Page 58 of Unbind

She purses her lips disapprovingly but doesn’t argue.

‘I think that worked both ways. The judge didn’t see me as fit to care for her, given the stunt I pulled. He ordered that I get some therapy in prison, but that was about it.’

‘Was it juvie?’

‘Nope. I was eighteen, so I got the full works.’

‘Shit,’ she says faintly. ‘Was it… horrific?’

It was horrific and relentless and inhuman and devastating,but I was so broken by that point, so wracked with guilt, that I barely cared.

‘It wasn’t fun,’ is all I say. It was my cross to bear, and I ruined Natalie’s family as well as my own, so I have no intention whatsoever of allowing her to feel any more sympathy than necessary.

‘So how did you get from’—she waves the hand on my thigh around—‘there to here? I mean, who the hell pulls that off outside of a rags-to-riches novel?’

That makes me laugh, because a journalist once used that very analogy in an article about my so-called meteoric rise.

‘Anne, my scary-as-fuck lawyer, gave me a real talking-to when I got sent down.’ She was utterly furious, and I know she was furious on my behalf, rather thanwithme, but she sure as hell channelled that fury into a hell of a bollocking.

‘She told me that I’d already proven to myself and everyone else how royally I could fuck up an already terrible situation with my actions, so I’d better make sure every action from now counted.’

I remember she said I could choose to be a victim or I could choose to be proactive. She told me my sentence could be a spectacular waste of a year of my life or a period of readjustment. Reprioritisation. A time I could use to lay the foundations for not only the kind of life I wanted for myself, but the kind of man I wanted to be.

The kind of man I wanted to be.

Her anger, her vehemence, was probably the biggest compliment I’d received at that point in my life. Her insistence that I counted, that my future and my potential counted, was the seedling I needed—tiny, but with potential buried somewhere deep inside its DNA.

In the same way that a humble acorn carries withinitself a universe of promise, the ghosts of future metre-wide trunks and scalloped leaves, of shelter and abundance equally, so did this exhausted, terrified, angry kid carry in himself that kernel.

Anne, God bless her, was the first person to plant that seedling, to suggest that betting on myself was the smart thing to do.

She was also the first person to thrust a metaphorical mirror in front of me and demand that I acknowledge my own agency. My actions had consequences—I’d proven that beyond a shadow of a doubt—and if I wanted to change those consequences, it was down to me to act accordingly.

Less philosophically, but more urgently, I knew the day I got out was the day I’d start making it up to Quinn and Dad. And I didn’t want to waste a minute.

‘Well, you clearly made your actions count,’ Natalie says now. ‘And it’s all very well to have people say these things to you, or even to believe them, but you made things happen. That’s a big deal.’

I shrug at that, because there were people who found me, who helped me, who dragged me out of that pit of despair, even people who should have walked away.

‘You know I met Anton when I was in prison,’ I say, stopping to laugh at her horrified expression. ‘Hewasn’t in prison—I was. At the time, he ran this kind of entrepreneurship programme at the place I was in and at a women’s one. I signed up because I was bored out of my brain and I’d already wrecked my chances of sitting my A Levels.’ I shrug. ‘It was something to do, and I fucking loved it.’

Understatement. That programme put a fire in my belly like nothing else had, even before I’d got myself banged up.

‘You’re kidding me! You’ve known him all this time? My God, he must be so proud of how far you’ve come.’

‘He was until his wife got mad that her husband’s protegé had beaten up your brother,’ I tell her with a smile, and she grimaces.

‘Yeah. I can’t imagine incurring Gen’s wrath is fun for anyone, even the mighty Anton Wolff.’

I shudder as I think of how pissed off she was that evening, how utterly outraged on Natalie’s behalf. ‘Tell me about it. You’ve got a badass woman in your corner there.’

‘She won’t believe it when I tell her I spent another night at yours—willingly, this time. But go on, tell me about this programme.’

I grin at the memory. ‘It was a theoretical case study about this failing packaged consumer goods company—it was a Harvard Business School one, if you can believe it. I think that was probably part of his plan: giving us an HBS case study was his way of saying he believed in us.

‘Anyway, I was the youngest person there, and definitely the keenest. I got some flack about it from the others. But I was fucking obsessed. He gave us each a folder and it had all sorts—P&Ls, balance sheets, qualitative stuff, sector themes, everything.

‘We had to come up with a plan for their board to vote on. Their financials were really shaky. Everything was on the table—raising equity, taking on more debt, divestments… whatever we thought would stem the outflows. He came back once a month, and I had more questions every time he showed up.

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