Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins 2019

Copyright © Lindsey Kelk 2019

Cover design by Ellie Game © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019

Cover illustrations © Lucy Truman

Lindsey Kelk asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008236854

Ebook Edition © May 2019 ISBN: 9780008236878

Version: 2019-05-02

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?

CHAPTER FOUR

‘I thought you’d stood me up,’ I said, manhandling Jenny in a massive hug after she’d run down the street, fifteen minutes late for our dinner reservation. ‘Again.’

‘That was one time,’ she told me, shame-faced and shiny-eyed. ‘I’m a busy gal. How is my favourite baby?’

‘Ask me when my scalp stops throbbing,’ I replied as I pressed my fingers into my temple. Alice was going through a grabbing phase and I did not care for it one bit. ‘Alex says you can’t see the bald patch but I don’t trust him.’

Jenny peered into my hair, giving it a thorough check. When you couldn’t trust your husband not to lie, only a best friend’s opinion would do.

‘You’re good. It’s red, though. She’s getting strong.’ She linked her arm through mine and started leading me down an exceptionally murdery alleyway. I hadn’t seen Jenny in forever but that didn’t mean I wanted to be led to my untimely death just to get in some non-baby friend time.

The sun was setting and we were deep in the middle of an industrial area I had never been to before and, god willing, would never visit again. According to Google Maps, the address Jenny had given me didn’t exist and so I’d already let myself into a lumber store, a ceramics studio and something they’d told me was doggy daycare – but, since I hadn’t seen a single dog or dog-related item, I was fairly certain had been a meth lab. Alex would be so annoyed if I got killed the week the nanny was off.

‘Where are we?’ I asked as Jenny rapped three times on a bright red door.

She turned back to look at me over her shoulder, with a half-smile on her face and dark brown eyes full of mischief. ‘Are you ready for an adventure?’

‘I’m ready for my dinner,’ I replied, pressing a hand against my empty belly. ‘Seriously, I’m starving. You promised me a feed, Lopez.’

‘I promised you an experience,’ she replied. The red door opened and a tall, very serious-looking Asian man appeared. He was wearing an exquisitely cut black suit, black shirt and black tie and I suddenly wasn’t sure my absolutely adorable blue Faithfull shirtdress and shiny white Converse were going to pass the dress code.

‘Welcome to Fukku Rain to Shinka¯,’ he said, looking us both up and down and frowning at my choice of shoe. I was correct. ‘You have a reservation?’

‘Lopez, for two,’ Jenny said. ‘Riverside.’

‘Riverside?’ I whispered as the man nodded once and held open the door. ‘Is that some sort of password?’

‘Not quite,’ she whispered back. ‘Relax, this is going to be a night you will never forget.’

I immediately tensed up from head to toe. When Jenny promised an unforgettable evening, someone either usually ended up at karaoke until three a.m., face first in the bottom of the Bellagio fountains, or moving to Los Angeles. And given that the last thing I’d done before leaving the house was apply calendula cream to my cracked boobs while Alex quietly sulked about me going out, none of those options seemed particularly favourable.

‘Not to be a Debbie Downer but I can’t be out super late,’ I said. Managing expectations was key with Jenny. ‘Alex is exhausted from being at home with Alice all week.’

‘Angie, it’s Wednesday,’ she whispered as we followed the host through a heavy black velvet curtain and into a tunnel so dark I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. ‘And Monday was a holiday so you weren’t even at work.’

‘Well, he’s tired and I don’t want to take the piss,’ I said, stumbling over something unseen. ‘Are you sure about this?’

‘Positive,’ her voice confirmed somewhere in the darkness ahead of me. ‘You’re gonna flip.’

‘Only if I don’t fall first,’ I corrected. ‘I’ve got a bag full of Ikea tealights at home, I’d have brought some if I’d have known.’

‘We have arrived.’

The darkness was split by a sliver of something like daylight as the host pulled back another black curtain at the end of the tunnel.

‘Please, choose your vessel.’

I blinked as my eyes adjusted to the light and then again to make sure I wasn’t seeing things. As far as I could tell, we’d only walked a few feet but somehow we had been transported to another world. I took a step forward onto a rickety wooden dock that jutted out over an actual river. Flowing water ran all the way around the room, surrounding a miniature island that was covered with full-size cherry trees, and dotted between the trees were a number of tiny tables, glowing with the light of a dozen candles. So, they didn’t need my Ikea tealights after all.

‘Well?’ Jenny said, nudging me towards three little wooden rowing boats tied up to what looked like an ancient dock in front of us. ‘Choose your freaking vessel.’

‘We have to row to dinner?’ I asked, as a tiny bird flew past my head. They had birds? Inside? Inside birds on purpose did not seem like the kind of thing that would get you a good grade from the New York department of health and safety. ‘Jenny, is this the actual Gowanus Canal? Because you know that water has gonorrhoea, right? I mean, they tested it and everything—’

‘Roberto will row the boat,’ the host explained with a small bow, gesturing towards what was quite clearly a male model, wearing nothing but a pair of gold swimming trunks. Either someone’s encyclopaedia had its pages stuck together or they’d been doing far too much coke when they came up with the idea of this place.

‘We’ll take this one.’ Jenny pushed me down the dock and hopped into the boat, spreading her gorgeous scarf-print dress around her on her seat. ‘Angie, can you take a picture?’

She leaned forward to hand me her phone before positioning herself in the boat, lifting her chin and reclining seductively.

‘I’m real sorry but we don’t allow photos inside the forest,’ Roberto explained in a thick Texan drawl. Holding my breath, I waited for Jenny to scratch his eyes out but, instead, she simply sat up straight and nodded, her face a study in seriousness.

‘Of course,’ she said, snatching back her phone and shoving it deep into her quilted Gucci camera bag. ‘Totally get it.’

What was going on? Jenny was OK with being told she couldn’t take photos? Everyone had officially gone insane. I looked down at the water and saw something dart underneath the boat.

‘I’m sorry I don’t want to panic anybody but I think I just saw something in the water.’ Most likely gonorrhoea, I thought to myself. ‘It looked like a fish?’

‘Most surely was, Ma’am,’ Roberto replied as he nonchalantly adjusted his package. ‘How else are you gonna fish for your supper?’

‘Jenny.’

‘Angie?’

My heels were already starting to hurt, my stomach was howling with hunger and I was almost certain one of the tiny birds had already shat in my hair.

‘Have you brought me to a restaurant where I have to catch my own fish before I can eat?’

‘Technically, only if that’s what you order,’ she replied, hitting me with her biggest, brightest smile. ‘But I ordered ahead so that is what you’re going to do, yes.’

‘I am going to die,’ I muttered, gripping Roberto’s arm tightly as I boarded. ‘I cannot believe you brought me here.’

‘You’re so welcome,’ Jenny said happily, taking my hand and completely missing my point. ‘It was not easy to get a reservation, believe me. But nothing’s too good for girls’ night, not for my Angie.’

I eyed her suspiciously. She was definitely up to something.

‘I’ll bet you one hundred dollars that one of us falls in the water before the night is over,’ I replied, entirely unamused as we rowed across the moat. ‘There’s no way we’re getting in and out of a place that serves booze and has a moat without one of us ending the evening piss-wet through.’

‘Jeez, would you relax?’ she huffed. ‘This is the hottest restaurant in the world right now, it’s booked up for months. Someone at work offered to get me into the Met Gala if I gave them our slot tonight.’

‘Are you serious?’ I asked. ‘You passed up tickets to the Met Gala so we could fish for our dinner in Gowanus?’

Jenny shook out her lion’s mane of chocolate-brown curls as the boat completed its brief journey and hit dry land. ‘It isn’t what it used to be,’ she muttered as Roberto the golden-trunked gondolier helped her out of the boat. ‘It’s all Kardashian-Jenners these days. At best, you get Rihanna. Who tried to get a reservation here and couldn’t, by the way.’

