Kitabı oku: «I Heart Hawaii»

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Q&A with Lindsey

Keep Reading I Heart series

Keep Reading Girl series

About the Author

Also by Lindsey Kelk

About the Publisher

Dedication

For Della.

The Jenny to my Angela, Angela to my Jenny.

Without you, there would be no I Heart. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

PROLOGUE

‘Angela? Are you up?’

I was not up. I had no interest in being up.

‘Come on. You can’t stay in bed all day.’

Slowly, very, very slowly, I prised open one eye as I tried to work out where I was.

The ceiling was too low, the window was in the wrong place and I couldn’t hear a single car horn honking. Not to mention the fact my bed was altogether too small and too empty.

‘Angela.’

Two taps on the door of my childhood bedroom before it opened, my mum’s face popping inside without waiting for an invitation.

‘Why aren’t you dressed? It’s nearly eight.’

Today was the day.

‘I just woke up,’ I croaked in response, raking a hand through the bird’s nest on top of my head. Everything came rushing back: where I was, why I was here, what had to be done today, and the steady thrum of nerves that had been beating in my chest since I got on the plane found its rhythm once again.

‘Well, I know we had a lazy one yesterday but you can’t lie around in bed all day today. The sooner you get up and start getting on with things, the better you’ll feel.’

I pulled the duvet up over my face.

‘Come on,’ she said, her voice softening outside my blanket fort. ‘Kettle’s just boiled. I’ll bring you up a cup of tea.’

‘Thanks, Mum,’ I whispered from underneath the covers as the door clicked shut behind her.

From the day you left home, the prospect of waking up in your childhood bedroom was never a welcome one. Best-case scenario, it was Christmas. Worst-case scenario, your life had completely fallen apart. I wondered where my current predicament fell on that scale.

With a groan, I tossed away the duvet and rolled over to stare into the eyes of the Care Bear printed on my pillowcase. It had to have been at least thirty years old but Mum always put it on the bed when I came home, even when it was last minute, even when it wasn’t planned. Pressing my cheek against the cool, soft fabric, I sighed. Poor Tenderheart Bear, he had already seen so much in his many years of service and now, here he was, offering his services as a stand-in for the person who should be lying in bed beside me.

Alex.

I glanced over at my phone, thought about it for just a second and then pushed the idea out of my head. No, not yet.

Save the torn-out pages of the NME I’d left stapled to the walls, my room still looked exactly the same as it did the day I left. Every time Dad redecorated, Mum insisted they keep the colours the same. Maybe there was a different duvet on my double bed but my Care Bear pillow and the crocheted blanket from my grandmother’s house were always there. Same pine wardrobe and chest of drawers. Same dressing table with the same scorch marks from my teenage pyromaniac phase. Terracotta essential oil burner from the Body Shop on the windowsill, pink plastic cassette case sitting beside my incredibly cool zebra-striped ghetto blaster. All this familiarity should have made me feel better but it just made me feel further and further away. Like my years in New York had been a dream. Like I’d imagined Alex and Jenny and James and Delia and Erin and all the rest of it.

As though none of it had ever happened.

‘But it did,’ I whispered, turning my engagement and wedding rings around and around on my finger and waiting for a genie to appear. ‘It did, it did, it did.’

‘Only me.’

The door opened again, all the way this time, as my mum marched in bearing a steaming mug of tea and not one, but two, biscuits.

Oh my. Things really were serious.

‘The sooner you get up, the sooner you can get this day started.’

‘And the sooner I can come back to bed?’ I added hopefully.

‘Oh, Angela,’ she said, sitting down on the edge of the bed and smoothing my messy hair down on the top of my head. ‘Don’t overreact, you’re making it worse than it is. Everything is going to be fine. When has your mother ever steered you wrong?’

This didn’t seem like a question that needed answering with a tremendous degree of honesty.

‘Drink your tea, jump in the shower and I’ll have your breakfast waiting. Your dad is raring to go.’

‘Classic Dad,’ I replied as she walked around the bed and tore open all the curtains. This day was coming in whether I liked it or not. ‘I don’t know if I can do this.’

I should have known not to push my luck. The sympathetic lift of her eyebrows folded in on itself until it evolved into its final form; Annette Clark’s trademark glare. I shrank back against the pillow. It worked when I threw a tantrum in Woolworths when I was three and it worked now.

‘Angela Clark, I will not have this attitude,’ Mum declared from the doorway, hands on hips, frown on face. ‘Downstairs in ten minutes. Today is a big day. You need to be up and dressed before everyone gets here. Whatever you’ve convinced yourself of, things aren’t going to go better with you in your bed, are they?’

With one last forceful look, she closed the door and left me alone. I might have left home when I was eighteen but I would know the sound of Mum’s purposeful march down the stairs anywhere with my eyes closed.

And I also knew when she was right.

Stretching my legs, I pushed away my blankets and felt for the floor with my toes.

It was all going to be fine, Mum said.

I put one foot on the floor, followed by the other. There, I was officially standing. The day had officially started. All I had to do was get up, get dressed and meet the day head on.

No turning back now.

CHAPTER ONE

One year earlier …

‘I am a woman who has it all,’ I said quietly, staring at my own face reflected back in the screen of my iPhone. ‘I am a woman who owns her power.’

The version of me looking back rolled her eyes but I went on regardless.

‘I am strong, vital and beautiful.’

And tired, emotional and, according to the tag in the front of my pants, wearing my knickers back to front. Although they were clean, so at least there was that.

The affirmations were my best friend, Jenny’s, idea. Apparently, if I said them out loud, every day, they would all come true. The more I heard myself say these things, the more I would believe them and then the whole world would believe them too. In theory. But the more I stared at my pale complexion and red-rimmed eyes I couldn’t help but think a nice, uninterrupted eighteen-hour nap would be more effective. Also, I wasn’t entirely sure I was supposed be reciting them on the toilet at work but I was fairly sure this was the first time I’d been entirely alone since I’d given birth ten and a half months ago.

I took a deep breath and refocused. My attention span was something else that needed some work, along with my short-term memory and my pelvic floor muscles.

‘There is nothing I cannot accomplish when I put my trust in the universe,’ I said, breathing out.

