind them. They don’t know as much as they think they do. You’ll be okay. Everything will be okay. And if you don’t want to come back here for a while, I can always come to your place every month and we’ll fill your cake tins and freezer instead. You know? Because you’re really close to uni so it’ll be easy to pop over and see you. Or we can meet for lunch and all sorts. Please don’t go away from me just because they’re mean to you.”

“Okay. Okay,” snuffled Kate. “I won’t. You’re right.” She backed off and swiped her eyes with the back of her hand.
“You know . . . you understand I . . .” she faltered, not sure how to explain this other than with absolute frankness that still felt inappropriate between her and her little sister. But she couldn’t leave and let Damian’s words be the only version of the story.

“I
went into Mike’s company thinking I could just take that software and it wouldn’t matter. And then I found it did matter and I couldn’t do it. And I love him and it’s changed everything for me. And Damian’s . . . Damian’s right, he . . . it can’t end well . . . but I . . . oh.” She started to sob and Janet put her arms around Kate again, holding her tight and rubbing her back as Kate’s bitter tears soaked into her cotton shirt.

She didn’t say anything, just stood there quietly. What was there to say? Finally Kate pulled herself together and backed up again, feeling wrecked.

“I shouldn’t let them get to me. You’d think I’d know better by now.” Janet just smiled sympathetically, giving her shoulder a little pat.

“Are you okay to drive?” she asked.

“Oh sure, sure, I should be fine. I’ll just sit here for a minute until I’ve got it together.” She gestured to her car at the curb.

“Do you want some company?
”

“Thanks, but no.
” All she wanted now was to be alone. “I’ll give you a call, shall I?” She asked the question, not sure what she’d hear after the tumult of the past hour. But Janet was steadfast, unruffled, with a composure that surprised Kate.

“Yeah, or text.
Love you.”

“Love you too,
Jayjay,” she said, using a childish nickname she had almost forgotten. Janet gave her a sweet smile and turned away, stopping again to blow a kiss from the front porch and then going inside the house.

Kate stood and watched her out of sight and then opened the door of her car and got into it, feeling immeasurably older than when she had arrived that afternoon.

What did this mean? She had always put family ahead of everything else in her life, and now it was falling apart around her ears. Was Mike really worth it? As soon as she had the thought, she had the answer as well.

Yes
.

But of course it went deeper than just a choice between the two. It was also a choice to be the woman she was supp
osed to be: not just a copy of Dad but an individual with her own thoughts and feelings, her own set of ethics. She didn’t want the process to mean no contact with Dad, though at this moment she wasn’t sure how she would get past that raised fist. It was so sick.

B
ut if Dad didn’t give her the choice of maintaining their relationship because he was too angry at her defection she would just have to accept that. She had clung to her childish, obedient relationship with him for too long. She needed to grow up, like Damian had said. Just not in the way he had meant it.

She saw again
Damian’s face in her mind’s eye; his bitterness, his rage and vicious words. And in a strange sideways slip she saw him not as she
had
seen him, through the eyes of her own hurt and heartbreak. She saw him instead as Mike might have, if he’d been there, weighing up the situation, measuring him. She could almost hear his words: ‘He isn’t ready to leave your Dad. And he’s angry that you are, because he wants to. He’s fighting you and himself’.

It was odd to be able to view the situation with
clarity, to look at the angst and emotional storm that clouded every disagreement with her family, this one only more intense because it was over something so hugely important to her, where she was achingly vulnerable and in the wrong, and because it had skirted physical violence.

She had been coping with lesser versions of that discussion for years now. She had always thought it made her stronger to go through them, to practice standing up for
herself and to voice her opinions even if they were usually squelched. At least she made sure she was heard.

Tonight, even with the anguish of hearing those words from them, seeing that raised fist, still it
was different from how it had been before

Fighting with her father and Damian used to twist her up in her own head until
she wasn’t sure if she believed them more than herself; like the ground had shifted under her feet until she didn’t know where she stood.

She was
no longer living inside a world of emotion dominated by them.

It was because she really
stood outside it now. She mourned this loss of her father and her brother like they had been cut out of her but the sick dynamic between them . . . She wasn’t trying to figure out how to work with it, to survive inside it. She was free.

It hurt. Oh it hurt. She could feel the shards of loneliness and abandonment already. But she had Mike.
And Janet. She had herself, too. The person she was becoming. The person she could be proud of, standing on her own two feet. It would be okay, just like Janet had said. Everything would be okay.

Maybe not now, this second.
Nor for awhile. But she was on the road. This was the right way.

She star
ted the car and drove into the night.