‘Here we go again,’ I replied, wobbling up and out. ‘When will you stop the one-upmanship with Rihanna?’

‘When she admits I gave her the idea for Fenty Beauty,’ Jenny snapped. ‘You were there, you know it’s true.’

‘If you’re talking about the time you were so wasted you lunged at her when she was leaving Philippe Chow and told her she was really hot and she should “do something with makeup”, then, yes, I was there.’

With a dismissive huff, Jenny turned on her heel and walked off up the dock and into the forest.

The restaurant whose name I had already forgotten was beyond. There was lush green grass beneath my feet, a dusky sky complete with fluffy clouds above my head. I didn’t understand it and I didn’t care to. Now I was out the murder tunnel and on dry land, the only thing I could think about was food. I ducked to avoid a head-on collision with a passing butterfly as a beautiful redhead in full Geisha get-up tiptoed through the cherry trees towards us.

‘Good evening, ladies,’ the woman said, bowing her head slightly. ‘We are so pleased you could join us on the island. I have you at one of our riverside tables this evening. Please follow me.’

At least the ‘Riverside’ bit made sense now.

I didn’t dare ask if her ensemble was cultural appropriation as we followed her to our table because I was fairly certain it was and I was too hungry to get thrown out. She led us down a winding pathway through the trees until we reached a small table, right next to the water. I could see other tables dotted around the forest but the perpetual twilight meant I couldn’t quite make out anyone else’s face. I made a mental note to have a nose when I went to the toilet, just in case there were any proper celebs in attendance.

‘Wait,’ I said, clutching my non-existent pearls as Jenny took her seat and immediately started fannying about with the fishing pole resting next to her chair. ‘Where are the toilets?’

‘Our lounge is through the forest and over the bridge,’ the waitress replied, waving a graceful arm over yonder. ‘It is gender neutral and paperless. Tonight we will start with our signature cocktail and feel free to begin fishing at your leisure. Please let me know if you require assistance on your journey.’

With a soft smile and a gentle nod, she disappeared back into the trees.

‘This place is so very you,’ I told Jenny, allowing her to believe it was a compliment. The restaurant, like my friend, was the very definition of the word ‘extra’. ‘What happens if I don’t catch a fish? What happens if I do catch a fish? And what does she mean by a paperless toilet?’

‘Half of me never wants to know and half of me so does. There’s no menu, by the way. Everything other than the fish you catch is omakase, chef’s specials, OK?’

‘Not really but sure,’ I replied, trying not to stare into the water. There. Was. An. Actual. Fish. ‘So, I haven’t seen you in a million years. What’s going on with you?’

There was a time when I knew absolutely every thought that went through Jenny’s head. Back when we lived together and spent all our nights watching America’s Next Top Model and mainlining Ben & Jerry’s, there wasn’t a single second of a single day when I didn’t know where she was, why she was there and what or who she was doing. Even when I’d moved in with Alex, we’d still managed to see each other all the time but, ever since Alice had come along, the amount of time I had to hang out with my friends, even my best, best friend, had been obliterated.

‘Everything. Everything is going on,’ she said, grabbing her napkin and flicking it out onto her lap. I did the same, knocked a pair of chopsticks off my plate and watched them roll onto the floor, down the bank and into the river. The evening was off to an excellent start. ‘I’ve finally figured it out. I know how I’m gonna become the next Oprah.’

Jenny had been plotting to dethrone Ms Winfrey ever since we met. There was not a single woman on this earth who owned as many self-help books, went to as many workshops or generally went around giving out unsolicited advice. Not that I was complaining about her fabulous fairy godmother routine, it always worked out a treat for me. Well, almost always.

‘Tell me everything.’

Jenny’s beautiful face lit up with an excitement usually reserved for sample sales, Tom Hardy and other people’s dogs.

‘I’m starting a podcast!’ she said, throwing her arms in the air, narrowly missing what looked awfully like Alec Baldwin’s face by roughly three millimeters. ‘Isn’t it the greatest idea you’ve ever heard?’

‘Oh my god, it is!’ I gasped as she did a happy dance in her seat, inching ever closer to the edge of the water. I utched my own chair a few inches back towards safety. ‘You’re a genius.’

‘So, I was running a few days ago and listening to a podcast and I was, like, dude, I should have a podcast! And now I’m officially a media mogul.’

‘To be honest, I expected a more dramatic story,’ I admitted, one eye on the fish that was having a good poke around at my submerged chopsticks. ‘Does it have a name?’

Jenny tapped her fingers against the table in a mini drumroll.

‘It’s called … “Tell Me About It with Jenny Lopez”,’ she announced. ‘I’m going to interview interesting people and get them to, you know, tell me about stuff. I already asked a bunch of people. It’s going to be amazing.’

‘I am so excited for you,’ I said, meaning it completely. This was so entirely perfect for her, I couldn’t believe we hadn’t thought of it sooner. A microphone, a platform and a completely captive audience? She’d be president within a decade.

‘I still have a few things to figure out.’ She smiled at the waitress as she returned with two tall glasses of clear liquid that did not look even slightly like proper food. ‘Like a studio and an editor and all the marketing, social media and graphic design. But other than that, I’m good to go.’

‘Other than that,’ I said, ignoring the tiny warning bells that had started ringing.

‘And I don’t know if you would know this but do you have any idea how you actually get a podcast online?’ she asked, not a trace of irony on her face. ‘Do I just send it to the podcast people and they do it all?’

Ring-ding-ding-ding-ding.

‘Podcast people?’

‘Ladies, this is a Chu-Hai Spritz,’ the waitress said, setting the glasses down on the table. A fat lychee bobbed around in the top of each cocktail. ‘Your first tastes will be out soon.’

I really hoped my first taste would be a full pizza.

‘So, you’re starting a podcast but you don’t know how to record a podcast, market a podcast or share a podcast?’ I asked.

Jenny shook her head and pushed her drink away.

‘Is that lychee in there? I hate lychees. Oh, and I’m taking over EWPR while Erin and Thomas are in London. I guess I’m going to be really busy over the next few months.’

I grabbed my cocktail and took a deep, much-needed drink. ‘I didn’t know Erin and Thomas were planning a trip to London. How long are they off for?’

Jenny’s eyes widened for a second.

‘She hasn’t told you?’ she said, her voice lifted by surprise. ‘They’re moving. Thomas got transferred, they’re leaving right after July Fourth.’

Erin wasn’t just Jenny’s boss at Erin White Public Relations, she was also one of our best friends. This was a lot to process on an empty stomach. I glanced off into the forest to see where our waitress was hiding. Just how much trouble would we get into if I broke out the emergency mini Twix I was hiding in my handbag?

‘It’s supposedly only for a year,’ Jenny added. ‘But she wants me to take over completely while they’re away. Acting president.’

And to think I’d guessed it would take her another decade to earn that title.

‘I’m gutted Erin is leaving but, Jen, that’s amazing,’ I said as she looked away, the big smile that had been on her face only a moment ago fading. ‘Isn’t it?’

Jenny ran her fingers through her curls and attempted to tuck her hair behind her ears as she took a deep breath in. It stayed in place for approximately three seconds before springing free as she breathed out, doubling in size as the curls bounced around her gorgeous face.

‘I’ll kill it, I know I will,’ she said, more to herself than to me. ‘But there’s so much going on and, I don’t know. I never even really wanted this job, you know? I fell into it by accident and now I’m running the show? There’s so much I wanted to do this year, there’s the podcast, we just moved into a new place and, I don’t know. Other stuff that I can’t do if I’m running a company.’

I reached across the table for her hand and put on my most supportive face. There was nothing I wouldn’t do for my best friend. Except give her my secret Twix.

‘You know I’m here for you. Anything you need, you’ve got it.’

