‘And you think I will now?’
‘I have ways of making you talk,?
?? I tease, putting a hand on his thigh, creeping it higher slowly until a throat clearing indicates that we’re not alone.
‘Miss Maxwell, Mr Byron-Hughes, welcome aboard.’
‘Thanks, Edward.’ Barrett doesn’t flinch. ‘All set?’
‘Yes, sir. We’ll have you on the ground in a little over an hour.’
I mentally calculate where we could get to in an hour. It’s too close for Napa, but maybe there’s another wine district within an easy flying distance.
‘Great. Let’s go.’ There’s a repressed enthusiasm in Barrett’s response that has me turning to face him again. The evening sun glints in off the windows and hits his skin so he appears—for a moment—to shimmer gold. He’s excited. What the heck has he organised?
Once we’re in the air Edward brings us some more champagne and a platter of food. Cheese, deli meats, seafood; it’s delicious. ‘I didn’t even realise I was hungry.’
He grins. ‘Cheese will do that to you, in my experience.’
‘I do like cheese.’
He angles a little in his seat, looking at me better. ‘You didn’t finish telling me about your charity.’
‘I didn’t start telling you about my charity,’ I say after a beat. ‘And it’s not “mine”. I founded it but there’s a board now.’ And I still donate a heap of money each year, I add silently.
‘Right. What is it?’
‘We work with homeless people—particularly women and children.’
‘Not men?’
‘We have a sister charity we partner with, but no. Our focus is on women and children because they tend to be the most vulnerable out on the streets.’
‘What made you start it?’
‘The neighbourhood I grew up in,’ I answer easily. ‘I couldn’t get from school to our apartment without passing at least two dozen people sleeping rough.’ I shake my head. ‘I used to look at them and wish I could do something to help—I think, when I was young, I didn’t realise that we were really only one missed pay check away from joining them.’
‘And there weren’t sufficient charities already in operation?’
‘Oh, there’s loads,’ she says with a nod. ‘But we’re different. I started off focusing on sanitary items—an essential that’s often overlooked—but now it’s expanded. We offer re-education and training. We have dedicated offices for people to go to and up-skill—whether that’s administrative or clerical, retail, we offer vocational training that will make it easier to get a job—and keep it. We collaborate with rehab clinics to get people clean, sponsoring attendance and incentivising maintenance. It takes a coordinated effort. But, most importantly, we counsel people to look to their potential and remember their dreams—dreams that are so easy to lose in the day-to-day struggle of staying alive.’
He’s staring at me like I’ve just cracked the atom.
I lift my shoulders, a little self-conscious but also so passionately captivated by my beliefs in this that I keep going. ‘What if the person who could cure cancer is sleeping under the bridge, you know? Isn’t it our human responsibility to capture the potential of our society as a whole?’
‘I’m full of admiration for that,’ he says, and I hear it in his voice.
‘I guess I know what I could have become, what might have happened to me, if I hadn’t found the one thing I’m good at. I was lucky. I want to take that luck out of it. We have aptitude screening, and our counsellors really get to know the clients. We have a pretty good job success rating—over sixty per cent of our candidates have gone on to find and keep jobs in the last twelve months. Obviously I’d like to get that closer to a hundred per cent but there are always other factors at play. It’s not perfect, but it’s important.’
‘Yeah.’ He nods, then grimaces. ‘And now I feel like I’ve wasted the last ten years of my life.’ He laughs self-deprecatingly, my heart juddering a little at the sight of him like that.
‘Why? You don’t like what you do?’
‘I love it, but it’s hardly the noblest pursuit. Not compared to your one-woman crusade to save the world.’
‘Ah.’ I grin. ‘It’s hardly a one-woman effort. I’m barely involved now.’
‘You finance it?’