Jenny said the affirmations would open up my subconscious and allow me to contact my inner goddess, the divine feminine energy, but so far mine was nowhere to be seen. Probably out dicking around with all the other inner goddesses who hadn’t got up five times in the night with a teething baby.

Lifting the phone a little to improve the angle of my selfie, I really looked at myself. Jenny said you had to look yourself in the eye when you were doing it and I didn’t have a mirror on me. Maybe there was something in these affirmations, after all. Sleep deprivation didn’t do much for a girl’s dark circles but my cheekbones looked killer. I tapped the photo-editing app Jenny had also installed on my phone and swiped through until I found my favourite filter, trying to snap a picture to send to Alex. Because nothing says I love you like a selfie taken on the toilet.

‘Hello?’

Three sharp raps on the cubicle door and I jumped out of my skin. My phone slipped out of my hand, fell between my knees and plopped directly in the toilet bowl.

‘Excuse me, do you have any toilet paper in there?’

‘Nooooooo,’ I breathed, momentarily paralysed before grabbing handfuls of toilet paper and waving it under the stall door. Yes, I’d just destroyed a thousand dollars’ worth of technology but I’d be damned if I would let another woman go for a wee without sufficient loo roll.

‘Thanks,’ the voice replied, sounding relieved as the paper disappeared. ‘Appreciate it.’

‘You’re welcome,’ I replied in a bright, tight voice as I gazed at my phone in the bottom of the toilet bowl, only to see myself looking back. And then the screen went black. I nodded and sighed before rolling up my sleeves and reaching in. I was a strong, vital, beautiful woman with her hand down a public toilet.

Brilliant start to a brilliant day.

The first day in a new job is always nerve-racking. Even if you’re in your thirties, even if you’ve done pretty much exactly the same job somewhere else before, unless you’re either Kanye or a complete sociopath, there are bound to be a few first-day jitters. And if you take those jitters and multiply them by the fact you’re coming back to work after having your first baby you’ve got a real, one hundred percent ‘shitting it’ situation on your hands.

With my waterlogged phone in my pocket, I eventually convinced myself to leave the lavs and made my way across the huge reception of my new office building. I smiled at the pleasing tap-tap-tap of my heels against the marble floor. Heels. In the daytime. It had been so long.

‘Hi.’

I beamed at the man seated behind the reception desk. He did not beam back.

‘I’m Angela Clark. I’m starting work at Besson Media today.’

Without raising his eyes to meet mine, the man nodded.

‘Photo ID?’

Slipping my hand into my ancient Marc Jacobs satchel, I pulled out my passport on the first try and handed it over with a brilliant smile. He looked at me, looked at the passport and looked at me again. Still nothing.

‘Fifteenth floor,’ he replied, sliding my passport back across the desk and inclining his head towards the bank of lifts across the cavernous hall. ‘Take elevator six.’

‘Thank you!’ I said, tucking my passport away and making the eighteen thousandth reminder to myself to finally get round to applying for a New York driver’s licence. I’d only been here the best part of a decade, after all.

But in all that time, I’d never seen anything like this. My old office had been a flash, glass, nineties-tastic monster of a skyscraper, slap bang in the middle of Times Square. If you were into flashing neon signs and an ungodly number of tourists, it was heaven, but this? This was something else. Besson Media had set up shop in an architectural icon. A recently renovated sugar refinery on the edge of Williamsburg, perfectly positioned to give Manhattan a good dose of hipper-than-thou side eye. Alongside the landmark building, we also had our own park, our own sculpture garden, different food trucks every single day and our very own beach. I’d read about the building, and I’d seen it when I walked by, but actually being inside felt so very special. Old red-brick walls and old-fashioned arched windows contrasted against the shining steel of the lifts and the touch screens I saw absolutely everywhere. Stopping myself from swiping wildly, I stepped into the lift, clutching my bag against my hip and grinning at strangers as more people joined me.

‘Hi,’ I said to the backs of people’s heads, shuffling backwards into the corner. ‘Hello.’

Ten months at home with a baby was pretty much exactly the same as when someone on a TV show disappears one week and then shows up the next, only to explain they’ve spent a thousand years in another dimension and no longer know who they were. You don’t speak to strangers in lifts, not in New York or anywhere else for that matter. One by one, floor by floor, people piled out until it was just me, all on my lonesome, arriving at floor fifteen.

It was beautiful.

Besson Media was, of course, on the top floor and, unlike the rest of the building, the penthouse level was all glass, giving us a 360-view of New York, Brooklyn and Queens, for as far as the eye could see. Not that anyone’s eyes were concentrating on what was happening outside the windows. Everyone already at work in the open-plan office had their eyes firmly fixed on whatever screen was in front of them, a desktop, a laptop, a tablet, a phone. Without anyone to greet me, and not seeing anyone I recognized, I took an awkward step away from the safety of the lifts and into the hub. Perhaps, if I could find my office, I could get settled and then start from there.

‘Hello,’ I said, waving at a young Japanese woman with green hair who was studying her laptop intently. She peered back at me from behind gold wire-framed glasses with exceptionally large lenses. ‘Um, I’m starting today? I’m Angela Clark. I don’t suppose you know where my office might be?’

‘We don’t have offices,’ she replied. ‘It’s open plan. Hot desk. Set up wherever you like.’

A shiver ran down my spine.

Hot desk? There had been no discussion of hot desks.

‘I’m fairly sure I’m supposed to have an office,’ I told her, subtly nudging my left breast pad back into place with my forearm. ‘I’m going to be running a site—’

‘I run a site,’ the girl replied. ‘I’m Kanako. I run Bias? The fashion site? No one has an office except for the CEO.’

‘Did someone say my name?’

The shiver turned into the cold grip of dread.

‘Angela, you’re here.’