The very second the words left my mouth, I knew I would regret them.

‘There is one thing,’ she said, turning back to face me with a different, more determined expression. ‘I have a huge problem that needs fixing ASAP and I desperately need your help. You know Précis Cosmetics?’

I nodded. I did know. I had stolen loads of it from her office. Lovely lipsticks, terrible mascaras and EWPR’s biggest account since forever.

‘They’re launching a new mascara.’

Good news.

‘And we’re hosting an influencer event for them in Hawaii.’

Bully-for-the-influencers news.

‘And I have to go because Erin is house-hunting in the UK and my account director just quit to go and run a Christmas tree farm in Pennsylvania with her girlfriend.’

Oh god. I-know-exactly-where-this-is-going news.

I pulled my cocktail closer and sucked on the paper straw.

‘What can I do? The last few years have been tough on people,’ she replied with a shrug before pulling her phone out of her bag. ‘Whatever, that’s not the point. The original plan was, we were gonna take a bunch of YouTubers from around the world to Hawaii to promote it, but it turns out maybe one of them tweeted something about Nazis and maybe another one of them fat-shamed some chick from America’s Got Talent and, the short version of my very long story is, the brand disinvited all the Americans and I have one week to find five people to take on an all-inclusive trip and I know I’ve barely had time to hang out lately but I’m going to make it up to you right now because you’re totally coming with me on this trip.’

I continued to suck on my paper straw until my drink ran dry.

‘May I refresh that for you?’ the waitress asked, appearing out of thin air.

‘Yes, you may,’ I replied as she scooped up my glass and rested it on a small wooden tray. ‘Jenny?’

She shook her head as she scrolled through her impossibly full inbox.

‘Do you want something else?’ I asked.

‘Just a seltzer,’ she replied with a sweet smile. ‘I have a shit ton of admin to do when I get home.’

Even though I’d said I didn’t want to be out late, it still stung to know I wasn’t her only plan for the evening. While the chances of rolling out of our favourite karaoke bar at three a.m. were slim to none, it would have been nice to think it was still on the table.

‘Come on, Angie.’ As soon as the waitress was gone, Jenny hurled herself across the table, stretching out her arms until her phone almost touched my face. ‘Look at this, tell me it’s not heaven. Come through. Come through for your old pal, Jen.’

‘Jenny, you’re insane,’ I said, slapping her phone away but not before I caught a glimpse of the photo she was trying to show me. Blue skies, white sand and a turquoise ocean that looked a million miles away from the East River. ‘I can’t just up and disappear to Hawaii. I have a baby and a job and, on top of that, Louisa is coming to stay next weekend.’

‘That’s perfect!’ she said, snapping her fingers. ‘Louisa can come too. Now we only need to find three other people. Anyone else unproblematic you can think of?’

‘We’re not coming,’ I reiterated. ‘What about Sadie? Précis would love that.’

‘I said unproblematic,’ Jenny replied, shaking her head. ‘I had dinner with her last week and she was super excited because someone on Twitter said she was peak white feminism and she retweeted it thinking it was a good thing.’

‘OK, so not Sadie,’ I agreed. ‘What about Eva from Evalution? She was at Spencer but she’s gone back to doing YouTube full time. I’m almost certain she’s entirely unproblematic. I can ask her if you’d like?’

‘That would be amazing,’ Jenny cheered, flicking through more photos. Oh, it did look pretty. ‘So that’s you, Louisa, Eva and we still have two open seats.’

‘Four open seats,’ I said. ‘I’m not coming. And I haven’t even asked Eva yet.’

‘Angie, baby,’ Jenny slunk out of her seat and crept around the table, crouching down by my side. ‘Just think about it. You, me, cocktails even more delicious than this one. Sun, sea, sand and a ton of free makeup.’

Hmm. I did enjoy free makeup.

‘And it would be so great for your new website. I could set you up with an interview with the amazing woman who founded the brand, you could write travel pieces about Hawaii and we’ll have make-up artists and a photographer there the whole time, taking millions of photos of you looking super awesome.’

I also enjoyed looking super awesome.

‘Can’t you imagine it?’ she sighed, stretching her arm skyward to paint an imaginary picture. ‘You, me and Louisa, sat on the deck of your private villa, sun slipping over the horizon with nothing but the warm, blue waters of the Pacific Ocean for as far as the eye can see. And then, at the end of the day, you hop in your personal hot tub and go to bed.’

I held a hand against my chest, my breath caught in my throat.

‘Uninterrupted sleep,’ Jenny whispered seductively. ‘For five whole nights.’

The foul temptress.

‘Jen, honestly, I can’t,’ I said, shaking myself to shatter her spell. ‘If someone had told me having a baby would mean turning down a free trip to Hawaii, I’d have considered getting a dog instead, but she’s ten months old now, it’s a bit too late for me to do anything about it.’

‘Bring her.’

I arched an eyebrow. ‘Really?’

‘No, not really,’ she sighed. ‘We’re not insured for babies and I really don’t know how I was planning to get out of that one if you’d said yes.’

I closed my eyes and chased any thoughts of white sandy beaches, cocktails served in coconuts and big, empty king-size beds out of my mind.

Jenny flopped down into the grass and sighed. ‘I know it isn’t as easy as it was before but come on, Angie. You could at least ask Alex. You could at least find out if you could take the time off of work. We used to have so much fun and now I never even see you.’

There it was. Used to. We used to have fun. And I’d looked up what normcore meant: it was just a sneaky hipster word for boring. Was that me from now on? A Used To Be person?

‘I know this is a lot to ask but it would mean so much to me, for work and as a friend.’ Jenny pushed herself up onto her knees, hands clasped together in front of her chest, her gorgeous silk scarf-print dress spread out around her like a sexy Gucci picnic blanket. ‘Please, Angie, won’t you just think about it?’

‘Jenny,’ I whispered.

‘Yes?’ she replied.

‘You’re awfully close to the edge of the water.’

‘Oh shit!’

Jenny looked over her shoulder, losing her balance as she twisted. All at once, I grabbed for her hand as she grabbed the fishing pole stuck in the grass at the side of my seat, only for the line to suddenly come to life and pull her flat down on her face. Jenny had a bite. She landed flat on her stomach, her face inches away from the water as I launched myself out of my chair, rugby-tackling her around the waist and anchoring my friend to dry land.

‘Let go of the fishing rod!’ I yelled as whatever was on the other end of the fishing line splashed furiously in the water.

‘Don’t let go of me!’ Jenny screamed, thrashing around as though she was about to dredge up Moby-Dick. ‘It’s pulling me into the river!’

‘It’s not Jaws,’ I shouted back, hoping that was true. I was scared, excited and still very hungry but even I didn’t think I could eat an entire shark. ‘Let go!’

‘Here’s your drin— oh, crap!’

But Jenny did not let go. And the waitress, delivering my fresh cocktail, did not see us sprawled out on the riverbank. I glanced upwards just in time to see the look of shock on her face as she tripped over Jenny’s wildly kicking legs. She was not dressed for speedy reactions, her reflexes severely hampered by her heavy silk kimono and traditional wooden sandals, and before anyone could do anything she went flying. The cocktails went first, sailing over our heads and into the river. With one arm still wrapped around Jenny’s waist, I threw the other up in the air, trying to catch her as she fell, but it was too late, she was already as good as gone. A swoosh of silk, a desperate cry and, finally, a very, very loud splash.

‘Get off me!’ she shrieked as Jenny and I attempted to pull her back onto the island. The river was only about knee-deep but that hadn’t stopped her getting soaking wet from head to toe.

Across the way, Roberto the Rower and the man who had shown us down the dark, dark tunnel jumped into one of the row boats, manically trying to reach the waterlogged waitress.

‘Are you all right?’ I asked as she crawled out of the water. Jenny picked up one side of her sodden kimono and tried to wring it out with a helpful smile. The waitress waved her away, Jenny ducking just in time to avoid a damp slap.

