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did I do? Why wasn’t I good enough ?

Chapter Four
Rachel
    “Good morning, Ms. Nolan.”
    Instead of simply responding to the usual greeting, Rachel stopped at her assistant’s desk. “So—who won?”
    Maria grinned. “It isn’t winning or losing that’s important, it’s whether the kids had a good time.”
    “Uh huh.”
    This time Maria laughed. “We did, five to four. Sidney scored three goals.”
    “I hope you’re writing all this down,” Rachel said, only half teasing. “When Sports Illustrated does a cover story on her in a couple of years they’re going to want to know what she was like when she was ten.” Rachel had caught one of Sidney’s soccer games a couple of months ago at an indoor tournament where her own daughter, Cassidy, was playing. Sidney stood out from the other players the way Tiger Woods had stood out in his early years. Rachel left the tournament secretly grateful Cassidy was in a different age bracket and the two girls would never play against each other.
    “I try not to think that far ahead,” Maria said, following Rachel into her office.
    Rachel pulled her cell phone out of her purse and put it on her desk. “Anything pressing this morning?”
    “Arthur Stewart wants to know if he can reschedule your meeting for later in the week. He said he’s still waiting for the reports from accounting. And there was a message from Ms. Hawthorne that she needs the actuary figures on Selman Electronics as soon as—” Maria smiled “—someone came in this morning.”
    “I assume you passed that one on?” Madison Insurance’s home office was in Baltimore. Andrea Hawthorne was one of the longtime employees who was slow to adjust to the three-hour time difference and accept the fact that the year-and-a-half-old branch office in San Francisco wasn’t being run by slackers who liked to sleep late.
    “Bob is working on it.”
    “Good choice. Thanks.” She hung her coat in the closet and dropped her purse in the bottom left-hand drawer of her desk, then opened her briefcase to retrieve the flash drive that held the confidential research she’d been working on the night before. A folded note, written on lined paper, was wrapped around the drive held in place with a smiley-face sticker.
    Maria dropped the morning’s mail on Rachel’s desk. “Coffee?”
    “Tea, please. Something decaffeinated.”
    Maria nodded and left, softly closing the door behind her.
    Rachel opened the note.
    Knock knock.
    Who’s there?
    Isabel.
    Isabel who?
    Turn over for answer. . . .
    She did.
    Isabel broke? I had to knock.
    I know, pretty bad, but it was the best I could come up
    with this morning. Have a good one, babe. See you tonight.
    Love, Jeff
    Rachel smiled and taped the note to her computer screen, where she would see it the rest of the day. By habit she moved her chair six inches to the right and with one hand logged onto her computer to check her email and with the other began sorting through the mail Maria had opened that morning and flagged according to urgency.
    Outside Rachel’s office window a thick fog hid all but the orange triangular peaks of the Golden Gate Bridge. The fog would dissipate by noon, leaving the bay a blanket of sequined blue. In the beginning she’d been mesmerized by the view and the ever-changing qualities of the city’s landscape. Lately she’d had to remind herself to take the time to look.
    Rachel skimmed the names on the email messages. Only one was unexpected. Connie Helgren. She saw Connie in passing almost every day, but the lunch-and-shopping friendship they’d had in Baltimore had become an unanticipated casualty when Connie took a lateral transfer to the new office in San Francisco and Rachel was given a promotion that put her into one of the key positions. Rachel made lunch dates with Connie and worked hard to keep them, but as often as not something came up that forced her to cancel. Then, when they did get together, the conversation was stilted and