Everyone in the office looked up at once as Cici Spencer, my former assistant, stepped out of the lift. I had to admit it, CEO looked good on her. She strode into her office wearing a sleek Tom Ford jumpsuit with at least twelve grands’ worth of floral embroidered Alexander McQueen blazer casually slung on her shoulders. A pair of crystal-studded Gucci sunglasses perched on her surgically perfected nose, which she lifted up to the top of my head to look me up and down. I shifted my weight from foot to foot. I’d agonized over this outfit for days: Anine Bing booties, brand-new Topshop jeans, my favourite Equipment shirt. I was playing with fire wearing a silk shirt while breastfeeding but I’d done a literal dry run and was wearing two pairs of breast pads so I was certain I could get away with it. My ensemble was comfortable, smart, no bold statements but enough style to let people know I was supposed to be there and hadn’t got lost on my way to the Target in the Atlantic Mall.

I would never get lost on my way to Target. I loved Target.

‘Here I am,’ I said as I twisted my engagement ring around my ring finger.

‘Here you are,’ Cici said finally, lifting the sunglasses out of her silky straight, ice-blonde hair. ‘And it’s OK, we don’t have a dress code.’

I would not rise to her bait. I was the one who had agreed to come and work for my former-nemesis-turned-assistant-turned-sort-of-kind-of-friend and there was no point acting surprised when a leopard showed its spots. Not that Cici would be caught dead in leopard print these days, far too common.

‘I also hear you don’t have offices. What’s that about?’

‘I have an office,’ she shrugged, letting her black Valentino tote bag slide off her shoulder and into the crook of her arm. ‘Everyone else lives here.’ She waved at the mass of desks behind me, randomly placed around the room, some at seated level, some raised to standing. ‘Our director of culture said this was the best way to nurture creativity.’

‘But where will I put all my stuff?’ I asked with a frown. She knew I needed my stuff. It was all essential to my process, from my signed framed photo of Robert Downey Jr to the Hannah Montana Magic 8 Ball I used to make any and all difficult decisions.

‘Besson doesn’t encourage personal artifacts at the work station,’ Kanako recited from an invisible rulebook. ‘A decluttered environment promotes a more efficient workflow.’

I felt a dark look cross my face.

‘If any so much as thinks the words “spark joy” I’m going home.’

She shrugged and turned back to her computer. ‘We all like it this way.’

We. There was a ‘we’ here and I, the new girl, was not a part of it.

‘I’m sure I’ll figure it out,’ I said, my hand never leaving my satchel for fear of my photos of Alex and our daughter leaping out and exposing me to all the world for the hoarder that I was. ‘Nice to meet you.’

‘Let me know if you need me to show you around,’ Kanako said without looking back.

It sounded like a nice thing to say but I could tell what she really meant was ‘now go away’.

‘I can give you the tour,’ Cici offered as a short but beautiful man with a shaved head appeared at her side. ‘Do I have time to give her the tour?’

‘You have seventeen minutes until your conference call with the investors,’ he replied, glancing down at a small tablet.

‘Plenty of time,’ she replied, shrugging off her bag and her sunglasses into the man’s waiting arms. From the look on his perfectly symmetrical face, I had to assume he was her assistant. It was the exact same expression last seen on Bambi, right after his mother was killed.

‘I’m Angela,’ I said, holding out a hand to the assistant. He looked down at it, his own hands full of thousands of dollars of designer goods. ‘It’s my first day.’

‘He knows who you are,’ Cici said, already striding off to survey her domain. ‘He’s my assistant, he knows everything.’

I really hoped he knew how to write a CV and find a new job ASAP.

‘Well, it’s nice to meet you …’

‘Don,’ he replied before turning back to Cici. ‘I’ll put these away and prepare for the call.’

‘Thanks, Don,’ she smiled as he scuttled away before sighing and lowering her voice. ‘It’s so hard to find a good assistant. You were so lucky to have me.’

‘Remember that time you had my suitcase blown up at Charles de Gaulle airport?’ I replied, watching as he ran.

‘No.’

It was a blatant lie. That was the kind of memory that kept Cici warm on the cold winter nights.

Before Besson, Cici and I had both worked at Spencer Media, one of the biggest publishers in the world, and a company founded by Cici’s grandfather. When she told me she wanted to strike out on her own, I knew she’d find her feet but I hadn’t realized just how fast she’d do it or how very big her feet would turn out to be. Within six short months, Besson had become a major player in digital media with some of the highest-trafficked sites in the US. While Cici could never claim to have been one of the world’s best executive assistants, she certainly could boast an innate ability to throw her family’s money at the most talented people in the industry, which resulted in absolutely brilliant content that was thriving in a market where everyone else seemed set to struggle.

‘I’m so glad you’re finally here,’ Cici said as we made our way around the open-plan office. ‘How is baby Ellis? Such a cool name. Alex pick it?’

‘Ellis is a cool name but my baby is called Alice,’ I answered, following her away from the hodge-podge of standing and sitting desks. ‘She’s named after my grandmother, actually.’

Fantastic. Now I was not only anxious about my first day at work, I’d also have to spend the rest of the morning wondering whether or not it was too late to change my baby’s name.

‘How old is he now? Like, three?’

‘She is ten and a half months, remember? You were there when I took the pregnancy test. How fast do you think babies age?’

‘Is that all? I guess they do say time flies,’ Cici said with wide eyes. I could tell it was taking an awful lot of energy for her to show this much interest in my personal life and I appreciated it, even if I knew she didn’t really give two shits.

‘They do and it does,’ I replied. ‘But I’m excited to be here, back at work. I’ve been going kind of crazy at home, I can’t wait to get stuck in with my site. I’ve got some really fun ideas—’

‘Yeah, I’m sure they’re great, that’s why I hired you,’ she interrupted. ‘So this is the conference table where we have most of our editorial meetings.’

She paused in front of a giant slab of crystal, propped up on a metal frame. If Coachella made office furniture.

‘The crystal channels your energies and creates a more harmonious working environment,’ Cici explained. ‘And it cost thirty-five thousand dollars.’

‘Bargain.’

‘I got it from an artisan I met at Burning Man.’

‘Of course you did.’

It really was just crying out for a ritual sacrifice with unicorn dip-dyed hair and a flower crown.

‘Over by the elevators we have our reading rooms, our privacy pods and meditation centre.’ She pointed at a row of frosted-glass doors. ‘While we encourage all our team players to invest their energy in our open-plan dynamic, we understand sometimes they need privacy.’

