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 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
