Chapter 18

18

The neat rows of chairs under the marquee have long since been abandoned, and while some people have dropped to the ground on the handful of picnic blankets that were provided, most of us are standing around nursing cool drinks or with plates of food. The presentations are over and team-building activities wrapped up, with Topher Fletcher's grand middle-of-the-year pep talk having segued seamlessly into the arrival of the food and the opening of the pop-up bar. The well-organized all-team meeting has dissolved into rowdy games of boules, a game of tag started by a tipsy marketing department, and plenty of lounging around.

It's a total change from the stern, focused faces of people always hurrying around the office or bent intently over their computers.

I lean back on my elbows in the grass, face tilted up toward the sun. Burnley's head rests on one of my thighs as he sprawls out flat, bemoaning how full he is after scarfing down three burgers and two hot dogs in practically one go from the barbecue. For such a petite guy, he sure can eat.

Elaine sits delicately next to him, legs folded beneath her, with Freya on her other side. Louis and Dylan sit back-to-back, playing some silly game Louis just invented that is a mix of Bullshit and Rock, Paper, Scissors, busy arguing over the nonexistent rules (which I swear Louis changes every time he's challenged on them or is losing the game). Monty ambles back over with a plate laden with vegetable skewers, and Burnley doesn't hesitate to take one.

I jostle my leg to get his attention. "If you're sick on my lap, I'll hold it against you forever."

His defensive retort is mostly lost through a mouthful of chargrilled red pepper and Halloumi, but I'm pretty sure it's something like, "What, me? I would never. You wound me, Anna."

Across the lawn, standing with a group of people I've come to recognize as interns from way back when, Tasha laughs. It's a high, grating sound that carries; I pick it out from among the other sounds of the party, my ears pricking up before I look over at her. She tosses her hair at some guy from HR. Izzy and Verity are with her, and one of the guys from our cohort. Again, I have to wonder if it's only me who dislikes Tasha—if I'm the problem.

With any luck, though, we'll never see each other again after this summer. Even if that means I get offered a job here (I hope) and she doesn't (I also hope).

Turning away from her, I spot some of the other interns scattered about in different groups. A few—mainly the more viciously competitive ones, who apparently care much less than I do about appearing "unlikable" and prefer to keep to themselves—stand around now with their teams from the office. My own team is similarly scattered, so I don't feel obligated to spend any particular amount of time with them beyond building a tower of marshmallows and spaghetti earlier as part of a teamwork exercise. (We came in second; I figured losing to the team of real-life scientists from the labs plus Lloyd was as good a win as we could get.)

I like the venue for the party. I'm told it's not as glamorous or exciting as other years and that the catering is less impressive, but I think it's pretty great. There's a pond with a large water feature reaching up out of it in the middle of the lawn, a collection of young trees in the two far corners, a pretty tangle of ivy behind some flower beds covering up an otherwise imposing and ugly brick wall. It's a spacious garden behind some museum I've never heard of, and it feels weird to find it between a collection of buildings in the middle of the city. I'm not used to thinking of London as someplace with much greenery, not like where I'm from, until I stumble across pockets of it like this. It seems wrong somehow that they should be shut away, hidden like this.

It makes me miss home.

I should probably try to go visit. Maybe next weekend?

No. That's no good. Dad and Gina are taking the boys on vacation next weekend, now school is finished. But another time, I promise myself. Soon.

It's just…kind of hard to talk to Dad lately. Every time I speak to him on video call, I see his face crumple into a frown and he asks, "You're not working too hard now, are you, Anna?" because he knows how much I pushed myself to get here in the first place. He'll ask about plans with the others I don't usually have, and I know what he's thinking. I know what it makes me think.

That I'm sacrificing too much. That it's not worth it. That I'm doing what Mom did.

It doesn't help that he always ends our conversations with, "You know, your mom would like to hear from you, Anna. She's really proud of you and how well you're doing."

If I wanted her to know how well I was doing, I'd tell her myself.