‘Oh yeah, sometimes,’ I agreed, trying not to vom at the term ‘team players’. I couldn’t help but wonder which Instagram influencer she had hired to do her HR. ‘Phone calls, difficult conversations, lactating.’

‘Lactating?’ Cici reared back as though I’d slapped her in the face.

‘Breastfeeding,’ I explained, making unnecessary honking motions in front of my own boobs. ‘Or pumping, I suppose. I have to pump.’

‘Still?’ she screwed up her pretty face. ‘Isn’t it a little old for that?’

‘Again, she, and again, not even eleven months,’ I repeated, staring at the privacy pods and wondering how many times a day they were used for the very important purpose of crying at work.

‘So gross,’ she muttered, adjusting her own perfect B cups inside her Tom Ford jumpsuit. ‘Anyway, this is where you would do that, I guess. The kitchen is right by the movement studio and the bathrooms, showers and dressing rooms are over there.’

She pointed off in the vague distance as I tried to log all the information. Things like this were more difficult to remember these days but I was fairly sure I’d be able to remember the place where the food was and where I needed to go for a wee.

‘And before you freak out and call HR, it’s one bathroom for everyone. That way no one can get offended.’

I lit up with a smile. ‘Like Ally McBeal?’

Cici looked back at me, stony-faced.

‘Don’t make that reference again,’ she warned. ‘People know I hired you. Don’t make me regret it.’

‘I promise you will not be the one with regrets,’ I assured her.

This was your choice, I reminded myself. You could have been sitting in your cosy office at Spencer Media right now but, nooo, you had to take a chance, you had to trust your gut and leave. Only my gut had a baby in it when I made that decision. It couldn’t be trusted. I should have been stopped.

‘And that’s it. I’m sure corporate culture went over the basics with you: no official start and finish hours, vacation is taken as and when it’s needed. We have a chef on staff to create round-the-clock snacks and beverages for all possible dietary restrictions and no orange in the office. I think that’s it.’

‘Sorry, what?’ I said, tearing my eyes away from the man who had just arrived with a small pig on a leash. ‘No oranges in the office?’

‘No orange,’ she repeated. ‘The colour. I hate it so I banned it.’

Brilliant. Starting her own company definitely hadn’t sent her mad with power.

‘Right. So, is now a good time to discuss my ideas for my site?’ I asked as she started back towards the elevators. ‘I have a name. It’s going to be Recherché dot com, it’s French and it can mean “to search for” or “exquisite”, which I think is perfect, don’t you? And content-wise—’

‘Sounds great, go for it,’ she nodded. ‘Have the design team get started.’

‘How do I get in touch with the design team?’

‘They’re in the directory,’ Cici replied.

‘And where is the directory?’ I asked.

‘On your computer?’ she answered.

‘And where’s my computer?’

‘I have to go to my office,’ Cici said, folding her arms across her chest. ‘I have a conference call.’

‘I thought we didn’t have offices,’ I said as she pressed her fingertips against a touch screen to summon a lift.

‘You don’t, I do,’ she replied. ‘If you have any questions, please go talk to corporate culture. Otherwise, get started. I hired you because you’re good at what you do so, like, do it?’

The lift dinged softly and I felt a wave of panic wash over me.

‘But we haven’t actually established what I’m here to do, have we?’

‘You know, I think this whole mom vibe is working for you,’ Cici said as she stepped into the lift. ‘I mean, I get it. Once you have kids, it’s hard to not be lame but you’ve really leaned in to mom-dom, Angela. Maybe you were fighting against this normcore vibe all along.’

Normcore? Did she just call me normcore? Admittedly I wasn’t one hundred percent certain what it meant but I was one hundred percent certain I should be offended. What did this woman want from me? Higher heels? Tighter clothes? Should I have whipped out the Sherbet Dip that lived in the bottom of my handbag and pretended it was a gram?

‘I’m going to go and find a desk,’ I said, smiling politely as the lift doors closed on my smiling CEO. ‘I’m so excited to get started.’

Hell hath no fury like a British woman mildly offended.

‘Right,’ I said, turning my attention back to the sea of desks in the middle of the bright room. Squeezing the strap of my satchel, I steeled myself and entered the fray, looking for an empty desk. Note to self, buy Apple AirPods on the way home. All the cool kids at school had AirPods.

‘Work,’ I corrected myself under my breath. ‘Not school, work.’

Only this felt very reminiscent of my first day in sixth form when absolutely everyone else had Doc Martens and I was wearing Converse and I never, ever lived it down.

Things are different now, Angela, I thought to myself. You’re a married woman. Living in New York. You’ve got a cool job in the media, loads of interesting friends and an actual baby. You are a parent. If you can heave a living being out of your vagina and make it home from the hospital in time to watch RuPaul’s Drag Race, you can certainly make it through your first day back at work.

I smiled, settling on a desk right by a window that looked out over Lower Manhattan. There, wasn’t so hard, was it? And besides, it wasn’t the first time I’d thrown myself head first into a situation with no idea what I was doing and I’d always survived before. Just barely on occasion but I’d always figured it out, one way or another.

‘This is going to be brilliant,’ I said out loud to the city below. ‘Just you wait and see.’

CHAPTER TWO

‘I’m home, I’m home,’ I wailed as I barrelled through the door, closing it firmly on a day I was keen to leave behind me. ‘Sorry, I totally lost track of time and the subway ran local and I had to stop to buy wine and tell me she’s not asleep already.’

Dropping my satchel on the dresser by the door, I kicked off my boots and looked up to see the most gorgeous man to have ever lived, holding Alice Clark Reid, no hyphen, the best baby in existence, standing in front of me. Admittedly, there was a chance I was a little bit biased on both counts because they were both mine.

‘Hey,’ Alex whispered, handing over the milk-drunk bundle of soft, sleepy wonderment. I met his green eyes as I took my daughter’s weight and felt my day fall away. ‘She’s still kind of with us. I just gave her a bottle and we were just about to go to bed. How did it go?’

