Thanks for the support.

So yesterday's problems still linger... and so does Max...

Chapter Three
Thursday 3rd December

When Rachel woke up that morning, she knew that she still had a headache to sort out with regard to whatever happened between Max and Steph. She had refused to talk to Max about the situation for the entirety of the afternoon and made a rather quick exit when the last bell rang for the day (with her telling Eddie that was the plan before he decided to do some marking at the school). She had also refused to talk to Eddie about it. Mainly because she knew that he would say that she had said the right thing and want to go and give Max a piece of his mind (she was sure that when Eddie said that he didn't mean that he was going to go and argue it out with Max. The last thing she could deal with would be if Eddie got suspended).

The first thing she wanted to do was talk to Steph. And that meant going to her rather than asking Steph to come to her office. Mainly because she knew that Max would like to restart the argument that he had tried to give the day before.

"Steph, we need to talk about yesterday." Rachel said, perching on the edge of the desk in front of Steph's.

"I was going to come to you," Steph said.

"Yeah, well… I would like a rather Max-free chat about things."

"You didn't have to do this. Everyone knows that we aren't… the best of friends."

Rachel swallowed. "No. We definitely have had our differences. But that doesn't matter. I did mean what I said yesterday. About your French. And your intuition with the kids." She paused. "I will always regret what happened. With Maxine and Earl. For the rest of my life. I will always carry it with me. I will always carry Maxine with me."

"Yeah. Well. I don't think I would have had to have fought as hard with you as I did with Jack to get her back in here. But Jack would have thrown Earl out."

"From what I've heard of Jack, he might have been the one to face the gun."

"You faced the gun as well. That day? With Denzil? You actually ran back into the school for him."

Rachel felt her face twitch. "Young boys and guns. Maybe I've seen it too many times for my liking. Like young girls and boys with drugs, ferrying them around. Or older girls… being made to sell their bodies." She paused for a moment. "I know where I grew up. And I know that young boys with guns are just… scared out of their wits. And because they are so scared, they are prone to doing stupid things."

It felt right for their conversation to pause slightly. They only knew one thing about her past. They didn't know the whole of it. Not that Rachel was sure that she would tell everyone her past. It had always been a secret. It was hard to talk about things that had been a secret for so long.

"What exactly happened yesterday Steph?" Rachel said to restart the conversation.

"First off, he was being very unfair. I do think that we should be grateful that the kids turn up dressed, in clean enough uniforms. There is no one that I can actively point out and say that they aren't being looked after. That their uniforms aren't being washed or that they are going hungry. We have helped those that we have spotted. I thought that the plan was bums on seats."

Rachel nodded. "Uniform isn't high on my priority list to sort out but I always found that once you've sorted out the underlying problems, the uniform usually, more or less, follows."

"But Max started to pick on Bolton and it was for something so stupid. Which only seemed to escalate the more Bolton tried to defend himself. If you and Eddie had been here, I would have got a student to get one of you because Max was being… judge, jury and executioner. He does like to pick on Bolton doesn't he?"

"I think for the same reason Stuart picked on him. They know that he has a certain level of respect for me and that is what drifts through the rest of the school. I don't know how. But that is what it seems."

"Well, like I said, I would have stayed out of it if you were here."

Rachel nodded. "I'm glad you stuck up for him though."

"And I… did mean what I said yesterday. You didn't give Earl the gun."

Rachel didn't need Steph to understand or ever forgive her for Maxine's death. She didn't care if there was this underlying tension between them. Rachel knew that she would never forgive herself but she knew that she found a small amount of comfort in knowing that Steph had.

She slid off the desk to signify that they had finished chatting about what Rachel needed to talk about. She knew her next task would be to talk to Bolton before she confronted Max about it all.

"So?" Steph said.

"So what?"

"So? Did you find out yesterday? I need to know whether I am picking up a pack or not."

Rachel could only smile. "What did you go for?"

"I said a girl. I don't know. I can see you and dear old Mr Lawson with a little girl more than a boy."