Chapter
Twenty

I had a bad day after I left you
she wrote in an email to him when she got home, remembering how hard it had been to leave him early, just after lunch on a Sunday that in her mind belonged to him, to them; sipping kisses from his lips as he said farewell to her at the door of his house, naked against her thin cotton clothes. The day had been perfect while they were together, so it hardly seemed conceivable it had been so bad afterwards.

Not the bake-up with Luke and Janet. That went really well. We made dinner together too and I was thinking I should do it more often with them. I was really happy.

But then I told Dad I couldn’t work in the family company anymore, and he didn’t take it well. He made accusations about me not taking care of the family properly, about abandoning them when they needed me. It got really nasty, and Damian joined in.

I know I’ve made the right choice. It’s been awful there for a while. I feel guilty to say it, but it’s such a miserable place to work. I want to find something better.

It just looks like I can’t do that and stay on good terms with Dad and Damian, and that stinks.

So I’m sad tonight. I wish I could
come crawl into bed with you and forget about it. You’re so good at making everything feel alright. Better than alright. Fantastic. I miss you already.

X

Before she could log off, a response arrived in her email inbox.

Do you need a shoulder to cry on? Shall I come over and comfort you? I can be there in fifteen minutes.

She panicked. Her hair was already dyed and dried flat ready for work the next day, and he would expect her to be staying home tomorrow, having just quit acrimoniously, so how could she possibly turf him out early enough to dress in her awful baggy clothes and glasses and leave for DigiCom?

She did long to see him though. Was this the moment when she simply didn’t show up to work as Cathy? In the middle of two projects, with another one almost complete and more scheduled in?

She weighed one against the other: a night with him now when she felt so alone, against another few days, or weeks at DigiCom . . .

Maybe she could call in sick tomorrow . . .

But her hair was already dyed, and she couldn’t strip the color out in just fifteen minutes. That made up her mind.

No, I’ll be okay.
Just a bit down in the dumps.Maybe I’ll come over sometime this week and you can make me feel all better
.


His response didn’t take long.

I can use another programmer, if you’re good. You want to show me some of your work?

She sat and stared at the screen, flabbergasted. It was the ideal solution. One she had never thought of. One she had never dared to suggest, even to herself. How crazy would it be? How crazy and how perfect?

Could she really have everything she had ever wanted, all at a single stroke?

How courageous
he was to make that offer, to welcome her so thoroughly into his life, his world. He trusted her so much. She would try, oh she would try to be worthy of that trust. She
would
be worthy of it, of him.

What could she show him? What piece of work was different enough from the things he had seen from Cathy, but still
sufficiently solid to demonstrate her skills?

She had a website she had created as part of a
uni assignment, then expanded in her free time. It really was designed as a showcase of programming stunts, with pictures morphing in response to movements of the mouse, transitions and cascading menus, a merging between art, play and functionality. She hadn’t settled on specific information to populate it, but the shell was in place and the images had a life of their own. She sent him the link and sat back to wait.

While she was waiting, she
logged in to the Techdos server, and copied all the letters from her Techdos work email into another file on her computer. Mike’s were already safe but there were other messages from friends and some nice thank you notes from customers that she’d kept. She had a feeling Dad would be in a slash-and-burn mood, and she didn’t want to leave anything precious within his reach.

She
also copied her list of contacts across and deleted the Techdos email address, setting an automatic response to any incoming mail that would deflect it and simultaneously say she no longer worked there. From now on she would use the email attached to another website of hers as her default email.

Then she removed herself as an employee from the internal servers, wiping away the evidence of her from a system that had owned her for too many years.

It was perhaps another fifteen minutes before Mike’s next letter arrived.

That’s some really solid stuff. More ornamental than what we currently have going, but then we’ve been developing those aspects a little more lately anyway. Your work might dovetail nicely with that. If you’re not worried about being romantically involved with your colleague, come on in and we can hammer out a contractor’s agreement for you. I promise I can (despite temptation) be perfectly proper in the workplace. At least so long as you let me have my wicked way with you outside business hours.

She sat grinning like a loon, reading and rereading his message, almost tap-dancing in place from glee.

You’re on. How about Wednesday? Say Wednesday afternoon? What time would be good for you?

She would tie off whatever loose ends she could on Monday and Tuesday, then disappear and never come back. Not as Cathy. She’d come back as Kate. If Mike didn’t recognize her as the same woman, neither would anyone else. After all, people saw what they expected to see.

They made a formal appointment, then she signed off with a:

Good night Mike. And thanks. This is some kind of wonderful. I’m excited to work with you, to see you in action. It’s going to be fun.

He responded:

It sure is. Good night, sunshine. Sleep well. Sweet dreams. Xx

That night she
did have sweet dreams. The sweet, satisfying dreams of a woman truly, profoundly happy for the first time she could remember in her adult life.