‘No, I’m not all right,’ she yelled. ‘Look at me. What the fuck were you doing on the floor?’

‘What is happening?’ The host from the front door stormed up the path, straightening his tie as he blustered onto the scene, Roberto and his gold trunks bringing up the rear.

‘We really don’t want to make a big deal about this,’ Jenny said, clearing her throat and dusting herself off as she stood up. ‘So we’ll take a round of free drinks and everything’s cool.’

The host fixed her with a steely glare the likes of which I hadn’t seen since my mother caught me sneaking in through the living room window at three a.m. after I lost my keys at Peter Jensen’s seventeenth birthday party.

‘The sanctity of the forest has been disturbed,’ he said calmly as the waitress hurled herself against Roberto’s naked chest. Out of everyone, he didn’t seem too mad about it. ‘You need to leave.’

‘You’re kicking us out?’ I replied, indignant and, more importantly, still starving. ‘You’re serving booze and charging people hundreds of dollars to play hook-a-duck in the arse end of Brooklyn and you didn’t expect anyone to fall in, ever?’

‘Angela Clark, you savage,’ Jenny breathed in my ear before turning to the waitress with a sympathetic smile. ‘We’re really super sorry.’

‘I’m not even a waitress,’ she wailed. ‘I’m an actress, this isn’t what I do. I have six thousand followers on Instagram.’

Jenny looked over her shoulder at me, impressed.

‘Wanna come to Hawaii?’ she asked as the waitress turned out her pocket and dropped a tiny goldfish back into the river.

‘Just get out before I call the cops,’ the host ordered. ‘Roberto, take them out the back.’

‘Your loss, lady.’ Jenny threw her hands up over her head and turned on her gorgeous red patent heel as we were escorted off the premises. ‘For real, I can’t give this trip away.’

‘Come on,’ I muttered, considerably less keen to make eye contact with the other diners than I had been when we arrived. Being marched through the kitchens and kicked out into a dustbin-filled alleyway was not how I’d envisioned my evening ending. ‘Dinosaur BBQ is around the corner. Let’s go and eat some proper food.’

‘OK but you owe me a hundred bucks,’ she said, curtseying at Roberto as he shrugged and then slammed the door in our faces.

‘I do?’

‘You bet me a hundred bucks that one of us would fall in the water by the end of the night,’ Jenny replied, impossibly pleased with herself. ‘And neither of us did.’

‘Hmm.’ I linked my arm through hers as we turned the corner back onto 3rd Avenue. ‘I suppose I do. Look at us, growing as people.’

She grinned and gave my arm a squeeze.

‘If you come to Hawaii, I’ll let you off?’

I couldn’t help but smile. ‘If I pay for dinner will you shut up about Hawaii?’

‘No, you’re totally coming, doll. The sooner you accept it, the better.’

At least she’d been right about one thing, I thought as we walked on, arm in arm towards a plateful of pulled pork. It had certainly been a night I’d never forget.

CHAPTER FIVE

Light was already beginning to seep in around the curtains when someone decided to lean on their car horn right outside my bedroom window at six a.m. on Thursday morning. I hated to start my days feeling homicidal but this was the price I paid to live in New York; occasionally, people were thoughtless dicks. Presumably there were thoughtless dicks everywhere but the horn honking really seemed much more prevalent here than anywhere else I’d ever been. Whether I liked it or not, I was awake and I knew the intelligent thing to do would be to stay awake. Either Alice or my alarm would go off by seven anyway and the extra hour would be meaningless, I’d feel worse than if I got up now. But I wasn’t intelligent, I was exhausted. As I rolled over onto my side, pulling the duvet up under my chin, Alex curled around me, pressing himself into my back and giving me another bone to deal with.

‘Alex,’ I breathed into my pillow as he ran his hand under the covers, down my arm, my waist, my hip, tiptoeing his calloused fingertips across my leg and tracing circles on my thigh. ‘I’m tired.’

He didn’t say anything. Instead I felt his warm body moving against the curves of my back, his fingers sliding upwards under the edge of my shorts.

‘It’s so early,’ I mumbled, smiling into my pillow.

‘You don’t have to do anything but lie there,’ Alex replied, lifting my hair up at the nape of my neck and pressing his lips against my skin. ‘Unless that sounds really creepy and you would like to be more actively involved.’

‘That sounds like a very workable plan,’ I replied, giving in as his hand slipped between my legs.

It had been a while since this had happened. And by ‘a while’ I meant more than month. I thought I knew what tired was before I had a baby – living with Jenny was hardly a relaxing experience, after all – but this was something else entirely. Motherhood utterly consumed me, mind, body and spirit. For the first six months, every ounce of my existence had gone into Alice and now, as I tried to pull back pieces of my life, I was even more exhausted than before. No matter what the baby books said, it was almost impossible to get yourself in the mood when you were so exhausted you felt like you were in a medically induced coma every time your head hit the pillow. No matter how hot your husband might be.

‘Alex, wait,’ I whispered, my voice catching in my throat as he pulled my T-shirt up over my head and the world turned pink for a moment as I untangled myself from the fabric.

‘What’s wrong?’ he asked, stopping immediately.

Wrangling my T-shirt back down, I offered him my best apologetic grimace.

‘I need a wee.’

Really I had to start working on my Kegel exercises.

‘Give me two seconds,’ I said, all arms and legs as I scrambled out the bed, running to the bathroom on tiptoes. A quick wee, a rinse around with mouthwash and, bloody hell, I thought as I caught sight of myself in the mirror, maybe we’ll go for a once-over with the micellar water, given that I got approximately none of my mascara off before I went to bed. Motherhood meant multitasking and I was well into my second cleanse, sitting on the loo, when I heard Alice start.

‘No, no, no,’ I chanted, dropping pads of used cotton wool in the bin. ‘Please go back to sleep. Mummy needs to get some.’

Looking down at my shorts and knickers, a pool of pale pink fabric on the bathroom floor, I sighed. My sleeping clothes were a sad state of affairs. I picked up the greying granny pants with my toe and tossed them in the trash, right on top of the cotton wool. So brazen for six o’clock in the morning.

As I washed my hands and combed my fingers through my bedhead, I realized Alice had stopped screaming.

‘Thank you,’ I said as I slicked on some lip balm. ‘Mummy appreciates it more than you’d know.’

Except what Mummy didn’t know was that Alice had only stopped crying because Daddy had brought her into bed.

‘Alex,’ I said from the bedroom doorway.

‘She was crying. I couldn’t leave her,’ he said, bouncing her up and down on his knee. ‘I’ll make it up to you later.’

With a frustrated sigh, I padded back to bed, sliding under the covers. It was true, Alex Reid was the greatest dad of all time. He had taken to fatherhood like a waitress to water, throwing himself head first into all things Alice from the very first day we’d brought her home. He was the one who said we didn’t need a full-time nanny when I went back to work, he was the one who cleared out Barnes & Noble’s parenting section, and I would be lying if I said he hadn’t done more than his fair share of dirty nappies and three a.m. feeds. He’d even built a chute that ran out of her bedroom window and down into the bin so I could chuck her dirty nappies away without having to go outside in the winter. But the fact of the matter was, for one person to be the best at something, someone else had to be the worst.

Alex was a natural parent, I was not.

And it didn’t feel good.

‘Here she is,’ he said, waving a sulky bundle of baby in my face. Softly shaking my head, I forgot my frustrations and snuggled into the family hug. Even though she was sleeping in the nursery, I loved how she almost always found her way into our bed in the mornings, all grumpy and fidgety and half-asleep.

‘She always reminds me of you when she first wakes up,’ Alex said, pulling the covers up over his long legs.

‘Thanks,’ I replied, running my fingertip along her tiny ear as her big green eyes watched me, cheeks flushed with crying. ‘She always reminds me of you when she cries, it sounds like you singing.’

