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.’
‘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