Besides—I'm almost afraid to leave the city. There's some irrational, panicky part of my brain that says if I leave, I'll come back to find my key to the apartment doesn't work and my pass for the Arrowmile offices has been deactivated. They'll decide I wasn't much good at my job anyway and kick me out, or find out I lied about my age and kick me out because of that.

Which is ridiculous, because if they were going to do it, they'd do it regardless of whether I was here or back home with my family. But still. What if I jinx it?

Soon, though. I'll go home soon.

"Hey!" Monty suddenly calls out, lifting a hand high in hello. "There he is! C'mon over here, mate."

Conversation dips as we all turn to see Lloyd making his way over, having changed direction after Monty called out. He's dressed more casually today, a pair of aviator sunglasses propped up in his curly hair and the short sleeves of his plain white T-shirt accenting the toned muscles of his arms, which sends a flurry of butterflies through my stomach.

Beside him is Will. Now that they're side by side, I can see Will is the taller of the two by about an inch and his face is slightly longer, oval where his brother's is angular. His hair is cropped even shorter than the last time I saw him, but other than that, I'm startled by just how alike they look for nonidentical twins. It's no wonder I mistook him for Lloyd initially. The main difference with Will this time is the way he's dressed: it's a far cry from the band T-shirt and shorts combo he wore last time, and more like something Lloyd would wear to the office. His shoes are polished,too.

"All right, guys?" Lloyd nods around at us all in greeting. His eyes skim right over me and—no, I'm not hurt. It's fine. For thebest.

I've been successfully avoiding him all week. I probably deserve to be ignored—if anything, I should be glad about it.

He introduces everyone to Will, and pauses at me before saying a bit too quickly, "And you know Anna."

Anna. Why doesn't it sound right, when I've been insisting on him calling me that for weeks now?

"I know Anna," Will confirms, and gives me a shy, stilted wave, but a warm smile.

Lloyd finishes up, introducing him to Monty and Burnley and then hesitates. Now, he looks at me. It's a furtive, awkward look, more toward my elbows than my face, but he seems to be weighing something.

Whatever it is, he's too late to decide either way—Will takes a seat, expanding our little circle. Lloyd follows suit, striking up a conversation with Freya, apparently a topic from some earlier discussion they had.

"So what do you do, Will?" Elaine asks him. "Are you at college?"

"Yeah. Classics major."

"Edinburgh! God, you couldn't have gotten much further away, could you?" Monty says, laughing, and Will glances at Lloyd before smiling along with the joke.

"Tell me about it. Means I don't get back much during term time, but I like it there. Nice part of the world, you know?"

"Oh, for sure." Monty nods with authority, although I remember him saying the other week he's never been to Scotland. I decide not to point that out.

"Classics?" Elaine asks, smiling politely. "That's so interesting. So different, too!"

"Different?" Will asks. His mouth quirks up, one eyebrow lifting, in a look that's uncannily like Lloyd's. "To what?"

"Well. Just, um. You know." She gestures around vaguely, but we all know what she means. Different from Arrowmile. A blush starts to creep up Elaine's neck and face as she stammers, "I—I just haven't met a lot of people studying it, I suppose. Ended up in a sort of a STEM bubble, with a math degree."

"Inevitably." Will nods, not unkindly. And then he tells her, "The science thing was never really my forte. Lloyd's the geek."

His twin pins him with a deeply unimpressed look. It'd be borderline threatening if he weren't obviously trying so hard not to smile. "Says the guy who tried to teach himself Latin. For fun. "

Will pushes his glasses up his nose. "It was fun."

"I didn't realize you were a science nerd, mate," Dylan says, speaking to Lloyd now. His game with Louis is abandoned; I'm not sure who won, and I don't think they know either. "Thought you were more into the business side of things and that was why you were always hanging around the labs. Checking in on investments and progress and stuff."

"Yeah. I mean, yeah, obviously." Lloyd's shrug is easy, his smile blasé. "I was just pretty good at science in school. Picked up a few things, hanging around at Arrowmile over the years."

