It didn’t sound like fun to him, but he also knew that Jane was more ambitious than he was, and her family expected a lot from her. It was a vast difference between them. Her father had driven both of his daughters hard to become high achievers, and her sister Margaret’s success in finance was a lot to compete with. He didn’t envy Jane, despite everything her parents had provided for her. They expected a lot in exchange, and she didn’t want to disappoint them. His parents just said they wanted him to be happy, whatever route he followed. He wasn’t sure the Addisons ever thought that was important. Neither did Jane. All she thought about was what she was going to accomplish in the coming years.
It was a race she was going to run every single day. And the race had started in earnest now with her first serious job. He didn’t envy her at all. In fact, when he thought about it, he felt sorry for her. She was going to miss out on a lot in life if she continued on the path she was on. She was driven by a force he didn’t really understand. It was a white-hot fire within her. She had to meet her parents’ high expectations and her own. It was a tall order for anyone. And dating her wasn’t easy either.
Chapter 2
Hailey left her office half an hour later than usual, which was always a problem when she did. She never made a point of it and stayed until her work for the day was done. But a late call from an author, a crisis Francine or Bob wanted help with, or a delay of any kind caused her problems with her babysitter, who never wanted to stay overtime. She had several other sitters she could call, and often did, if one of the kids was sick. She never mentioned it being a problem to Francine, who had kids of her own. Hers were teenagers and had been latchkey kids for years. They were three and seven when she got divorced, and she taught them early to be independent. She had her daughter watch her little brother at an early age until Francine got home, and managed without full-time babysitters even when they were very young. They went to a neighbor if they had a problem, which they seldom did. They had learned to be self-reliant. She tried to save on childcare as soon as she could and didn’t want to waste money on help. Her kids learned to fend for themselves and were unusually responsible now as teenagers. She was proud of them. They had managed for years without child support from her ex-husband, and they all lived on her salary. Her ex spent the little he made on his new family and ignored his old one. She was bitter about that too.
In Hailey’s case, it was different. Her husband had died so suddenly that she wasn’t prepared in any way. Her children were young and there were three of them. Arianna was six, Bentley four, and Will eight months old when Jim died. She had no choice but to rely on sitters when she went to work at the agency where she was lucky enough to find a job. She couldn’t support them and herself on what she would have made as an editor, pay for childcare, and still live in the city. They had been spending all of Jim’s salary to live in a spacious apartment in Gramercy Park downtown and lead a pleasant life with three children, with her not working. Everything changed the moment he died, with no insurance and almost no savings, and no salary of her own. She had no family to help her. Jim’s father had died when Jim was young, and his mother had died of early Alzheimer’s. Hailey had no one to turn to and had to rely on herself and the people she hired in order to go back to work. At least all her children were now in school full-time. The sitters picked them up after school and brought them home. Hailey took them to school in the morning before she went to work. She tried to be home no later than seven every night, no matter how busy she was, and she never used sitters on weekends. She had had no social life to speak of for the past five years. She couldn’t afford one. She was more of an anxious mother than Francine, and didn’t want to leave her kids alone. Francine had taught hers to be independent early on. It was a difference of philosophy they had discussed several times if they saw each other socially.
Hailey had been lucky to find an inexpensive two-bedroom walk-up apartment on the West Side. She and Arianna slept in one room, and Bentley and Will slept in the other. The building was safe and in a modest, mixed neighborhood.
She never talked about her kids casually at work, or that it was occasionally a struggle to get help with them. If they got sick at school, she did everything she could to find someone who could pick them up and keep them for her so she didn’t have to leave work to do it. She never reminded anyone at the office that she had children to deal with. She made work her priority during office hours, and her children the rest of the time, and she never complained about it. It was a constant juggling act. It might get better when they were older, but she was still in the thick of it with young kids.
It was seven-thirty when the cab dropped her off, and she hurried up the steps of her building. When she had time, she took the subway home, but she had been in a hurry, so she hailed a cab as she walked out of her office building. She let herself into the apartment, and she could hear them talking in the kitchen. The kindly Jamaican woman, Felicity, who babysat for them on most days, had made dinner for them, as she often did.
Hailey threw her coat over the couch in the living room and hurried into the kitchen. Only Arianna and Bentley were at the table, and Felicity was putting their dishes in the dishwasher. Dinner was over. She had missed it, again. It was a struggle to get home early enough to eat with them.
“Where’s Will?” she asked them. Her six-year-old son was noticeably absent.
“He threw up all day, Mom,” Arianna, her eleven-year-old daughter, said with reproach in her voice. “And I need help with my math homework.” It was Hailey’s worst subject too, and always led to arguments and tears when Arianna didn’t understand the problems, and neither did her mother. “And I have a science paper due.” They gave her a mountain of homework, and Hailey could hardly keep up with it in the little time they had together at night.
“We’ll deal with it when the boys go to bed,” she said, trying to sound calmer than she felt, and turned to Felicity, who was eager to leave now that Hailey was home. She had children of her own, teenagers who got into mischief if she stayed too late. “Does Will have a fever?” Hailey asked her. It was the second time in three weeks that he’d been sick.
“No,” Felicity said, shaking her head. “But he threw up three times after I picked him up at school. He’s sleeping now. He didn’t want dinner.”
“He threw up all over the little rug in our room,” nine-year-old Bentley informed her with a look of disgust.
“I put it in the washing machine. It’s drying now,” Felicity reassured her. It was one less thing to deal with as Hailey sat down at the table with them, and tried to focus on them and clear her mind of everything she’d done at the office since that morning. This was their time now. She led a double life, a literary agent to some very high-powered writers by day, and a mother to three children who needed her full attention at night. She felt constantly guilty about them because of the time she couldn’t give them.
She had loved being a full-time mother when Jim was alive. Her life had been a relay race ever since he’d died, trying to cover all the bases, and being mother and father to them. They all resented how hard she worked, and the fact that she couldn’t speak to them openly when she was at the office. She told them they had to wait until she came home at night to deal with their problems. But sometimes they forgot and called her anyway. She got off the phone as quickly as she could when they did that. She wanted no crossover or overlap between her two lives. She had to be two people now: a mother and an executive. She managed it as efficiently as possible, although sometimes it got out of hand. She was very organized, which averted crises whenever she could manage it. A surprise illness or an accident turned everything upside down, as it had today. Arianna and Bentley still remembered their father, although dimly. Will had been a baby when he died, and never knew him. Arianna often said that “if Dad were alive things would be different.” Bentley said it to mimic her, and in both cases what they said went straight to Hailey’s heart and convinced her that she was failing, but she couldn’t do anything differently. They had every spare moment of her time when she wasn’t working.