Page 1 of The Do-Over

PROLOGUE

Do you ever stop to ponder what pivotal events in your life shaped you? I don’t. For me, everything changed on the day Dad left. Although it’s much less regular than it used to be when I was younger, it still haunts my dreams occasionally, playing out the same way every time. It opens on one of those crisp autumn days, where the sky is bright but the wind is cold. I’m eight years old, and I’m walking home from school. Mum is holding my right hand, and my sister Saffy is on the other side of Mum. She’s three years older than me and resists holding hands with Mum because it’s ‘babyish’.

‘Before we get home, there’s something I need to tell you, girls,’ Mum says in a quiet voice. ‘It’s about your father.’

I glance at Saffy, meeting her eye briefly. News about Dad is never good.

‘What’s he done now? Is it the money thing again?’ Saffy asks with the world-weary tone of a pre-teen desperately trying to act older than her years.

‘I’m afraid so,’ Mum says gently.

Saffy rolls her eyes. ‘What did they take?’ None of us are strangers to visits from the bailiffs. It’s been a constant patternof our childhood so far. Every time it happens, Dad promises to turn over a new leaf, showers us with tatty gifts and things improve for a while. Then, just when we think that he might finally mean it, the bailiffs turn up again to repossess the TV and anything else they can squeeze a bit of value out of, and we go back to square one.

‘It’s a bit more serious this time, love,’ Mum tells her, sighing deeply. ‘It seems that your father hasn’t been paying the rent on our house, which he didn’t tell me about until this morning when the man from the council turned up. I’m not sure how to tell you this, girls, so I’m just going to say it. They’ve thrown us out of our home.’

‘But where are we going to live?’ Saffy asks in horror.

‘I’ve spoken to Nan, and she’s agreed to let us stay with her until we get back on our feet. She’s waiting for us at home. The important thing you need to hear is that none of this is your fault, and it’s not your job to try to fix it.’

‘Dad will fix it, though, won’t he?’ I ask.

‘Not this time, Thea love. Your dad’s gone.’

‘Gone? Gone where?’

Another deep sigh. ‘I don’t know, and I don’t particularly care. There comes a time when you just can’t wait any longer for someone to make the right choice. He’s had chance after chance and I can’t do this any more. It’s not fair on me and it’s not fair on the pair of you. From now on, he’s no longer part of our life. It’s us three against the world.’

I can still remember the burning sense of humiliation as we loaded the bin bags containing our meagre possessions into the back of Nan’s car, under the watchful gaze of our neighbours. People we’d counted as friends suddenly wanted nothing to do with us, as if we had some infectious disease they were frightened of catching. The only place I felt safe was school, where the teachers watched carefully to make sure we weren’tbullied. We never saw Dad again; Mum got a letter a few years later to say that he’d died and did she want to organise a funeral for him. By then, our lives were already radically different. As soon as Saffy and I were safely ensconced in secondary school, Mum had swapped her part-time job at the shop for a full-time role as receptionist for a firm of accountants. There, she met Phil, who couldn’t be more different from Dad if he tried. However, after wrestling with it for a while, she decided that closure would be good for all of us, so she paid the fees and we went to Dad’s funeral. It was a perfunctory service and we were the only mourners. We didn’t cry; I don’t think any of us really knew what to feel. Afterwards, Phil bought us all ice creams to break the sombre mood, and I’m not sure we thought about Dad at all after that. We certainly didn’t talk about him.

Given that our story has, generally speaking, a happy ending, I sometimes wonder why the dream still haunts me. I know the answer, of course: it’s to remind me of the seed that was planted that day as I looked out of the back of Nan’s car at our securely padlocked house. I’d always been a happy, slightly lackadaisical child, content to potter along in the middle ranks. That day changed my outlook completely; I studied harder than anyone else, achieving top grades across the board in every set of exams. Nobody was ever going to take my home from me again. I was never going to feel that humiliation again. I was going to defy the odds and be the best I possibly could be. At everything.