‘Thank you for that vote of confidence two weeks out from my first show in forever. My baby’s gonna be a rockstar.’

Stretching until my back cracked, I smiled and shook my head. ‘Auntie Jenny says she’s going to be a YouTube sensation.’

‘Over my dead body,’ he said instantly. ‘She’s going to be a rockstar. Or an astronaut. Only choices on the table.’

‘What if she wants to do something really important with her life?’ I countered. ‘Like write amazing novels that are never appreciated in her lifetime? Or start an underground feminist magazine? Or open a cat café?’

‘Also acceptable options,’ Alex replied as Alice poked the blanket with great concentration and babbled to herself. We were so close to her first words I could feel it and every single atom of my body wanted that word to be ‘Mummy’. I knew it wasn’t a competition as to who she loved the most, but I also knew it totally was.

‘Jenny wants to take me to Hawaii,’ I said, resting my head against his chest with my eyes closed, synching my breathing with the reassuring thud of his heartbeat.

‘And I was going to offer to take you to breakfast. Why does she always have to one-up me?’

‘Because she’s Jenny?’ I suggested.

He nodded sleepily. ‘When does she wanna go?’

‘Next week,’ I replied. ‘For five nights.’

Alex and Alice both looked at me with their matching big green eyes and laughed.

‘Sure. Classic Lopez.’

‘It’s a work thing, all expenses paid, fancy private resort on one of the little islands,’ I said, rolling onto my back and catching Alice’s tiny toes in my hand. Alex closed his eyes and smiled. ‘I told her I couldn’t go.’

I looked over to check for a reaction but in the pale dawn light of our bedroom his face was perfectly still and his eyes were shut. He wove his fingers into my hair, running them from root to tip and then back again, sending happy shivers down my spine.

‘You don’t want to?’

‘I would love to but I have work,’ I reasoned. ‘And Louisa is coming to stay and, you know, I have to keep a human being alive.’

‘I don’t know, Angela.’ The corners of Alex’s mouth turned upwards in a smile even though his eyes stayed closed. ‘I think I can survive without you for five nights.’

‘Ha ha, I meant Alice,’ I said, propping my head up in my hand. Alex stayed exactly as he was, his chest rising and falling evenly with every breath. ‘Although you would also be a concern.’

‘I’m not the one who leaves their hair straightener on three times a week,’ he reminded me. It was a harsh but fair point. ‘If I had the opportunity to go to Hawaii on Lopez’s dime, I would go. You’ll be gone what, five days? Me and Al can cope on our own. You managed when I was gone for the weekend.’

‘Yes but that was different,’ I argued, reaching for a hair band from my nightstand and automatically pulling my hair up in a ponytail. Once the hair was up, that was it. I was officially awake.

Alex opened one eye and raised an eyebrow. ‘How exactly?’

Don’t say because I’m her mother, the voice whispered in my head, do not say because you’re her mother.

‘Because I’m her mother.’

Alex closed his eye and grinned. Alice said nothing.

‘If you wanna to go, you should go,’ he said through a yawn. ‘When this record is finally finished, we’ll definitely have to tour, and I’m not a parenting expert but I hear babies are a lot less trouble than toddlers, so consider this my pre-emptive apology for all the times she throws a tantrum when I’m off playing some rando festival in Germany two years from now. You were fine on your own, I’ll be fine on my own.’

I rubbed my thumb against the band of my engagement ring and scooped Alice out of his arms, resting her against my chest.

‘When you went away, I spent the entire weekend in my pyjamas,’ I muttered, gazing down at my baby. ‘I didn’t shower, I only slept for six hours the whole three days and I took her to the emergency room when her spit-up was blue.’

‘What was it?’

‘I was so tired, I forgot I’d given her blueberries,’ I said, stroking her delicate head. ‘She was fine.’

‘If she spits up blue, I’ll shoot you a text,’ Alex promised. Cradling Alice carefully, I reached for the edge of the curtain, pulling it back on what looked to be another extremely sticky day. Did Hawaii get as humid as New York? I imagined it was less of a concern if you were sitting on a beach in a bikini.

‘I don’t know,’ I said, letting the curtain fall back into place, a shaft of daylight fading in and out across Alex’s face. ‘I can always go when she’s older. Hawaii isn’t going anywhere, is it?’

‘Can’t promise that,’ he said with an uncertain shrug. ‘Climate change is a real thing. Which reminds me, you have to start separating the recycling, babe.’

‘I’m going to tell Jenny I can’t go,’ I said, thinking out loud and mentally listing all the reasons not to jump on a private jet to a five-star resort with my very best friends for five nights in paradise. ‘I can’t leave you two on your own. It’s not fair.’

‘Obviously, I would miss you, it’s like we never have any time together, but that shouldn’t stop you from going.’ He turned over and covered his eyes with his forearm.

Well, that was considerably less encouraging.

‘And, if I have to, I can always get my mom to come and help out.’

He could do what? I sat bolt upright, suddenly wide awake.

His mother? Just when I was starting to think about going …

‘It’s not that I don’t like his mum,’ I ranted into my phone the second I left the house. ‘It’s more that my entire body rejects the very concept of her existence.’

Louisa growled in agreement. ‘So what you’re saying is, you’re not that close?’

‘At our wedding, she asked me if I was marrying Alex for a green card. When I said I wasn’t, she asked if I was pregnant. And then, when I was pregnant, she bought Alex a home paternity test, “just to make sure”,’ I replied, peeling off my denim jacket as I walked. It was only the end of May and summer was coming on strong. It seemed as though we were skipping spring and going straight into a three-month-long heat wave again this year. ‘Every time they come over, she spends the entire visit telling me everything I’m doing wrong then goes, “I suppose that’s the British way”, before walking off in a huff.’

‘If she’s not careful, the British way will be me giving her a kick up the arse,’ Lou said. ‘And I thought Tim’s mum was bad.’

‘I don’t know, what’s the worst present you’ve ever had from Tim’s mum?’ I asked.

‘Oh, I don’t know.’ She clucked her tongue as she considered. ‘Probably the time she accidentally bought me a vibrator. The man in the shop convinced her it was a back massager. That was a bit awkward.’

‘Alex’s mum bought me a lifetime subscription to Weight Watchers for Christmas. While I was pregnant.’

Louisa gasped.

‘And his dad’s no better. They never gave a shit about Alex until we had Al and now they can’t keep away, even though all they do is go on about how amazing his brother is and he’s not, he’s the worst human alive.’

‘I already believe they’re awful,’ she laughed. ‘No need for hyperbole.’

‘He’s an estate agent,’ I said, pausing to check traffic before running across 8th Avenue. ‘And an amateur magician.’

‘He must be kept away from Alice at all costs,’ Louisa replied gravely. ‘Have you considered a moonlight flit? Change your names and move back to England?’

‘Yes,’ I admitted ruefully. ‘I actually have.’

‘Well, far be it from me to tell you what to do but I do have to say, the idea of a weekend in Hawaii isn’t the worst thing I’ve ever heard,’ she said carefully. ‘Not that I wouldn’t be extremely happy to spend the weekend in New York with you and Alex but this trip does sound like a bit of a dream come true, doesn’t it?’

I knew I shouldn’t have told her.

‘I’ve got to go,’ I said, checking the address in the mysterious email I’d received a week ago. ‘I’ve got a meeting before work and I’m already late. They bloody love a breakfast meeting around here.’

‘It’s hard to stay on schedule when you’ve got a baby,’ she said. ‘I’m sure they’ll understand.’

‘Keep your fingers crossed,’ I said as I climbed the steps of 585 11th Street. ‘It’s some super exclusive mummy and baby club. They emailed me and Alex said I should meet them. He seems to think I need more mummy friends.’

