Page 35

“Hi, Vanessa,” Coralie said in a way that was polite but also mildly puzzled, because the launch was this coming Friday, and everything was in the can.

“I don’t know about this, Coralie,” Vanessa said. “I didn’t think it would be so big.”

“Seven hundred thousand pounds,” Coralie said. “Seven months’ work. Ha-ha! Yes, it’s quite big.”

“People on Instagram are annoyed. And so are my friends. Look at the program, I say. All that left-wing, Goldsmiths, hipster academic shit! But they can’t get behind the sponsor. I’m getting emails. My niece says I’m the problem!”

The baby kicked high up near Coralie’s heart.

For a moment, it mimicked the feeling of fear, her heartbeat ratcheting up a notch.

But she didn’t feel scared, not really. The event would be over on Sunday.

In two weeks, she’d be on mat leave. Nothing mattered as much as her baby, not even, for the moment, the fate of the earth.

(Let alone Vanessa’s finer feelings about a problem of her own making.)

“Let’s think about where we were in December,” Coralie said in a soothing voice.

“Locked into the Futurum contract, unable to pull the pin. But we chose to focus on what the gallery does best, sparking conversations and transforming culture. That’s the path we chose together.

Now you have a program of events that embraces complexity, ambiguity, the gray areas of life—where art happens! Art and change.”

This was easy for her to say as a copywriter for a brand agency solving a comms problem.

There’s no way she’d boldly advocate for this approach as herself .

She’d stopped posting on Twitter altogether, so great was her fear she’d be seen as too radical, not radical enough, or (this was also bad now) too medium .

Vanessa gave an anxious moan. “But what if protestors show up?”

“Let them! Discuss it! Invite them in!”

The chat went on for a few minutes, but Vanessa’s wobble was over. Stefan hung up with a sigh of relief. “So!” he said loudly. “What do you think of that ?”

As Coralie stared at him in surprise, a funny sound came from the work landline on his desk. Clap, clap, clap.

“Brava,” came a familiar voice on speaker. “Coralie! Brava.”

Her chest was an ice shelf, and a crack ran through the middle.

“Your protégée, Richard,” Stefan said.

“Well,” Richard purred down the line from Sydney, “she certainly learned from the best.”

Coralie didn’t hear anything else. She walked to her desk, unplugged her laptop, picked up her bag, and left.

···

She wasn’t faking it —the thermometer said she had a fever. She didn’t go into work on Tuesday or Wednesday and missed Zora’s final pickup from school. When Zora crashed into the house and rushed up the stairs, she felt each stomp like a punch. “ Zora ,” she called from her dark bedroom. “Please!”

“Please what ?” Zora stood in the doorway, a frown on her beautiful face.

“Please don’t storm around, I have a headache.”

“Fine!” Then she did something Coralie would never have expected in a million years. She slammed the door behind her.

I’ve asked Marina , Adam WhatsApped from downstairs. She doesn’t know what’s wrong.

One of their strategies for not buying Zora a phone was letting her text on her iPad.

She could use it to message Adam from Marina’s, and Marina from Adam’s, but if she wanted to be in touch with her friends, she had to ask an adult to text her friend’s adults.

This would all change when she went to secondary.

Everyone was getting a phone. But now she composed a text to Zora’s iPad, relieved not to brave the dragon in its den.

Raspberry sorbet in the freezer , she wrote.

What do you have planned for tomorrow? Do you want me to ask if you can visit Daniel and Madonna?

(Daniel had hosted Adam’s birthday at Barbie’s last Christmas Eve and let Zora flame the pudding with his lighter. She loved watching movies far too old for her on the big screen in their red sitting room: Mean Girls , Titanic , and Clueless .)

The gray dots showed up, bounced, and disappeared. Left on read by an eleven-year-old?

Then a one-word reply appeared: Yes.

···

The next day, Daniel appeared after breakfast with the poodle tucked under his arm. Coralie looked at him meaningfully as he escorted Zora out the door. He shrugged, and she wasn’t sure if he was saying I’ll see what I can do or I refuse your mission to find out what’s wrong .

Coralie was going into work for the first time since Richard Pickard had spoken to her on the landline at work.

At the office, she leaned round Stefan’s door. “Bánh mì today?”

He gestured regretfully to the little fridge under his desk. “I’m on a juice cleanse.”

“Okay.”

“Coralie!”

She turned back.

“Maybe just half,” he said. “Tofu.”

Later, they took their lunch to the lavender-scented green space of Spa Fields.

She stumbled through the story about Richard.

“I’m sorry that happened to you,” Stefan said formally.

Maybe she hadn’t told it well enough. “It’s confusing,” she empathized with Stefan. “The not-actually-having-sex part. But I think that’s what we’re all working out now, or I am. It’s not about sex, but power.”

“He’s a very powerful man. Hey, listen. Coralie. Richard got excited about the idea—about Feel Tank. He’s coming for the press day.”

“But it’s my thing.”

“Our thing.”

“But can’t you stop him?”

Stefan pressed the side of his phone to make it light up. “He landed seven hours ago. He’s napping at Dean Street Townhouse. He’s coming to the office at three. He wants to go over the materials.”

“My materials,” Coralie said.

“The agency’s materials.”

She looked down at the bench between them, where Stefan’s bánh mì lay still in its wrapper. “I don’t think my cold is better,” she said. “I came back from sick leave too early.”

“Yes,” Stefan said. “You don’t look very well.”

She got up, waiting for him to say Stop, stop , that he’d talk to Richard, he’d send him home.

“Take it easy,” he said instead.

She blundered back to the office with tears in her eyes.

The Richard stuff had been nothing compared with her first friend in London not caring .

They’d started off the same, two twenty-nine-year-olds knocking back wine, gossiping, tiptoeing around Antoinette and having a laugh.

Now Stefan wore Raf Simons suits to client events and was named industry organ Campaign ’s “Creative Leader of the Year.” If he was a monster, Coralie had helped create him: She’d ghostwritten all his guest columns.

She wanted to run back to Spa Fields, to make him understand and fix things.

But she was too pregnant for that sort of thing, too tired and too sad.

Before she left, she took her fancy tea bags, her spare makeup, the gym kit she hadn’t used in about three years, the pen holder Zora had made her, and all of Florence’s nursery art.

Incredible. Two and half years her darling daughter had been at nursery.

So—why? So Coralie could clock in at the brand factory?

Unvalued by her colleagues (even her so-called friend), or by society (grappling—or, more accurately, not grappling—with the existential problems of inequality and climate change)? Taking the fucking piss.

She spread the rest of her stuff out so her desk still looked occupied (because what would it do to her mat leave if they thought she’d left for good?). But she knew she’d never set foot in the agency again. It was seven years since the first time Richard had forced her out, almost to the day.