"Nice to know drinks are on you tomorrow then."

"Really? A girl?"

Rachel nodded before she left Steph to finish up what she was doing. Although, she was sure that getting ready for her first lesson of the day was the last thing that Steph was now doing.

Rachel wouldn't say that she felt better after talking to Bolton but she felt more sure that she had most of the facts. And then she spoke to Eddie about what she had refused to talk to him about the night before. She could see the lines of worry on his face and she knew that what she had just told him hadn't really helped to calm his worries. It seemed like Max was relentless when it came to trying to undermine her but Rachel knew that she was strong enough to go toe to toe with him. Once she had put all of her doubts in a box and locked it.

But she knew that she couldn't avoid Max all day. She had done a good job so far but that was because she had yet to enter her office. In fact, she had dumped her bags in the antechamber just so she didn't have to face Max.

This wasn't how things were meant to be but it was very clear that Max would never accept any olive branch that Rachel would hand him. That when he said that he would willingly work with her, they were empty words. Max had one task and one task alone and Rachel wondered why he felt so threatened by her. Because that was the only reason that Rachel could come up with for his behaviour.

She gave Joyce a smile only to have the older woman stop her.

"Did you find out?"

Rachel nodded. "It's a girl."

Part of Rachel felt glad that she had so many people that she could tell, with her and Eddie agreeing that they were going to tell people outside of their family. Rachel had half assumed that she would finally get her wish of being pregnant and finding herself with little to no one to be excited about it with her. She hated to admit that her life before Waterloo Road was quite a lonely one. That she always believed what her father had told her and that she would be on her own for the rest of her life. She felt like Waterloo Road had given her just as much as she had given it.

Which she was grateful for and it was something that she would hate to lose because of Max. She knew that men like him weren't worth fighting as they always seemed to win in the end but this was one fight that Rachel wasn't going to give up. Even if she was sure that someone else would fight it for her if she did feel like giving up.

So stepping into her office for the first time that day felt weird. Even more so because the office was meant to be her safe space. This was where she came up with all of her ideas for the school and set out her plans. It was where she reigned from. It was where she could show her authority.

But now she never felt comfortable. Definitely not comfortable enough to ever let her guard down.

"I almost didn't think that you were here," Max said, looking rather too comfortable in her chair.

"Well, I had a few things to deal with this morning."

"You know as well as I do that she is a liability."

"No, I don't."

Max chuckled. "Come on, you aren't that naïve."

"Well, as I understand it, your role in this school is advisory. Meaning that you have no authority to sack any staff. You could advise me but… I think we both know that I am probably not going to listen to it. They are my teachers, Max. I decide who stays and goes. And in that event, the best procedure would be to try and replace members of staff before they left so that there aren't any holes left by the leaving staff member, whether they were pushed or they jumped."

"Jo would have coped."

"I don't want staff members just copping. I want them to be able to do their jobs to the best of their ability."

"And is Steph Haydock doing her job to the best of her ability?"

"I would like to see you in the classroom."

"You as well."

Rachel thought about the challenge and she was sure that they could set something up and put it to the test. The only problem she could see would be that her class would probably behave for her because she was who she was. She didn't quite know how far the students would or could push Max. And she didn't think that she would like the fall out from that.

"Not brave enough then?" Max said with the snuggest smile on his face. "Has it been too long since you were in the classroom? Have you forgotten what it was like to be in there?"

"No. Not at all. If needed, I would happily step back into the classroom."

"Then let's set it up. I'll cover a History lesson and you can cover… whatever you used to teach."

"I didn't really have you down as a History teacher. Although, I am unsure what I would have thought that you would have taught."

"I was going to go with English for you. I didn't want to assume."

"Well, you are wrong. Bachelors and Masters of Science. So not English."

She suspected that the silence that fell between them was because he expected her to tell him what she taught. She wasn't going to. It wasn't something that she minded telling people. It just came as a surprise to some people and others laughed, thinking it was some joke. And Max was very low down her list of knowing. Eddie didn't even know and that was just because he hadn't asked her.