‘And so do I,’ Lou replied. ‘You can’t keep refusing to socialize with other mums just because they sing different words to the “Wheels on the Bus”. It’s not good for Alice.’

‘I’m not refusing to, it’s just weird.’ I shuddered at the memory of my one morning with the Park Slope New Parents group. Dairy-free, gluten-free, caffeine-free and fun-free. ‘The groups here aren’t like they are at home. I feel like I’m about to join a cult.’

‘Then don’t drink the Kool-Aid,’ she instructed. ‘And if you see any pictures of Tom Cruise on the walls, run for the hills.’

‘Noted,’ I said, pressing the doorbell and hearing a gentle chime echo on the other side of the door. ‘Speak to you later.’

I slipped my phone into my satchel, gave my underarms a surreptitious sniff and straightened my shoulders. Even though I was a grown woman with her own child and a husband and a job and a mortgage, whenever I was confronted with a group of women, especially mothers, I always felt like I was back in Year Seven, delivering a message to the sixth-form common room.

According to their website, The Mothers of Brooklyn, or M.O.B., was a non-profit parenting group, ‘dedicated to supporting mothers and children through emotional support and growth’, and according to their Twitter feed, they would be doing this by getting half-priced manicures at Gloss nail salon every Thursday morning from ten until two. The manicures I could definitely get behind, but the rest of it sounded a bit much.

After what felt like forever, a tall slim brunette opened the front door. She was impeccably dressed for eight thirty in the morning, wearing sky-blue Jesse Kamm sailor pants, a white silk T-shirt and a colourful statement necklace made of oversized crystals that Alice would have destroyed in seconds.

‘Yes?’ she said, giving me the same look I gave to the people who knocked at my door with a clipboard in their hand.

‘Oh, hello,’ I said, overcome with the utter certainty that I’d knocked on the wrong door. ‘I’m supposed to be meeting Perry Dickson, I’m Angela. Angela Clark?’

The woman forced a smile onto her face and opened up the door fully, a cool blast of air conditioning making a break for the sweaty street.

‘You’re Angela Clark.’ It sounded more like a threat than a question or a statement. ‘I’m Perry. Please do come in. We’ve been expecting you.’

We? Gulp.

I followed her through the foyer into a huge, airy living room, full of tasteful, elegant furniture that was perfectly lit by crystal-clear floor-to-ceiling windows that let in the blinding sunshine. It looked just like my apartment. If you knocked out every wall of every single room, painted the entire thing a bright, clean white and never allowed a human being to touch a single thing.

‘This place is gorgeous,’ I said, head on a swivel as we carried on walking, striding across the stripped wooden floors and through a doorway at the end of the room. ‘You have a beautiful home.’

‘This isn’t my home,’ Perry replied with a solid bark of a laugh. ‘This is our office, our clubhouse, shall we say.’

The only club I’d ever been a member of was the Take That fan club and I had a sneaking suspicion Perry was neither a Mark nor a Robbie girl. I squeezed my denim jacket, wishing I’d worn something more formal. I loved my little leather flip-flops and pink cotton Zara sundress but, compared to Perry’s sophisticated ensemble, I felt as though I’d just trotted in from the morning milking. Which, I thought, absently squeezing my deflated boobs with my forearms, I sort of had.

‘Here we are.’

I walked through to another high-ceilinged room, this one opening out into a stunning conservatory, full of lush green plants I hardly dared look at. I could kill a cactus by simply looking at it and I counted at least three orchids in Perry’s collection. Best to keep my distance.

‘Morning, everyone,’ I said, raising a hand in a hello. Four other women dotted around the room smiled and nodded in response. Each and every one of them was just as perfectly put together as Perry. These were not women who were worried about sweat stains or subway mess or baby puke. If the townhouse hadn’t been enough of a giveaway, their immaculate presentation did it. I was out of my depth and trapped in a room full of Cicis that had spawned and I couldn’t work out for the life of me why on earth I was there.

‘This is Nia, Danielle, Avery and Joan,’ Perry said, each woman raising a diamond-bedecked hand as her name was called. ‘We’re so happy you could join us.’

‘That’s always nice to hear,’ I replied as I sat down, keeping one eye on the other women. They hovered at the edges of the room, poised and graceful, as though posing for an unseen photographer. It was all very unsettling, not least because there was literally no sign of a single baby in this supposed mother and baby group. I couldn’t see one piece of plastic or wipe-down surface anywhere. I no longer owned anything that couldn’t be cleaned with a baby wipe. ‘I’m sure it’s my baby brain acting up but I can’t remember how you said you got my details originally.’

‘No, that’s because we didn’t say,’ she replied as one of the other women presented us with glasses of sparkling water before resuming her original position.

Gulp.

‘You didn’t?’

‘We didn’t,’ Perry confirmed. ‘We’re very discreet. And as the head of the membership committee, I personally select women for the group who are a good fit for our community.’

And I had been selected? Me? Teenage Angela who never got picked for dodgeball was very excited but adult Angela was more than a little wary.

‘Let’s get to know each other a little better,’ she suggested. ‘You work at Besson Media?’

‘I do,’ I confirmed, sitting on my shaking hands. ‘Well, I just started but I was at Spencer Media before that.’

‘And you’re a writer.’

Perry’s smooth face barely moved as she spoke.

I nodded, crossing my legs at the ankles to hide the chipped nail polish on my big toe. This was not a chipped pedicure kind of a gang, I could tell.

‘We have a lot of contacts in the media,’ she said. ‘And a few of our members are in publishing.’

‘Oh, I’d love to write a book one day, it’s always been my dream,’ I told her, a happy smile on my face as I rambled on. ‘I used to write children’s books, ghost-write actually. I would write the books that went with kids’ films and TV shows. You might have read some of them actually, they were dreadful obviously, but don’t hold that against me.’

This is not the time for verbal diarrhoea, I whispered to myself. Cut it out, Angela.

‘What is it you do?’ I asked, very aware of the sweat patches under my arms.

‘Hedge fund manager at YellowCrest,’ Perry said as though telling me she ran the corner shop. No wonder The M.O.B. had a five-million-dollar brownstone as their clubhouse. Erin’s husband worked at YellowCrest and Erin’s husband made literally millions of dollars a year.

‘Or at least, I used to. I gave it up after Mortimer came along.’

‘Mortimer?’ I squeaked. Please let it be the name of her dog, please let it be the name of her dog, please let it be the name of her dog.

‘My son,’ she replied with a smooth smile. ‘He’s my second, he’s almost eighteen months now, and Titus, his big brother, will be three next month. Two sons under three, oof, what a challenge. There’s simply no way to manage a full-time job and two children, although I was heartbroken to leave.’

‘Right, must be tough,’ I said, trying to work out just what exactly Perry had done to her face. Her forehead was perfectly smooth, her cheeks very slightly overinflated and there wasn’t a single visible pore on her skin. While I very much supported people doing whatever the hell they wanted to their own faces, something about Perry’s work just looked off. She looked ageless and not in a good way. I’d have placed her anywhere between thirty-five and fifty, there was just no way to tell.

‘We’re so excited you’re interested in joining us,’ Perry said, glancing over at the other women who promptly left their positions and came to join us on the sofas, her smooth face void of any visible signs of said excitement. ‘We do some magnificent work here and we’re always on the lookout for quality members. Between the support we give each other and community outreach, if you’re accepted into The M.O.B., I think you’ll find being part of our group quite rewarding. Although I should mention membership is select – not everyone who is invited to meet with us ends up making the cut.’

‘And I’m always excited to make new friends,’ I lied, so pleased to know they might still reject me even though I hadn’t asked to join in the first place. ‘So what’s the deal? Coffee mornings, jumble sales, playdates, that kind of thing?’

