Her speech closed to the sound of rapturous appreciation. Rachel dared herself to find his face. It wasn’t difficult. She could just imagine the scent of his aftershave, which she caught when they embraced, just inside the angle of his shirt collar.
*
Of course he followed her back from the launch. Mutually they had decided not to be seen together in public. On the surface neither wanted their position to be compromised – his investment muddied the waters somewhat – but deep down it was their shared reluctance to commit. A no-strings arrangement suited both fine. Secret liaisons at her apartment or his heightened the thrill. Being linked officially made it too serious, too much of a fact. Rachel wasn’t ready for that. She liked the emotional distance.
She was stepping into the shower when she heard the buzzer go.
‘Aaron.’ She answered the door in her gown. ‘It’s two a.m. Can’t you sleep?’
He grinned. ‘Not without you.’ He leaned in and she turned her face away, just a fraction, to tease him, even though she knew she would let herself be kissed.
‘You were sensational tonight,’ he said, his arms looping round her waist.
‘Thank you.’
‘I mean it. I was impressed.’
She could never tell how sincere he was being. Aaron Grewal was arrogant and proud (as she suspected were many multimillionaires), and she had a reasonable inkling he slept with other women. But she didn’t care. This wasn’t about heart and soul; it was about danger and distraction. Aaron was different to what she was used to…to what was missing. He was like her late nights, her coffee, her deadlines, a quick fix to get through, nothing permanent or serious, nothing it would hurt to lose.
Afterwards, they lay in each other’s arms. It was nice to be held, to hear the warm beat of another person’s heart. When she’d won the pitch from Aaron’s firm, they’d told her she was one of the strongest candidates they’d seen. The word had stayed with her, become part of why she’d been drawn into romance with Aaron in the first place. He saw her strength and recognised it. Strength was the reason she was still here. It was how she’d got ahead, being decisive, being convinced: it was how she’d survived.
In the glow of the streetlight, Rachel made out the room around her: a student’s room, a rented room, a room lived in for hours at a time. Interspersed with her plans for the gallery, drawings, reports and journals filled with sketches and emails and wish lists, was a litter of empty cups, perfumes, piled up books, pictures that never made it on to the walls, propped up against wash racks, clothes strewn across the floor, handbags and pill packets and phone chargers…
There were no photographs. Aaron had commented on it when he’d first come over. No framed family, no memories, nothing personal. It hadn’t been intentional, just how things were. She couldn’t help it. The past was a stranger.
‘Goodnight, Success Story,’ Aaron murmured, kissing the top of her head.
She smiled into his chest, feeling the urge to cry. Exhaustion, that was all. And an expression of tenderness she had long learned to live without, so that when she received it, it hurt a little. Rachel had cried a lot at the start of her life, and she had cried a lot in 2012, but she hadn’t cried since. As a rule she didn’t cry. Instead she surrounded herself with noise and lights, with anything but quiet and dark.
It took ages to fall asleep. She would manage a couple of hours and that was what she preferred: a brief sliver of quiet before the day drew her into its comforting, busy embrace. And yet the shorter the sleep, the deeper her dreams… Always they came in bursts, the same one on a cycle for weeks at a time. This one had lasted longer than most. Rachel felt herself floating in a familiar space, inexplicable, tantalising, as known to her as her skin yet as alien as the stars: a dimly lit passage in a huge, impersonal house, a moon-bathed window, coarse floorboards beneath her naked feet. This faraway place called her, whispering, whispering, This is where you belong.
He left before she woke the next morning. Rachel was glad, fixed herself coffee and opened her emails. Her inbox was filled with messages of congratulation. They’d made a mint on some of the more expensive works last night and several write-ups had already appeared in the morning’s coverage, calling the Square Peg launch ‘a triumph’ and ‘an enthralling odyssey into the city’s burning talent’. Paul had written with news that tickets for next month’s exhibition had sold out, and that a renowned London artist wished to make an appearance at the weekend. Rachel summoned Paul for brunch and closed her tablet.
It took minutes to get ready. Despite her lack of sleep, the bathroom mirror told her she looked good. With neat brown hair, warm hazel eyes and a smattering of freckles across her nose, Rachel was no supermodel, but she had a fine figure, great skin and she carried herself well. For a long time she had puzzled over the roots of her appearance. Most people didn’t have to – their parents were right in front of them, or they had pictures to go on, blood relatives to join the dots – and she had thought so many times about what a phenomenon that would be. Imagining her mother and father was a bit like imagining her own hypothetical child, as much of a mystery and a miracle. For she had no positioning in the world, no biological foundation: she wasn’t the branch or the leaf on a tree, running deep into the earth, permanent and enduring; she was her own shrub, small and lonely, with roots barely clinging to the soil.
Rachel had got along fine with her adoptive parents, Maggie and Greg. They had longed for a baby and been unable to have one of their own, and when they’d welcomed her at a week old, it had been the answer to their prayers. She was lucky, she knew: they’d been loving, supportive, attentive, and truthful with her, explaining her adoption as soon as she was old enough to understand. But, really, one was never old enough to understand something like that, to properly get to grips with and accept deep inside without umbrage or bitterness that you weren’t loved enough to be kept in the first place. ‘We chose you,’ Maggie used to say over and over, ‘because you were special. We adored you from the second we laid eyes on you.’ And Rachel used to take reassurance from this – that she might have been cast aside by one set of parents but at least she’d been picked up by another – until her older, more complicated years, when she had learned about the adoption process and that Maggie and Greg hadn’t selected her, she had simply been the first baby to come along. It was hard to get a baby, most childless couples wished for babies and there weren’t enough to go round, so no wonder her adoptive parents had felt she was meant to be.
Rachel knew this was ungrateful and unhelpful, so she’d stifled the truth of her emotions and instead focused on the future, always the next thing, getting ahead, refusing to look behind. When she’d referenced her mother in the gallery speech, she’d been remembering how Maggie used to describe her as ‘bloody-minded’. It was meant, for the most part, affectionately, but in her teenage years it had caused toxic fights. Rachel’s stubbornness, her iron will, whether it concerned dating a boy or staying out or refusing to finish her studies, came from a place that neither Maggie nor Greg could trace in themselves, a place so remote and unknown that it served only to remind them what was missing. That Rachel had a family out there who were just like her, and it was their blood that was running through her veins, not the Wrights’.
Maggie and Greg had died within a year of each other when she was eighteen, so she hadn’t had all that much of them either. At the time she’d mourned, but she never shed as many tears over them as she had over her imagined, other parents. It had seemed thankless and hurtful to pursue her heritage while Maggie and Greg were alive, but after they went there was nothing stopping her. Rachel knew she’d been born in England to English parents,