I don't miss the look Will cuts him, or the way Lloyd pointedly ignores his brother. Will sees me looking and his mouth twists into a curl that seems to say: What can you do?

It slots something into place. Another piece in the jigsaw of who Lloyd Fletcher is, one I didn't know I was curating. The whole exchange, seeing this new dynamic, feels meaningful in a way I can't quite pinpoint. It's a corner piece in the jigsaw, anchoring something—I'm just not quite sure what yet.

"Bet you're proper jealous of him," Burnley tells Lloyd, jerking his head at Will. "He gets to enjoy a summer of freedom while he's home from college, and you're stuck working."

Lloyd laughs it off, and the conversation slides quickly into the subject of summer breaks. It's a frequent one among the interns, so nothing new, but I let myself get carried along by the familiar rhythm of it, with Will's occasional comments sparking new interest.

Lazy in the afternoon sun, cozy with friendly company, my mind wanders to how Lloyd told Will about the night we kissed. Did he tell him about last Friday night, too?

Not that it matters. Obviously. We can't be anything more than colleagues.

Friends. As challenging as that is.

—

The party shows no sign of ending anytime soon. The venue is booked until ten o'clock, with the intention of people sticking around a while longer picking at leftover food or continuing the morale-boosting bonding experience of lawn games and free drinks.

The heat of the day is just starting to abate and I'm at the pop-up bar to get a drink. I hadn't wanted to get too into the party spirit at what is predominantly a work event, so I've been sticking to soft drinks all day.

One Pimm's won't hurt, though.

As I order, someone sidles up beside me, heavy and unbalanced. Their arm presses into mine before they right themselves.

"Can you make that two, please?" Will flashes me a quick smile, pushing his glasses up his nose. "Hiya. Sorry, I didn't mean to crash into you like that."

"Had a few too many beers?"

"Just naturally woefully uncoordinated," he corrects me.

"Well, better than sneaking beers out of a crate and being sick in the office."

His eyes blow wide. "How did— oh my God. That arsehole. He's never let me live that down, you know, after I told Dad what happened and he got in trouble. We both got drunk, you know. We both had the bright idea to go find that crate of beer."

"Don't worry—from what I heard, Lloyd's end of that story was way more embarrassing than yours."

"The yoga." He scoffs. "Kinda wish I'd been there to see it, you know."

"I didn't realize he got in trouble over it."

Will sighs, fidgeting with the laminated menu on the bar counter. "Yeah. Yeah, I guess I shouldn't be surprised he left that part of the story out."

"I can see what you meant," I tell him, thinking about the last time we spoke. "About him not always being a total prat. Well—he probably was a bit, stealing the spotlight to run a drunk, impromptu yoga class, but I mean the part where he was trying to help you out. I can see why you defended him."

Will smiles softly to himself. His fingers drum absently against the menu. "I heard you guys hung out last Friday."

He says it quietly enough that I know he's conscious people might overhear; whatever Lloyd has told him, he's obviously aware it's not common knowledge. It does something funny to my insides. Guilt? Excitement?

"Yeah," is all I reply.

By now, our drinks are ready. Beads of condensation sweat along the outside of the glasses already. I poke the black paper straw around and take a sip, reveling in it. Aperol Spritz was the first drink I bought after I turned eighteen, finally legally allowed to drink. My birthday isn't until the end of the school year, so I'd been left behind with soft drinks whether I liked that or not, while my friends got to flaunt their new IDs at bartenders and bouncers. A bunch of us went to a beer garden when it was finally my birthday, and even though it poured rain and we had to huddle under the parasols, they were adamant I'd get to enjoy my first "proper" taste of summer in a beer garden—which they unanimously decreed was Pimm's. It was a proper, grown-up, cosmopolitan kind of drink, they insisted. Appropriate, now we were all officially adults.

I'm not sure I like it very much, but I like the memory of it enough that it makes up for the taste.

