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.
‘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