Page 19 of Minha Dona

You’ve given her what she needed like you gave Caitlin what she needed. And now she’ll go out into the world and use it, and you’ll be left with the satisfaction of knowing you helped and the quiet, lonely ache of wanting more.

She pushed the thought away. Tonight wasn’t about melancholy. Tonight was about celebrating the fact that a nervous, curious twenty-three-year-old had just pinned her against a wall in a side street and made her orgasm so hard she could barely walk back to the bar.

Not bad for a Sunday night, Helena thought, and finished her drink.

Chapter 7

The email arrived on a Wednesday morning a week and a half later, sandwiched between a client update and a reminder about the office’s annual community day. Helena almost scrolled past the generic subject line from a no-reply mailbox (“Annual Global Partner Conference: Invitation”) as she got several of those a week from external vendors who’d worked out her email address from her online profile and were spamming her firm looking for an in, any in they could get, to try to pitch for their business.

But this time she hesitated, because the sender purported to be the Managing Partner’s office… not the local Managing Partner but the head of the whole firm. She checked and, heart suddenly beating a little faster, she opened it once she could see it was legitimate.

Dear Helena,

On behalf of the Global Leadership Committee, I am delighted to invite you to this year’s Annual Global Partner Conference, to be hosted by the Miami office.

As you know, this event is typically reserved for Partners and Senior Leadership. However, each year a small number of high-potential consultants from across our global offices are invited to attend as part of our commitment to developing future leaders. Your outstanding performance over the past year, including your successful international secondment and your leadership on recent engagements, has identified you as one of these individuals.

You will find full details below. Travel budget has been pre-approved by the Global Leadership Committee. Please confirm your attendance by…

Helena read the email twice, then a third time to make sure she hadn’t misunderstood. The annual global partner conference, three weeks from now. The partners-only event that was spoken about in the São Paulo office with a mix of reverence and irreverence… reverence for the networking opportunities and career implications, irreverence for the stories that filtered back about what partners got up to when they were let loose in whichever city was hosting that year with a seemingly unlimited expense account.

She’d known it existed, obviously. Rafael had mentioned it in passing a few times, usually in the context of dropping heavy hints about Helena’s trajectory. But she’d assumed it was at least two or three years away for her until she might be invited, with partnership itself a possibility a few years after that. Being invited now, at twenty-five, was a significant statement from the firm’s leadership.

Helena hesitated for a moment. She was thrilled, genuinely thrilled, but she sent a screen shot to Rafael asking if it was a hoax, just in case, and only really let herself believe it when he replied in the affirmative. Once she’d had that confirmation, she found herself grinning like an idiot… this was a career milestone, the sort of thing that if she made the most of the networking opportunities and was able to impress would accelerate her path in ways that were hard to overstate.

She scrolled excitedly through the agenda, the dinners, the networking drinks, the speakers and discussion groups, and then she stopped, suddenly.

One name leaped out from the page.

The sole speaker for a session on Adoption of Modern Data Environments.

Caitlin.

Caitlin will be there.

Of course she would. She’d made partner this year, the youngest in the firm’s history, and her nickname even before then had been Future Managing Partner, a nickname that was known even in Helena’s office. She was a legend already, and of course she’d be there to network and to cement her place in the firm’s leadership structure. The conference was where partners went. Caitlin was a partner with great things ahead of her. Therefore Caitlin would be in Miami.

Helena stared at the email for a long time.

Nine months. Nine months of near silence, of brief messages and professional distance, of Helena slowly, painfully coming to terms with the possibility, no, the likelihood that what happened in Houston was a closed chapter. And now she was going to be in the same hotel, at the same event, for two nights.

Her first impulse was to call Isabella. Her second was to close the email and pretend she hadn’t seen it. Her third, the one she went with, was to sit quietly for five minutes and think.

What do you want from this?

It was a complete no-brainer to confirm her attendance. Professionally there was literally no downside unless she went there, spent the whole conference drinking, and made a fool of herself. Obviously, that wouldn’t be the case. There’d never be another professional decision as easy and obvious as this one.

And yet…

Caitlin complicated everything.

As Isabella had said, silence is a choice. Unfortunately, though, knowing it wouldn’t make it any easier when she saw Caitlin for the first time. How would Helena react? She’d like to think that she would be calm, mature, oh don’t worry, I’ve moved on too. But that was always easier to say than do. And how would Caitlin be with her? What if she’d grown to deeply regret that crazy week they’d shared, what if she’d written it off as an aberration and she was deeply embarrassed to encounter Helena again? Helena wasn’t sure how she could cope with that.

She pulled out her phone and fired off a message to Isabella.

Hey, I need to ask you about something. Free for lunch?

She got her reply a few minutes later.