"And it isn't something that we will do." Rachel continued. "I think there has been enough disruption in this school to warrant no more."

The sly smile that he gave made her think that he thought that he had won. He hadn't. He just hadn't worked out that Rachel was saving him from any embarrassment that would follow when a class was particularly disruptive because he was in charge. And after a couple of incidents at the beginning of the year, she didn't really want to know what his tactics were to get a class under control.

"Steph Haydock isn't the type of teacher John Fosters would employ. End of." Max said, bringing the conversation back without Rachel having to.

"And John Fosters is no more. This is Waterloo Road. We have different expectations."

Max looked her up and down (but not in a way that men had looked her up and down in the past). "I can see that."

"One mentioned about my past…"

"Well, that's why you let in the riff-raff in, isn't it?"

"Have you not thought that maybe that is why these kids… trust and respect me? That when I have them in here, on the edge of being permanently suspended, and I tell them to give me one more chance and list out all of my demands, all of which aren't that demanding, they actually believe me. Here is the short of it, Max, you don't understand these students as you haven't been one. You don't know the struggles of living in a low-income household. You don't understand living with someone with some sort of addiction. This is what this school is about. This school is about making sure that the students leave with enough that they can go out and get a job and, maybe, help themselves out of the situations that they were born into. That is what Waterloo Road is and always has been about. It is not changing now because of you and John Fosters."

She had wondered whether she had gone in a little hard but she felt like it needed to be said. No, she didn't think that she was some messiah that was going to save all of the kids that were from low-income families and/or those that have addiction within the family. She just understood the importance that something could be done about it if it was recognised rather than ignored. Before a choice was made that would impact the whole family.

Rachel was still the one to retreat from her office, with her not wanting to be anywhere near Max for the moment. She knew of other places that she could get her paperwork done, getting it off Joyce before leaving that part of the school. Because at the worst, she could join Eddie in his classroom. Although, she couldn't decide whether she was ready for the conversation that Eddie wanted or not.

Eddie was sure that he would have hated seeing Rachel as stressed out as she was even if she wasn't his fiancée or wasn't pregnant. It was the type of stress that never left her, even after bubble baths and finding a film to watch as they curled up on the sofa together, there was a tension in Rachel's body that he could constantly feel. And he was sure that she did have a lot of aches and pains as part of the pregnancy but he did also feel like there was more to it than that.

He was sure that she hadn't been able to relax properly since the first day back. That she went over things, again and again, to make sure that Max wouldn't poke holes in what she was planning to do. It was bad enough that Eddie had to hold his tongue in those meetings, wanting to give Max a piece of his mind about how he didn't know the school or Rachel and that he never gave anything a try because it wasn't dreamt up by him. He would. If it didn't upset everyone else. And there was nothing more that he wanted to do other than ram his fist in Max's face (just like he had done to Stuart). Only, he had promised Rachel that he wouldn't do that.

But he didn't know what he could do to help. He hated feeling helpless. And he hated it even more when Rachel wouldn't talk to him. He knew that she did like to sort things by herself. Even more so recently. But he felt like now was the time when they needed to act more as a team. Be the strong partnership that they had built over the last two years.

Yet, he knew that was a conversation for another day.

His plan for that evening was to try and get her to relax.

So he pushed her into the living room when they got home, telling her that he would make dinner. He was glad that they had all of the ingredients for her favourite meal and tried to make it as quickly as he could. After they had eaten, he got her upstairs to have a bath that he didn't think that she wanted, even when she sighed into the warmth of it. And when she got out, he asked her where she was sore, just to help give her some relief.

It wasn't a lot.

There wasn't much he could do.

But the sleepy smile on her face made him believe that he had done enough for the moment.

He was doing his best under the circumstances. And he just needed to remind himself that it was enough. Especially when he didn't need to be worrying unnecessarily.