‘I’ve no idea what I’m doing, Cici is worse than she’s ever been, I forgot to lock the door of the privacy pod while I was pumping and so the entire office has already seen my tits and I dropped my phone in the toilet before I’d even got into the office,’ I replied, checking Alice still had all ten toes I’d left her with that morning. ‘Does she look bigger to you? She looks bigger to me.’ I rubbed my cheek against her fine baby hair.

‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘She waited until you were gone this morning and, boom, she shot up half an inch. It was incredible.’

I flashed him a look but it was a look tempered with a smile. I already felt so guilty for leaving her and it was only one day. Christ, the next twenty-one years were just going to fly by, weren’t they?

‘Sounds like you made a good first impression. Did you say you brought us wine?’

‘Yes but Alice has to wait until she’s fifteen, just like Mummy did,’ I replied softly, tilting my head back for a kiss as I continued to stroke Alice’s hair. I still couldn’t quite believe I had made something quite so brilliant. Admittedly she was occasionally revolting, especially after we gave her avocado for the first time, but for the most part, she was incredible.

‘I can’t believe I married a teenage alcoholic,’ Alex said, grabbing the woodwork around the doorframe and stretching his long, lean body. ‘Let’s hope she takes after Daddy and doesn’t start drinking until she’s twenty-one.’

‘Yes, let’s hope she takes after Daddy and runs away to join a band and shag everything on the Eastern Seaboard for a straight decade,’ I muttered, covering Al’s tiny ears. ‘That’ll look good on her college applications.’

Before we met, it was fair to say my husband had sown an entire field full of wild oats but, against all laws of god and man, I really didn’t care. Alex was a vision. Tall and skinny with perfectly square shoulders that were made for vintage T-shirts, beaten-up leather jackets and holding onto when we kissed. His skin was so pale, it was practically luminous, and the contrast of his jet-black hair only made his green eyes shine even brighter. And if that wasn’t enough to get him laid, he had the uncanny ability to make absolutely everyone he met feel like they were the most important person on earth. Also he was a musician. In a band. In Brooklyn. That made money. Honestly, it would have been more worrying if he hadn’t spent a good decade putting it about.

‘Slut-shaming your own husband,’ Alex said with a dramatic sigh as he leaned against the doorframe. ‘Go put that baby to bed. I’m making dinner.’

‘I always knew you’d make an amazing wife one day,’ I called, doing as I was told and carrying Alice through to her bedroom. Was there anything more erotic than a man making you dinner when you were totally knackered? No, I thought not.

Our Park Slope apartment was easily my favourite place in the entire world. Bloomingdale’s, Shake Shack and that random bodega that stocked Jaffa Cakes on 12th Street all ran a close second but, like, home is where the heart is and – more importantly – it was full of the best people and all my snacks.

Our place wasn’t as swanky as Erin’s West Village townhouse or as cool as Jenny’s new Financial District loft but it was my home; all comfy sofas and soft rugs and prints and pictures and things that made me happy. And right in the heart of it all was Alice’s room, a.k.a. the nursery of dreams. Alex had painted it four times before we found the perfect shade of pale pink, something that was harder to find than you might think. Of all the hills to die on, the colour of my daughter’s bedroom had been a fight so many people had chosen to go to war over. Jenny wanted to paint it blue to defy the patriarchy, Delia said it should be green to stimulate intellectual development, and my mother, despite saying she didn’t think it mattered one way or the other, had fourteen litres of Farrow & Ball ‘Middleton Pink’ shipped over from England in an attempt to instil some regal British backbone into her long-distance granddaughter. Unfortunately, when we got it on the walls, it looked a little bit like we’d dipped a brush into a bottle of calamine lotion that had gone bad in 1987 but, as far as Mum was concerned, Alice was absolutely sleeping in a nursery painted in a random shade of pink chosen by someone in marketing who wanted to make a quick buck off the royal family.

But far and away my favourite part of the nursery was Alice’s wardrobe. It turned out almost all designers made baby clothes. Teeny, tiny versions of their adult togs that were so much more affordable than their grown-up counterparts. There was no way I could spend three thousand dollars on a Gucci sweater for myself but two hundred dollars on a romper for the best-dressed baby in town? Um, yes. Al was already a sartorial masterpiece. Even though all she did was throw up on them. Actually, throwing up was best-case scenario. If I’d done what she did while decked out in head-to-toe Stella McCartney, I’d never have been able to look at myself in a mirror again.

‘But it’s OK when it’s you, isn’t it?’ I whispered, pulling back the sheets and laying her down gently. Crouching down at the side of the cot, I stared at her through the wooden bars of her tiny baby prison. Every night I wondered when I would get bored of this but it hadn’t happened yet. Al turned her head to look at me, fixing me with the same green eyes as her daddy. The spit of Alex, people said – his hair, his eyes, his full lips – but every so often, I could see a flash of myself in there. Usually when she was hungry or angry or both. Which made perfect sense, really.

‘So, do you think you’re going to sleep through tonight?’ I asked with the newfound optimism I’d discovered immediately after pushing eight pounds and six ounces of human being out of my body. Would she sleep through the night? Probably not! Would I keep hoping she might? Yes! For all eternity!

When she didn’t reply, just blinked her long lashes at me and gave a sleepy smile, I pulled the covers up over her little legs and thought of all the things I’d learned in the last year that had never even occurred to me before. Like baby pillows. I’d searched high and low. Looked in the shops, I’d checked online, I’d even turned to Etsy, but it turned out babies don’t have pillows, only a mattress. Who knew? And then it was the quilt. Some people said they could have quilts, other people said they couldn’t. Louisa said she used a sleeping bag but Erin said sleeping bags would be too much in my apartment because it got so hot. My mum said I had a home-knitted blanket and I’d been lucky to even have that … Life was a lot easier when the only things I searched for were discount Marc Jacobs handbags and photos of Chris Hemsworth with his top off.

‘She didn’t really nap this afternoon so she should sleep OK,’ Alex said as I tiptoed into the living room once Al was fully asleep. ‘We went for a walk around the park but she would not give it up. I think she was hoping to get a glimpse of Patrick Stewart.’

He smiled at me with heavy-lidded eyes, put a glass of red wine in one of my hands, the TV remote in the other then disappeared back into the kitchen. If that wasn’t my most intense sexual fantasy, I didn’t know what was.

