to South America soon after they first met. By the time he came back to Africa, she had moved on to the Balkans. That was how it was for people like them, an occupational hazard. So it remained no more than a spark, a maybe-one-day, until they met again just over a year ago, back in Africa. She was falling through the air after the episode they almost never spoke about these days – and he caught her. For that, she would never stop being grateful.
She stumbled into the shower and was still drying off when the intercom sounded: the clients, down at the entrance to the apartment building. She buzzed them in. Allowing for the lift journey, she would have about a minute to get dressed. She scraped her hair back into a rapid ponytail and reached for a loose grey top, which fell low over her jeans. She flung open a cupboard and grabbed the first pair of low-heeled shoes she could see.
Just time for a quick glance at herself in the mirror by the front door. Nothing too badly out of place; nothing anyone would notice. This had been her habit since she had come to Washington. ‘Dressing to disappear,’ Liz, her younger sister, had called it, when she was over on a visit. ‘Look at you. All greys and blacks and sweaters that a family could camp in. You dress like a really fat person, do you know that, Maggie? You've got this drop-dead gorgeous figure and no one would know it. It's like your body's working undercover.’ Liz, blogger and would-be novelist, laughed enthusiastically at her own joke.
Maggie told her to get away, though she knew Liz had a point. ‘It's better for the work,’ she explained. ‘In a couples situation, the mediator needs to be a pane of glass that the man and woman themselves can look through, so that they see each other rather than you.’
Liz was not convinced. She guessed that Maggie had got that bullshit out of some textbook. And she was right.
Nor did Maggie dare let on that this new look was also the preference of her boyfriend. With gentle hints at first, then more overtly, Edward had encouraged Maggie to start tying her hair back, or to put away the fitted tops, tight trousers or knee-length skirts that constituted her previous urban wardrobe. He always had a specific argument for each item: ‘That colour just suits you better’; ‘I think this will be more appropriate’ – and he seemed sincere. Still, she couldn't help but notice that all his interventions tended to point her in the same direction: more modest, less sexy.
She wouldn't breathe a word of that to Liz. Her sister had taken an instant, irrational dislike to Edward and she didn't need any more ammunition. Besides, it wouldn't be fair on him. If Maggie dressed differently now, that was her own decision, made in part for a reason that she had never shared with Liz and never would. Maggie had once dressed sexily, there was no denying it. But look where that had led. She wouldn't make that mistake again.
She opened the door to Kathy and Brett George, ushering them towards the spare room reserved for this purpose. They were in the couples' programme devised by the state authorities in Virginia, a new ‘cooling off’ scheme, in which husbands and wives were obliged to undergo mediation before they were granted a divorce. Normally, six sessions did it, the couple working out the terms of their break-up without any need to call a lawyer, thereby saving on heartache and money. That was the idea anyway.
She gestured to them to sit down, reminded them where they had got to the previous week and what issues remained outstanding. And then, as if she had fired a starting gun, the pair began laying into each other with a ferocity that had not let up since the day they had first walked in.
‘Sweetheart, I'm happy to give you the house. And the car for that matter. I just have certain conditions—’
‘Which is that I stay home and look after your kids.’
‘Our kids, Kathy. Ours.’
They were in their early forties, maybe seven or eight years older than Maggie, but they might as well have come from another generation, if not another planet. She had listened with incomprehension to the rows about who got to use the summer house in New Hampshire, which in turn triggered an almighty clash over whether Kathy had been a good daughter-in-law to Brett's father when the old man was sick, while Kathy insisted that Brett had been consistently rude whenever her parents came to stay.
She had just about had it with the Georges. The two of them had sat there on that couch, slugging it out for four consecutive weeks without taking a blind bit of notice of a word she said. She had tried it soft, saying little, offering a gentle nod here and there. She had tried it hands-on, intervening in every twist and turn of the conversation, directing and channelling it like a stream running through the middle of the room. She preferred it this second way, firing off questions, chipping in with her opinions, no matter if Little Missy over there turned up her nose or if Mr Rod-Up-His-Arse squirmed in his seat. But that didn't seem to work either. They still came back in as much of a mess as when they first started.
‘Maggie, do you see what he did there? Do you see that thing he does?’
Listening to the pair of them made Maggie despair that she'd ever made this move in the first place. It had made sense at the time. ‘Mediator’ the job spec said and that's what she was. OK, this was not quite the area she was used to, but mediation was mediation, right? How different could it be? And, after all, she couldn't face going back to the work she had done before. She had become frightened of it, ever since she had seen what could happen when you failed.
But Jesus Christ, if these two weren't convincing her she'd made a terrible mistake.
‘Look, Maggie, I hope this is already firmly on the record. I am more than happy to pay whatever maintenance budget we all decide is reasonable. I'm no miser: I will write that cheque. I just have one condition—’
‘He wants to control me!’
‘My condition, Maggie, is very, very simple. If Kathy wants to receive my money for the upbringing of our children, in other words, if she wants me to effectively pay her to bring them up, then I would expect her to do no other job at the same time.’
‘He won't pay child support unless I give up my career! Do you hear this, Maggie?’
Maggie could detect something in Kathy's voice she hadn't noticed before. Like a rambler spotting a new path, she decided to follow it, see where it led.
‘And why would he want you to give up your career, Kathy?’
‘Oh, this is ridiculous.’
‘Brett, the question was directed at Kathy.’
‘I don't know. He says it's better for the kids.’
‘But you think it's about something else.’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, for Christ's sake—’
‘Go on, Kathy.’
‘I wonder sometimes if, if … I wonder if Brett kind of likes me being dependent.’
‘I see.’ Maggie saw that Brett was silent. ‘And why might that be?’
‘I don't know. Like, maybe he likes it when I'm weak or something. You know his first wife was an alcoholic, right? Well, did you also know that as soon as she got better, Brett left her?’
‘This is outrageous, to bring Julie into this.’
Maggie was scribbling notes, all the while maintaining eye contact with the couple. It was a trick she had learned during negotiations of a different kind, long ago.
‘Edward, what do you say to all this?’
‘Excuse me?’
‘I'm sorry. Brett. Forgive me. Brett. What do you make of all this, this suggestion that you are somehow trying to keep Kathy weak? I think that was the word she used. Weak.’
Brett spoke for a while, refuting the charge and insisting that he had wanted to leave Julie for at least two years but didn't feel it was right until she had recovered. Maggie nodded throughout, but she was distracted. First, the intercom had sounded while Brett was speaking, followed by the sound of several male voices, Edward's and two or three she did not recognize. And, worse, by her