Will and I drift to the fringes of the party, watching everybody else in companionable silence. A game of boules is wrapping up in the middle of the lawn near the pond. A laugh, hearty and infectious, peals out from the center of the crowd that has gathered around the game; someone shifts enough that I can see Lloyd there. He's collected some of the boules and is juggling four of them, launching them higher and higher, to the amazement and delight of Arrowmile employees and interns. Topher is there, too, having collected the other boules, laughing as he watches. He nudges Lloyd, trying to get him to demonstrate how to juggle so he can join in.

"Does it ever get on your nerves?" I blurt.

I don't know Will. A couple of brief, polite conversations and some secondhand stories from his brother don't amount to knowing him. But he's oddly easy to be around—not in the way Lloyd is, but in a calmer, more present way. I know a few conversations don't make a friendship, but I feel a weird sort of kinship with him, not unlike how I did with Lloyd that first night we met.

So I'm not altogether surprised when he doesn't need to ask what I mean.

Instead, he just says, "You've seen Hamilton, right? I mean, have you?"

"Of course. I'm not a monster."

He chuckles. "Well, you know how Hamilton's always super obsessed with his legacy? Can't stop going on about it, bases all his decisions around it?"

"Sure," I say, although I have no idea where this is going until Will looks back at his brother and dad, gesturing slightly with hisglass.

"Dad makes Hamilton look like he doesn't give a fuck about his legacy."

"Oh."

Oh, indeed. It's another few pieces of the jigsaw. Unprompted, Will carries on.

"And, I get it. He started up this company a few years before we were born, and start-ups are always rough at the beginning. Especially when he had to sink so much of the original funding into development that wasn't going to pay off for a while. It was tough. He worked hard. Poured his heart and soul into it. And…I respect that, I do, but I just wish he hadn't expected us to do the same thing. Everything was always about Arrowmile when we were growing up. I think I learned what a profit and loss statement was before I finished learning my times tables. After we finished up Year Seven—I remember, because when other kids went back to school and we had to talk about ‘what I did on my summer break' in French class, ours was always way different from everyone else's…

"That summer, we spent a lot of time at Arrowmile. Mom had just died, and I don't think Dad knew what to do. With himself or us. He threw himself into work and I guess he thought if it helped him, it'd work for us, too."

"Oh," I say again, and it's all I can manage, not sure how else to voice my sympathy. When Lloyd mentioned his mom dying, I'd never made the connection that it was the same summer he started spending so much time at his dad's company.

"It wasn't too bad," Will says affably, with a fleeting but sincere smile. He shifts from one foot to the other as he gets more comfortable. "It was nice to have some familiar faces around—we knew a lot of the staff already from odd trips into the office—and it was definitely better than being home with this big empty presence where Mom used to be, you know? But it became habit, and Dad started…"

He sucks a breath through his teeth, uncertain.

"You don't…I didn't mean to pry," I tell Will, feeling equally awkward all of a sudden. "You don't have to tell me about all this."

It's not like I have any right to this information. I'm curious about Lloyd, but I'm not owed answers. Certainly not from Will, who I barely know.

But I get the impression he wants to talk about it, that there's some relief in sharing it with someone who might understand, so I wait patiently after he nods that it's okay, until he's ready to carry on.

"I want to say Dad spiraled, but that's not fair. It wasn't quite like that. I think, maybe, after putting so much of himself into the company, he didn't have that separation anymore. What was Arrowmile, what wasn't. We'd become part of that, too. Hanging around during half-terms, getting to know how everything worked. After a couple of years it just started to get…intense, you know? Dad got intense. Started talking about legacy, and how this would be ours one day, trying to insist on us putting in the effort to know everything. Wanted us to know how to run the place like he did before we even finished school.

"I say ‘we,'?" Will says on an inhale, a frown slipping onto his face, "but I mean me. I'm the oldest."

"You are? I—I mean…Lloyd didn't tell me that."