‘I don’t know what a jumble sale is but I am quite sure the answer is no,’ she replied, brushing her silky brown hair over her shoulder. ‘We’re an exclusive network of elite women, come together to lift each other higher. I will admit we are somewhat selective about the women who join our collective but that’s to preserve the quality of our experience. We strive to stimulate our intellect and grow our spirit in all that we do.’

Oh god, it was a cult.

‘Right, one question,’ I said, slapping my thighs and making everyone jump. ‘Where do the kids come in?’

‘Kids?’ Perry looked confused.

‘Yes, your kids,’ I said. ‘Where are they while you’re, you know, stimulating your intellect?’

‘This isn’t a mommy and me class,’ she replied as the other four women laughed. ‘The B.O.B.s aren’t always here.’

‘B.O.B.s,’ I repeated slowly.

‘Babies of Brooklyn,’ Perry clarified.

‘That’s what I thought,’ I said, leaning back against the sofa. ‘Just wanted to make sure.’

‘The goal is to create an empowering network for our children from an early age,’ she said, flicking an invisible speck of dust from her trouser leg. ‘I’ve worked with a social psychologist and several corporate counselling experts who agree it’s essential for children to begin forging the right kinds of bonds right from birth. They are the next generation of leaders, after all.’

‘Do you not worry that’s a lot of pressure to put on a baby?’ I asked gently, a vision of Alice being sworn into the White House passing through my mind.

Perry stared right back at me.

‘No,’ she said.

I waited for the rest of the sentence for a moment before realizing that was it.

‘Oh, OK.’ I looked down at my flip-flops and wondered how fast I could run in them. This was clearly not the group for me.

‘The networking isn’t just for Alice,’ Perry said, leaning forward and gripping my knee with her coffee-coloured nails. ‘We want to raise these children in an environment of powerful women. A tribe is only as strong as its weakest member.’

‘Christ almighty,’ I whispered.

‘I’m sure we all have a busy day ahead of us so let’s get things moving,’ Perry said, sitting back and clapping her hands. ‘I’m going to ask you a few questions and then we’ll play a little game.’

Please let it be Hungry Hungry Hippos.

‘In how many classes is Alice currently enrolled?’ Danielle, a striking woman with tightly curled black hair, asked from the sofa beside Perry.

‘Classes?’ I stared back blankly.

‘Music class, baby yoga, dance, swim, is she learning any languages?’ Nia replied. Nia was a tall willowy blonde who looked as though she should be playing Reese Witherspoon’s best friend in at least seventeen movies.

‘Maybe art class?’ suggested Joan, the gorgeous black woman sitting on my left with poker-straight hair that fell all the way to her waist. My hair was in a bun, secured by a scrunchie. I was a monster.

‘Or sign language? Or ballet? Mind and body sensory stimulation?’

‘She’s not even one yet,’ I replied, making a mental note to find out what the hell mind and body sensory stimulation was and avoid it at all costs. ‘She isn’t in any classes.’

Joan sucked the air in through her teeth as though about to give me a quote for a new carburettor.

‘What’s her hashtag?’ Perry asked, tapping away on an iPad that had appeared from nowhere.

‘Hashtag?’

‘For social media,’ she clarified. ‘My boys are “hashtag MorTitus”, for example.’

Oh dear god, those poor children. As if their real names weren’t already going to get them beaten up when they got to school.

‘My husband isn’t a massive fan of social media so we don’t really put pictures of Alice online all that much,’ I said slowly.

All the women looked at each other.

‘If that’s the choice you’ve made, that’s the choice you’ve made,’ Perry declared. I had a feeling it wasn’t the only choice that had been made. ‘Perhaps we should skip along to the game and get this over with.’

‘You know, I have to get to work,’ I said, fiddling with the buttons on my denim jacket. A universal ‘I’m going to leave now’ gesture. ‘This has been so lovely but—’

Before I could stop her, Avery, a delicate redhead with reflexes like a cat, had snatched my handbag from the floor and upended it on the coffee table. My phone clattered onto the marble tabletop first before it was buried in piles of my secret shame. A bag of M&Ms, three tampons, one out of its wrapper, a dried-up pen with a missing cap, lip balm, lip gloss, eyeliner, a manky old mascara, two more lip balms, my MetroCard and, even though this wasn’t my baby bag, two open packs of baby wipes.

I opened my mouth to protest as the women began pawing through my belongings but nothing came out. It was worse than the time Karen Woods nicked my diary in Year Nine and read it out loud in registration so the entire year group heard how I was worried about my left boob coming in bigger than my right one. Nia screwed up her delicate face as she held a loose Percy Pig up for inspection.

‘I wasn’t going to eat that,’ I said quickly.

I was absolutely going to eat it.

‘What we carry with us is who we are,’ Perry said sadly as she inspected a half-eaten Special K bar. ‘What do you think the content of your purse says about you, Angela?’

‘I think it says I have a baby and a full-time job and no time to sit cleaning out my handbag,’ I replied. My cheeks burned as the five women picked over my belongings, tutting and sighing and occasionally throwing in an ‘Ew’ for good measure.

‘How cute!’ Avery held up a key ring in the shape of the Empire State Building. ‘You know, I’ve never actually been.’

‘My husband took me when we first started dating,’ I said, compelled to explain in spite of myself. ‘He gave me that before he went away on tour a few years ago.’

‘Tour?’ There was a very definite sneer on Avery’s face as she raked through my makeup, tossing eyeliners and lipsticks all over the coffee table. ‘What is it that your husband does?’

‘He’s in a band,’ I told her, grabbing a precious packet of Sour Patch Kids out of Avery’s hands. ‘I don’t know if you’ve heard of them, they’re called Stills.’

All five women froze.

‘Stills?’ Perry repeated, her grey eyes suddenly open wide. ‘Your husband is in Stills?’

I puffed out my cheeks and nodded slowly.

‘Is it Alex or Craig?’ she demanded before looking at the other women to explain. ‘Graham the bassist is gay.’

Oh god, I thought as the colour drained from my face. She’d shagged one of them, hadn’t she?

‘Alex,’ I replied, my voice barely above a whisper.

As my voice grew quieter, Perry’s elevated to an all-out screech.

‘You’re married to Alex Reid?’ she squealed.

‘Yes?’ I replied.

Perry turned on Nia with savage stare.

‘Why was this not in her background check?’ she hissed. ‘Unacceptable.’

Nia shrank back, visibly quaking in her overpriced boots, and I wondered how many lashes she’d be getting after I left.

‘Do you know Alex?’ I asked, afraid to hear the answer to my question.

‘I don’t know him, know him, but I love him,’ she said so quickly I could barely understand her. ‘That is, I love Stills. They’re my favourite band. I’ve seen them at least ten times. I’ve been to every tour they’ve ever played. I once went to Texas to see them play at South by Southwest. Imagine, me in Texas.’

A quick look around the room confirmed that neither Nia, Danielle, Avery or Joan could even conceive of such a thing.

‘Angela,’ Perry said. ‘I have to meet him.’

And just like that, Perry the investment banker and grown-up Mean Girl turned into a squealing teenybopper who had a crush on my husband. But on the upside, at least she hadn’t shagged him.

‘They’re playing here in a couple of weeks,’ I said as casually as I could manage. ‘Trying out some new material.’

Perry gave a sharp nod and Danielle, Avery and Nia began shovelling my belongings back in my handbag while Joan pulled out a Google Pixel phone and began tapping away at the screen.

‘If you’re looking for tickets, the show sold out as soon as they announced it,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’

‘Angela,’ Perry leaned forward and gripped my knee so tightly my foot sprang out and kicked Avery square in the shin. ‘Can you get us tickets?’

‘I don’t know,’ I gasped, wincing as I pried her fingers off me. ‘I can ask.’

‘I would do anything to go to that show,’ she said, opening her eyes so wide I could see white all the way around her pale grey irises

‘Anything?’ I replied, more frightened than interested.