‘Her and me both,’ I said, setting down the remote and following him into the other room. ‘You were all right today, though? I’m sorry I didn’t text as much as I said I would. My phone wouldn’t turn on so I had to text from my laptop and—’

‘You sent thirty-seven texts,’ he replied, taking a sip from his own fingerprint-smudged glass. ‘How many times were you planning on sending?’

I shrugged, peering into a bubbling saucepan. Ooh, pasta. The deal for now was I would go to the office Monday to Thursday and work from home on Fridays. While he wasn’t away on tour, Alex would be home with Al Mondays and Tuesdays and the part-time nanny we shared with Sasha and Banks, a couple from my antenatal group, came by Wednesday and Thursdays so he could, in theory, get on with writing his new album.

In theory.

‘Did Graham come over?’

Alex shook his head and snatched his fingers back from the spitting pan.

‘He and Craig are gonna swing by tomorrow. We’ve gotta figure out the set, make more time to rehearse. It’s creeping up on us real fast, we’ve only got three weeks.’

In an attempt to get themselves back into the creative flow of things, the band had announced a hometown show, their first in more than a year, supposedly to try out new material. Only there was no new material. And the show was in less than three weeks. Unless Alex was planning on rocking out some adult-oriented rock covers of ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’, he definitely had an uphill struggle in front of him.

‘You look so good today.’ Alex tossed a tea towel over his shoulder and looked back at me. ‘Did you get your hair done or something?’

‘I washed it,’ I whispered brazenly. ‘And then I brushed it.’

‘That is so hot,’ he replied, leaning over to press his mouth against mine in a decadent red wine kiss. ‘You want to blow off dinner and go straight to bed?’

‘What’s for dinner?’ I asked, breathless from the kiss.

‘My celebrated spaghetti in sauce from a jar and pre-shredded cheese.’

It really was a difficult choice.

‘Will you still love me if I say dinner first and then bed?’

Alex took the spaghetti off the stove and dumped it into the colander that waited in the sink.

‘I would love you even more than ever,’ he replied, clearly relieved. ‘I didn’t sleep last night at all and with Al not taking a nap all day, I’m exhausted. I’m so tired I don’t even think I could get it up.’

‘Oh good,’ I muttered as I remembered I hadn’t shaved my legs in over a week. Because we hadn’t had sex in over a week. Or was it two weeks? Maybe more.

‘What’s up?’ Alex asked.

‘Nothing,’ I replied, replacing my frown with a grateful smile. ‘Hey, do you know what normcore means?’

Even though I’d always thought of myself as someone who prized sleep above almost everything else in life, ever since Alice came along, I had found myself awake at two thirty in the morning, right on the dot. Almost every night, I found myself lying in bed wide awake, even when Al slept straight through. Always looking for a silver lining, I tried to fill these weird little moments of me time with useful tasks, like watching YouTube videos and eating.

‘And then she called me normcore,’ I whispered into my headphones as I prowled around the kitchen, looking for snacks.

‘Well, I don’t know what that is but it doesn’t sound very nice,’ Louisa said, her lovely face looming large on my iPhone screen. ‘Tell her to sod off.’

My absolute favourite thing to do with this unwanted gift of useless time was to call one of my best humans in the UK and interrupt her breakfast routine. I watched over Louisa’s shoulder as my six-year-old goddaughter, Grace, merrily poured herself a red Le Creuset mixing bowl full of cereal behind her mother’s back.

‘Do you think my life has got boring?’ I asked, dreading the answer to my question. Louisa had known me forever and she wasn’t terribly good at sugarcoating.

‘If your life is boring, I should take myself down to the glue factory right now,’ she replied. ‘Listen to yourself, woman.’

‘I suppose you’re right.’ I opened the fridge and pouted at the miserable contents. I would not be reduced to eating a pouch of pureed baby food. Again. ‘My life is amazing. This is the first week I’ve felt like I’m getting myself back, you know? I actually feel like myself again.’

‘I remember trying to renew my passport when Grace was six months and Tim came home to find me sobbing on the settee,’ Lou replied. ‘I was so broken I couldn’t remember my middle name. You’re definitely doing better than me.’

‘I’m not completely on top of it,’ I admitted. ‘I’m knackered all the time and I can’t get through a full set of adverts without crying and I have to unfasten the top button on my jeans by lunchtime every day, but other than that, yeah, I think I’m there.’

‘I thought you said you’d lost all the baby weight?’

‘This body grew a baby and I will not be fat-shamed by you or anyone,’ I replied, trying to look as indignant as possible for someone who had already eaten three Penguin biscuits before calling. ‘And for your information, I did get rid of all the baby weight but I replaced it with Christmas weight and the pastries-from-the-new-coffee-shop-that-just-opened-round-the-corner weight. Plus, I feel like everything has moved. Pregnancy is rude, why couldn’t it put everything back where it found it?’

‘It’s all a matter of discipline, Ange,’ replied the woman who still weighed exactly the same as she did on her wedding day and tried on her wedding dress once a month, every month, to confirm it. ‘Just eat less and move more. Dead simple.’

I was about to give her my best snappy comeback when Gracie splashed an entire four pints of milk into her mixing bowl.

‘Does Gracie always make her own breakfast?’ I asked innocently.

Louisa glanced over her shoulder then immediately did a double take.

‘Oh, fuck,’ she grunted, dropping her phone on the kitchen table. I smiled happily at her faux gabled ceiling as the wailing started across the room.

‘I’m going to have to call you back,’ Lou said, her face sweeping across the screen. ‘There’s bloody Coco Pops everywhere.’

‘Wait, you said you wanted to ask me something,’ I reminded her. I’d woken up to several WhatsApp messages, which usually required me to find some bizarre toy like a WTF doll or some such shite that was already sold out in England – but such were the responsibilities of Cool Aunt Angela in America.

‘Honestly, I’d forget my head if it wasn’t screwed on,’ Louisa said while Gracie continued to wail in the background. ‘I’m coming to see you!’

‘You are?’ I opened the fridge and grabbed the pouch of baby food. ‘All of you?’