"A whole thirty-eight minutes. It used to be this great big joke when we were little, but then Dad started piling on the pressure, and it just…It wasn't for me anyway, but it terrified me. I started imagining this life where I'd just follow whatever path he laid out, become some carbon copy of him, and…"

"And you didn't want that."

Which, knowing the little I do about Will, is more than understandable. I can't quite picture this shy, modest guy in Lloyd's place, schmoozing and soaking up the spotlight.

"Yeah. It all came to a head when we were picking out our A levels. I picked history, English, French, and you had to get your parent to sign off on it. Dad refused. Said there was no point, it wouldn't help me in this industry. We had this blazing row, but…" He smiles faintly, watching Lloyd clapping a boules teammate on the shoulder for their throw. "Lloyd has a better mind for business than I ever did. He's better with numbers than me. And he likes all the science behind it. He always took the brunt of it when we had work shoveled in front of us to do for Dad, and he did it again. Stepped right up to Dad's side and said it didn't matter what A levels I was doing. He was doing ‘useful' ones. We didn't both want to be vying for Dad's job one day anyway, and he'd be the better fit for it." Will sniffs, but it's dismissive rather than upset. "Dad and I weren't exactly on great terms for a while, but Lloyd started spending more time getting involved at Arrowmile, and eventually Dad didn't care that I didn't want to be."

It's not just a few pieces this time, but a whole section of the puzzle that gets revealed. Suddenly, Lloyd's shiftiness about his degree when I asked why he doesn't just swap to a different course makes so much sense. Will's absence from Arrowmile and the way people talk only about Lloyd—even the way he hesitated after Monty joked that Edinburgh University couldn't be much furtheraway.

I stare at Will for a few minutes, but he doesn't seem angry or agitated about any of it. He just looks… peaceful. Content with his lot in life. Grateful for it, even.

I follow his gaze to where Lloyd is taking his turn at boules.

"Now I feel bad for giving him so much flak about being the golden boy and always swanning around the office, sticking his nose into everything," I mumble.

Will laughs, nudging my arm with his elbow. "At least someone is. Wouldn't want him getting too big for his boots, right?"

"Right."

But—God, I can't believe I didn't know any of this. Lloyd was being cagier than I realized. And it kind of explains why I've seen such different sides of him away from everybody else, too.

"It's been driving me crazy," I admit. "Trying to work out why he seems like a totally different person when we're alone compared to…this. The whole prize pony, peacocking act. Turning the charm up to the max, being the prodigal son and whatever. I guess now I know."

"Like I said, I know he seems like a prat, but don't hold it against him. He's a good guy."

"What would he be doing if he didn't have your dad pressuring him? At college, I mean. Something science-y?"

"Oh, for sure. I caught him looking at chemical engineering courses a few times."

My brow furrows. "So, what, like…the kind of thing where he could figure out how to create new experimental coolants for an electric vehicle? I would've thought that was right up the Arrowmile street. Enhancing the legacy, or whatever. Did your dad really have a problem with it?"

Will pulls a face at me as he sips his drink. "Dad doesn't know. Lloyd never brought it up."

"Why?"

His face falls even as his mouth remains upturned. He's not easy to read in the way Lloyd is, but I'd put my money on him feeling ashamed.

"My guess is he didn't want to rock the boat by deviating from the plan. Didn't want to drag me back into the firing line and another argument."

I think about the different facets of Lloyd I've seen, and the common threads that link them all. The endless optimism and the ever-ready smile, the charisma he wields so effortlessly and how he hides so few of his emotions. The single-minded determination I've seen him display.

I picture him standing between his brother and his dad, never complaining or lording it over Will, just accepting it for what it was with that quicksilver smile, his charm like armor. Guilt squirms in my stomach, tying it into knots, and my mind replays a ruthless montage of all the times I've tried to knock Lloyd off his pedestal in the office.

I glance over at him again. Topher is there, clapping a hand on Lloyd's shoulder as he says something to a few other people.

And again, all I can say is, "Oh."