1

I sense Margaret’s approach long before she comes into view. Every fibre of my being has been on high alert since this morning, and I subconsciously sit up a little straighter in my chair and focus my eyes firmly on the agreement I’ve been trying to work on. I need to come across as a totally dedicated professional, today of all days.

‘They’re ready for you now, Thea. Would you like to come with me?’ she says softly. ‘Bring your things.’

As we make our way through the open-plan area where the junior associates sit, I’m aware of their eyes following me. My heart is thudding so hard it feels like it might smash a rib and break free at any moment, and my hands are trembling with nerves. I’ve put everything I’ve got into this and, if I haven’t been successful, I’ll have to wait another whole year before the opportunity comes again, so the stakes couldn’t be higher. Although nothing will be announced officially until the end of the day, when all the candidates have been seen, the office grapevine has been humming and, so far, only one of my fellow applicants seems to have made partner. Alana, who was widely considered to be one of the favourites, was spotted crossing thelobby in floods of tears earlier so it would seem she didn’t make it.

Morton Lansdowne is one of the largest firms on the corporate law landscape; as well as the London office where I’m based, we have offices in pretty much every major capital city in the world. For most wannabe corporate lawyers, just getting a traineeship here is considered the dream ticket. Becoming a partner, albeit a junior one, is akin to winning the lottery. The difference between partnership and winning the lottery, however, is that only one of them has any element of luck. Put it this way: you don’t join a company like Morton Lansdowne if you value personal time. There is a work/life balance inasmuch as you live to work. The harder you work, the better you will do. If you expect idiotic things like set office hours, uninterrupted weekends and holidays, then this life is not for you.

One of the highlights of the year, apart from partnership day, is trainee induction day. Like most big law firms, we take a set number of law graduates onto our trainee programme each year. They spend two years with us, moving between departments to get maximum exposure to the different types of work we do for our corporate clients. At the end of the traineeship, only a handful are selected to stay with us as junior associates. The rest, to use the office term, are ‘released back into the wild’. As part of the induction day, the existing associates are invited to meet the new trainees over lunch in the office, and there’s always a good deal of speculation afterwards about which of them are going to make it and which don’t stand a chance.

The lift is taking forever to come. Next to me, Margaret is gently drumming her fingers against her thigh. As personal assistant to Martin Osborne, the managing partner of the London office, she will already know my fate, and it’s hard not to try to read meaning into every little micro-gesture. Where I’m so tense I suspect even my eyelids are stretched tight, she appearsto be totally relaxed. Is that good news, or is it because she’s not taking me seriously?

‘Stop it, Thea,’ she murmurs discreetly.

‘Stop what?’ I whisper back.

‘Trying to read me. This isn’t my first rodeo. Do I know whether you’ve been successful or not? Yes. Am I going to somehow give it away between here and the boardroom? No.’

‘I’m a lawyer, Margaret. I wouldn’t be very good at my job if I wasn’t trying to read you.’

‘And I’m Martin’s PA because of my absolute discretion, among other things. So I can assure you it’s a fruitless exercise. Ah, here we are at last.’

The lift doors open and we step inside. I’m surprised to see my friend Alasdair among the other occupants. He and I joined in the same intake and we hit it off pretty much straight away. He works in Property now, rather than Mergers and Acquisitions where I am, so we rarely see each other. Conversation in the lift is severely frowned upon, so I meet his eyes, raise my eyebrows quizzically and mouth ‘Singapore?’ at him. In return he subtly draws his finger across his neck to indicate that something has obviously gone south with the transaction he was working on, hence his return to London. When the lift stops at the sixth floor, Alasdair steps out, mouthing ‘Good luck’ to me as he goes. On the seventh, the remaining occupants disembark, leaving just Margaret and me to climb to the top floor.

By the time the lift pings and the doors swing open on the eighth floor, where the senior partners have their offices and the boardroom is located, my legs are trembling and I’ve had to clamp my jaws together to stop my teeth chattering. Margaret is obviously aware of my increasing anxiety because she touches me lightly on the arm.

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