‘No, just me,’ she explained. ‘Tim and I were supposed to be off on a dirty weekend but he’s been pulled into a work conference. Figured I’d abuse his air miles and get some quality BFF time in.’

‘Sounds lovely,’ I replied. ‘Clearly Gracie can be left alone to look after herself.’

‘Grace is going on a pony camp with her friend Lily and her mummy,’ she said loudly. ‘If she behaves and stops crying and eats her breakfast like a good girl.’

‘I h-hate i-i-it,’ I heard Grace stammer through choked sobs. ‘I w-want my Coco Pops.’

‘What have you given her?’ I asked, peering at the tiny, tear-stained face behind my friend.

‘Coco Pops,’ she replied with a sigh. ‘But she wants them in the mixing bowl. Tim put them in there months ago so they could share and now she insists on it every single day. Because some daughters don’t realize there’s seven quids’ worth of cereal and milk in that bowl and some fathers laugh at them every time they do it, which just encourages said daughters.’

‘Which ends up with said mothers going completely bonkers,’ I finished for her. ‘So, I am getting the feeling you could use a weekend away. When were you thinking of coming?’

Louisa’s entire face broke out into a bright, happy smile.

‘Weekend after next,’ she said. ‘I’ve already booked it, had to grab the seat while it was available. I will see you a week on Thursday!’

‘A week on Thursday!’ I forced the corners of my mouth up into a smile while my heart began to beat faster. ‘That is very soon and specific and what were you going to do if we weren’t here?’

‘Where else would you be?’ she scoffed. ‘There’s no running off all over the world these days, Angela. You’ve got a baby now. Even if Alex goes off on tour, you’re going to be at home, aren’t you?’

I sucked in my bottom lip and bit down hard.

‘I’m so looking forward to it. I can’t wait to give Alice a squidge.’ Lou smiled so happily, I couldn’t help but smile back. ‘Some proper quality time with my two favourite girls.’

Right on cue, Grace began to wail from her spot at the kitchen table.

‘My favourite girls other than you,’ Louisa yelled, shaking her head at me and frantically waving. ‘Say bye-bye to Auntie Angela.’

The call ended abruptly, leaving me all alone in the dark kitchen with a phone in one hand and a pouch of pureed apples and plums in the other. I unscrewed the cap on the pouch with my teeth and squished half of it into my mouth. Alex liked to make his own fruit purees but there wasn’t always time and, though I didn’t have the heart to tell him, Alice definitely preferred these to his homemade efforts. Also, I knew it was petty but sometimes his perfect father routine was ever so, ever so very slightly grating. No matter what my mother, his mother, fourteen thousand mummy bloggers and Gwyneth Paltrow said, a couple of store-bought processed fruit pouches weren’t going to kill her or me.

I pushed the door to Alice’s room open, just a fraction. The calming blue light from her humidifier cast just enough of a glow for me to see her peaceful, sleeping face. I smiled and fought the urge to go over and stroke her little pink cheek.

‘I will always let you have a mixing bowl full of Coco Pops for breakfast, even if Daddy says no,’ I whispered, closing her door and tiptoeing back into my bedroom. I plugged my phone into its charger and slid under the covers, curling myself around Alex’s sleeping body and burying my face in the nape of his neck, waiting for sleep to come back to me.

CHAPTER THREE

‘So do you think it’s better to split the site into sections or just use tags?’ I asked Ramon, head of design, as we stared at three different screens, each showing a dummy mock-up of my new site on Wednesday afternoon. ‘Maybe a floating menu at the top of the page—’

Before I could finish the thought, my screen froze and the disembodied head of our fearless leader appeared in front of me. Cici, the great and terrible.

‘Can you come up to my office?’ the head requested.

‘Now?’ I asked. ‘I’m in the middle of something.’

The head smiled.

‘Hit the penthouse button in the elevator, it’ll bring you straight up.’

The head disappeared.

‘Don’t go anywhere,’ I said to Ramon as I gathered my notebook and a pen. ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’

‘No, you won’t,’ he replied. ‘But I agree you need a drop-down menu. I’ll figure it out.’

‘You decided to keep things low-key in here then?’ I said as Don let me in, only stopping to pick my jaw up off the floor. Cici shrugged, seated in what had to be a custom-built chair behind what had to be a custom-built desk. Although it wasn’t really a chair, more of a throne that had mated with a tube of Ruby Woo lipstick on the set of a Lady Gaga stage show. A huge, glossy pop of colour in the otherwise all-white office with views out over the East River. She’d always been destined for an office like this, I realized, high in the sky and looking down on New York. She was born for it.

‘What’s up, boss?’

She gave a happy shimmy as I sat myself in one of the butter-soft white leather chairs on the opposite side of a crystal desk.

‘I do love hearing that,’ she said, nodding when Don appeared with two glasses of water and placed them on the coasters before scurrying away without a word. ‘Here’s the thing. It’s been a really fun six months doing literally everyone’s job for them but I need someone else to oversee the editorial because, like, I don’t want to do it any more. I really like being the CEO but I don’t want to have to deal with all the, you know …’

‘People?’ I suggested.

‘Exactly,’ she agreed, slapping the air for not getting it as quickly as I did. ‘The people. And the actual work. It’s really not my thing. Someone else needs to deal with the day-to-day running of the sites. I don’t have the time to sit in editorial meetings, pretending to give a shit.’

There was an argument to be made that honesty wasn’t always the best policy. I’d known Cici for years but that didn’t mean I was always ready for her bluntness. All the diplomacy genes had gone to her identical twin, Delia, in the womb but what Cici lacked in subtlety she made up for in … well, nothing good.

‘Someone has to give a shit,’ I told her. ‘You’re ultimately responsible for what you’re putting out.’

‘Exactly, that’s the problem. I hire people because they are the best at what they do but they’re always asking for my approval on every last little thing. It’s a huge turn-off,’ she sniffed. ‘So we’re creating a new role to deal with it.’

I straightened up in my chair as far as my high-waisted jeans would allow. I’d made a mistake abandoning my maternity jeans already and I knew it.

‘I’m hiring a VP of content.’ She leaned back in her lipstick throne and fixed me with her steady gaze. ‘What do you think?’

