Page 39 of Pride and Privilege

“I need the phone. It has my alarm on, all my alerts.”

“Your four AM alarm? Do you think I don’t hear it go off?”

“I need to check the markets.”

“No, you do not. Not on a Saturday.”

“Poppy, you don’t—”

“And even in the week, they close at seven AM GMT, or Shanghai does. Hong Kong closes at eight!”

“But there’s the pre-market movements, too, all the world news to catch up on, brokerage—”

“All your strategies are medium- to long-term—”

“We rebalance portfolios daily—”

“No,youdo, but that’s not—”

“It’s the BlacktonGold touch—responsive management—”

“It’s making you sick, Roscoe!”

She got to her feet, too angry to stay sitting.

Roscoe stood, too. “It’s the job, Poppy.”

“Well it doesn’t need to be. You’re letting it be.”

Roscoe let out a breath, trying to push down the irritation that was rapidly turning to anger. Did she really think he was allowed to switch off at the end of the day like she did? That a beer and TV show was going to make it all go away, all the naggingundones, thewhat-ifs, theneed-tos…

“Please. Give me my phone.”

She shook her head, the glitter of tears in her eyes. Roscoe felt a pang at that—guilt, and sorrow at the evening ending like this. But it annoyed him, too, that she was trying tocare, trying to sympathise, pitying him, when he didn’t need any of that. He just needed his bloody God-damned phone.

“Poppy. I have to, OK? People are relying on me. Clients trust me. I have to do my job properly.”

“You’re talking fractions of a percentage point. That’s all your over-managing achieves.”

“Over-managing?”

“Yes. You’re trigger happy. You’re getting twitchy. Switching positions too often. The team can’t keep up. I ran an analysis—tracked the performance against what it would have been if you’d done nothing—”

“And?”

“Barely a percentage point.”

“Of a billion pounds, Poppy. Do you know what one percent of one billion is?”

“Yes. Ten million. Barely the price of this flat, right?”

“No. It’s the difference between being the best and being mediocre. It’s why clients come to BlacktonGold.”

“But it’s not worth your sanity, is it? You’re worth more than that, Roscoe. You’re worth more than a percentage point.”

He glared at her, jaw tense, words lost somewhere in an avalanche of emotion, a crumbling, breaking, shifting landscape going on behind his eyes. Anger and fear and shame and…and…

He didn’t want to shout at her. But he couldn’t think what else to do about the cutting challenge in her eyes. Because she didn’t understand that he had no choice—he couldn’t just coast, take it easy, work nine to five and walk out whistling. He had to prove himself. Over and over again. Every single fucking day, he needed to prove that he deserved to be there, that it wasn’t just a fluke. He needed to make his father proud because his fatherdemanded it of him and because his brother never would, and so someone had to do it, didn’t they? Someone had to be the son his father wanted.

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