‘Anything,’ she confirmed. ‘Forget the membership process, you’re officially in The Mothers of Brooklyn.’

‘Which is very nice of you,’ I said as I grabbed my bag back from Nia, immediately reaching in to find my phone, my thumb hovering over the emergency call button. ‘But really not necessary. I really do have to go, as lovely as this has been.’

It hadn’t been lovely, it had been intimidating, humiliating and ultimately terrifying, and for the first time since I’d met Cici Spencer, I couldn’t wait to get to work.

‘We’ll work it out,’ Perry said, following as I stood up out of my seat. ‘There has to be something.’

‘I will ask,’ I promised, not even sure if I meant it. ‘Nice to meet you all.’

The M.O.B. stared after me as I dashed out the room, walking quickly through the big white room and breaking into a run as I hit the steps to the street.

‘You need to socialize with other mothers more, they said,’ I muttered as I turned onto 8th Avenue and flagged down a passing yellow cab. I couldn’t get far enough fast enough on foot. ‘You need more mommy friends, they said.’

Hurling myself into the back seat, I rummaged through my bag to make sure everything was there before tearing into the packet of M&Ms, inhaling them by the wild-eyed handful. There wasn’t a single thing anyone could offer that would make me go through that again. They could send all four of the Chrises to my house, oiled up and shirtless, each bearing a different Chanel handbag, and I still wouldn’t be swayed.

I never wanted to see Perry Dickson again as long as I lived.

CHAPTER SIX

‘I’m not saying she’s obsessed but I am saying, if I ever get home from work and seem a bit off, please just check it’s me and not Perry Dickson in an Angela skinsuit,’ I said, pushing Alice’s pushchair through Park Slope. It was Friday and I should have been ‘working from home’ but Cici had called an emergency meeting and demanded I attend. On my first Friday working for her. Definitely not a power trip.

‘Maybe we should come up with a safe word,’ I suggested. ‘Like, if I seem taller than usual, ask me what I want for dessert and if I don’t say rhubarb, she’s got me locked in the attic of that bloody mansion on 11th Street.’

‘I thought our safe word was peanut butter,’ Alex replied through a mouthful of doughnut.

‘Your safe word is peanut butter,’ I said, flushing at the very thought. ‘I don’t have a safe word, I’m English.’

‘Rhubarb it is,’ he agreed simply. ‘Perry Dickson, huh. Is she hot?’

‘Yes,’ I admitted grudgingly. ‘And she’s got some very nice trousers.’

‘You’ve got nice trousers too,’ Alex said, resting his hand on the top of my arse. ‘I can put her on the list for the show if you want me to.’

And there I was, hanging on the horns of a true moral dilemma. I did not want Alex to put Perry Dickson on the list for his show but I knew if I did, it would make her incredibly happy. It was a selfless act that would make someone else’s day, earning me many karmic brownie points, but it would also mean spending another second of my life with Perry Dickson, something I had vowed never to do.

‘Maybe,’ I said, staying non-committal until I’d consulted wiser minds on the matter, i.e. Jenny. ‘I’ll let you know.’

Hanging back on the edge of the street, we waited until the light changed before starting to cross 7th Avenue to the subway station. Besson’s offices might be cool but they were not convenient. I had to get the G to Lorimer and then the L to Bedford and, even then, it was still a fifteen-minute walk. Thankfully, the humidity had broken and the weather was civilized again, even if my commute wasn’t. As we crossed, I fished around in my satchel, digging around for my MetroCard and trying my best not to think about all those women from The M.O.B. rummaging through my things. Just as I caught the edge of the travel pass with my fingertips, my bag slipped off my shoulder, hanging precariously between me and the pushchair for a second.

‘Alex, watch out!’ I cried but it was too late. The bag fell, hitting Alex hard in the back of the knee and knocking him off balance, the strap wrapping round his leg and sending him face first into the road.

‘Oh my god,’ I yelled as Alex groaned, the contents of my bag rolling on the street around him. I pushed Alice to the safety of the pavement and stamped the brake on before turning to help Alex up to his feet, the two of us stumbling to safety right before the light changed, leaving my bag at the mercy of the traffic.

The strap had snapped.

The strap of my Marc Jacobs satchel, my first and only true bag love, had snapped clean in two.

Pushing my hair behind my ears, I looked right, then left, then right again, preparing to run out against the light to retrieve my poor bag as it sat waiting patiently for me in the middle of the road.

Until a taxi came tearing around the corner and ran right over it.

‘My bag,’ I gasped.

‘My ankle,’ Alex moaned.

‘Waah,’ Alice added. She was absolutely fine but understandably wanted to be part of the excitement.

‘Are you OK?’ I asked my husband as I tried not to cry. I was worried about him, of course, but he was clearly in one piece and this was my bag. My precious, beautiful, wonderful bag. Unable to tear my eyes away from the carnage, I choked back a sob as I saw it lying there in the middle of the road, flat as a pancake, haemorrhaging tampons, breast pads, loose change and tubes of lip balms that had rolled away from the scene of the crime and into the gutter.

‘I don’t think anything is broken but my ankle does not feel good,’ Alex said, wincing as he touched his leg. The fall had torn his paper-thin vintage jeans and there was a nasty gash on his knee. ‘What the hell happened?’

‘My bag broke,’ I said, the simplicity of the statement not nearly covering the enormity of what had just happened. A bus hurtled down the street towards the victim and this time I had to look away. Rest in peace, little bag. ‘We should go to the hospital, you’ve got to get it looked at.’

‘I’m fine,’ he insisted before howling in pain the second he tried to put weight on his left foot. ‘I take it back, I’m not fine. ER it is.’

‘Right, yes, let’s do that,’ I nodded before realizing the light had changed again. ‘Just a sec.’

I dashed into the crosswalk, scooping up my flattened satchel, smashed phone and as many of my other belongings as I could. My keys and wallet seemed to have survived unscathed but everything else was a goner. I couldn’t even look at the packet of salt and vinegar Squares that were scattered all over the street. My last bag of them as well.

‘Don’t be upset,’ Alex said, leaning against the pushchair and holding out a hand for the wreckage of my bag. ‘I’ll bet I can fix it.’

‘We should fix you first,’ I said, wiping away a tear as I cradled my first bag baby in my arms. My first human baby was no longer crying but looked understandably confused by what was going on. One day you will understand, I thought sadly, but I hope I will be able to spare you this pain. ‘There’s that walk-in clinic on 5th Avenue, it’s closer than the hospital.’

‘You’re going to be late for your meeting, go, I’ll be OK.’ Alex hopped along using Alice’s pushchair as a makeshift crutch. I shoved the remains of my bag into the shelf under her seat and gave him an unconvinced once-over.

‘Yeah, I don’t think so,’ I told him, glancing down at the open wound on his knee. ‘They can wait ten minutes. I’d prefer to know you didn’t bleed out on the way if it’s all the same to you.’

With half a smile on his even paler than usual face, Alex rested one arm around my shoulders, keeping the other hand on the handle of the pushchair while Alice sang happily to herself, entirely unmoved by the drama unfolding around her.

‘Angela Clark,’ Alex said, hobbling down the street, very, very slowly. ‘What did I do to deserve you?’

What did I do to deserve this? I replied silently as I spotted the puff from my lost-forever Chanel powder compact, blown up into the air by another passing car. It certainly felt like punishment for something but – oh, wait a minute.

‘This isn’t exactly the time for it,’ I said, sliding my arm around my husband’s waist and staring up at the sky. Someone up there was taking the piss. ‘But when you get home, if you could add Perry Dickson to the guest list for the show, that would be grand.’

‘Sorry I’m late,’ I called, emerging out of the lifts at Besson forty minutes later. ‘Minor emergency, crisis averted.’

Cici, Kanako and the rest of the editors were sitting around the crystal conference table. One by one, they each turned to look at me, all of them with the same expression on their faces.

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