Biting my lip, I considered my answer. I thought it was a great idea but I also knew I didn’t want to do it. I left my last job when it became too corporate and I wasn’t ready to sign up for an even bigger, even more management-y role. I wanted to come in, write stories I cared about and go home at the end of the day, wondering why my brain made up words like management-y. I wanted to see my husband, hang out with my friends, put my baby to bed every night and still have time to binge on Netflix and eat an entire pizza. Taking on a bigger job would put all of that at risk, especially the Netflix and the pizza, and I just wasn’t having it.

‘I think it’s brilliant,’ I said, trying to come up with the most gracious rejection I could. Cici was not someone I wanted as an enemy. Again.

‘Right?’ she said, letting out a sigh of relief. ‘So, you might think this is crazy but you were the first person HR suggested for the role.’

‘Me?’ I gasped with fake surprise. There were no Oscars in my future.

‘Yeah but I told them you wouldn’t be interested so they found someone in the London office. I interviewed her yesterday and she’s starting next week.’

Oh.

‘They were all crazy about hiring internally, and obviously you have experience at this kind of thing, but I know it’s not what you want to do,’ Cici said, tapping her finger aggressively against the trackpad on her computer to bring it to life.

‘No,’ I agreed, fighting my FOMO. ‘It’s not what I want to do.’

But it would have been nice to have the chance to turn the job down.

‘You’re going to love Paige,’ she went on, eyes scanning her inbox as she spoke. I could tell her attention was already elsewhere. ‘You guys have a ton in common. She’s British, you’re British. She worked at Spencer UK, you worked at Spencer US.’

I raised an eyebrow.

‘She’s a little younger than you,’ Cici said as she tapped away at her keyboard. ‘And she comes from more of a fashion background so she’s, you know, cool. And she has really great ideas. And hair. Fantastic hair. So not, like, everything in common, I guess.’

I’d never heard Cici be so complimentary about anyone. For the first year I’d known her, she would only refer to me as the ‘girl who turned men gay’, which wasn’t even true. All I did was encourage a very famous, supposed shagger of an actor to come out, which was, in hindsight, a total blessing in disguise. These days we’d just post a ‘hashtag live your truth’ pic on Instagram with seventeen rainbow emojis and no one would say a single thing about it, but back then it was kind of a big deal.

‘Since you did the whole London to New York thing, I’d love for you to help her out for the first few weeks,’ she said, forcing her features up into a cheerful smile. ‘Make sure she settles in right.’

Oh good, another job for me. So, on top of looking after my actual baby, I now had to babysit a younger, more fashionable, more senior version of myself who had better hair as well.

‘I can’t wait to meet her,’ I replied, focusing on the giant Andy Warhol original behind her desk. Even though Cici was right, I wasn’t interested, for some godforsaken reason, tears were burning at the edges of my eyes. My emotional response to any given situation had been out of control ever since I found out I was pregnant. Alex had already banned me from watching any and all reality TV after finding me in floods of tears after my favourite bladesmith was eliminated on an episode of Forged in Fire.

‘I can’t wait for her to start dealing with all these whining editors,’ she replied, leaning her head to the left and digging her fingers into her shoulder with a pretty grimace. ‘I have legal meetings all day and I don’t want to have to OK another feature on leather pants for summer, yes or no.’

‘Is everything OK?’ I, a whining editor, asked, my tears disappearing as quickly as they had arrived. ‘With the company, I mean?’

‘Everything is great,’ she nodded. ‘But the investors need to hear me say that a thousand times a day and I don’t appreciate a bunch of old men in suits assuming I don’t know what I’m doing just because I’m young and beautiful. They’re a nightmare,’ Cici groaned, pressing her perfectly manicured fingertips into her temples. ‘I’m, like, you gave me the money, I’m doing my job, now go away please.’

‘Oh, I can imagine,’ I said with an uncomfortable chuckle. I could not even imagine. ‘What’s a few million dollars between friends?’

‘Exactly. I should have funded this whole thing myself. It’s just all so much.’

I was well aware that Alex and I were a lot better off than most people. But for the most part, my money went on impossibly dull, everyday things Cici wouldn’t have been able to fathom. The last thing I’d funded myself was a chocolate croissant.

‘Jumping from assistant to running an entire company is a lot,’ I reasoned. ‘But you know you’re doing an incredible job, everything is going so well.’

‘I know,’ she replied without a hint of even false modesty. ‘And you would think I’d have more to do now but I really don’t. When I was your assistant, I had so many different things to do every day. Like, a thousand dumb tasks.’

I resisted the urge to point out how few of those tasks were ever actually completed.

‘But now it’s bigger-picture stuff. I don’t have so many things to do but the things I do have are intense. Sometimes it’s exhausting, all this power.’

She closed her eyes and smiled like a shark, only Cici Spencer was a thousand times more dangerous than any Great White.

‘I’m sure you went through this when you were younger. I mean, people don’t talk to you like you’re dumb now, do they? It’s terrible that we should have to wait until we’re in our forties to be taken seriously, totally sexist.’

‘Cici,’ I said, clearing my old crone throat before I spoke. ‘I’m not in my forties. You’re three months older than me.’

‘Oh, Angela.’ The look on her face was one of pure horror. She waved a hand in front of her own visage to make sure I knew just what had offended her so greatly. ‘What happened?’

For just a moment, I allowed myself to revel in the memory of that one time I’d punched her at a Christmas party. It wasn’t an act I was proud of but it was something that gave me great comfort in trying times. Like this.

‘Remind me to get you a certificate for Botox for your next birthday,’ she said, still utterly aghast.

‘So, work on Recherché is going well,’ I said, attempting to redirect the conversation before I lamped her. I looked young for my age, everybody said so. Not that it mattered but still. ‘We should be ready to go live in a week or so.’

‘Awesome, sounds great, can’t wait to see it.’ She held up her hand to quiet me as she stared directly at my face. ‘Are you sure you’re only thirty-five?’

‘I’ll be back downstairs if you need me,’ I said, standing up to leave. ‘I’ll try not to bother you in the meantime.’

Because really, if you’d already punched someone once before, did it really count if you punched them again?