I HEART CHRISTMAS
Lindsey Kelk

Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Harper 2013

Copyright © Lindsey Kelk 2013

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2013

Cover illustration © Bree Leman

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: 9780007501502

Ebook Edition © July 2013 ISBN: 9780007501526

Version: 2017-08-22

Partly for Bernard’s dancing, partly for Matt’s beard and entirely for Terri White.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

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

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Author

Angela’s Guide to Christmas

Keep Reading

About the Publisher

CHAPTER ONE

‘Can you explain to me exactly why I’m dragging this thing through the streets of Brooklyn,’ Jenny asked, huffing and puffing behind seven feet of majestic Christmas tree, ‘when you have a perfectly acceptable husband to do these things? What’s the point in being married if he’s not going to carry heavy shit for you?’

‘Because we’re strong, independent women who don’t need men to carry things for us,’ I offered, shivering as I fumbled for my front door key. ‘We are woman, hear us roar.’

‘I am woman, hear me call a delivery service to do this so I don’t have to,’ she grumbled through a mouthful of the finest Douglas fir. ‘Where is Alex anyway? Isn’t this the kind of cutesy shit you two should be doing together?’

‘He’s out, somewhere.’ I shuffled backwards, pulling Jenny and the tree towards the lift and pretending not to see the trail of pine needles. ‘God knows.’

‘You really make marriage sound like a dream,’ she replied.

Getting the tree up to our floor would not be the perfect crime. Our building super already disliked me with a fiery passion. I couldn’t quite work out if it was because he had trouble with my accent and never quite understood what I was saying or because I still couldn’t remember which bin was for recycling and which was for rubbish. Or there was a small chance that it was due to all those times I’d locked myself out at three a.m. when Alex was away on tour and I’d had to call him to let me in. Regardless, the fact of the matter was, he just wasn’t that keen on me and this unquestionably seasonal, yet unrequested new carpet of Christmas tree needles in the lobby was not going to go down well.

‘I don’t know where he goes.’ I tiptoed backwards into the lift, trying not to fall over my own feet. Again. ‘That boy is a wanderer and it’s too bloody cold for me to wander with him. Besides, I wanted to get the tree. I wanted to do it with you, oh bestest friend in the entire universe.’

Jenny poked her head around the tree to fix me with a narrow-eyed stare.

‘He said you couldn’t have a tree yet, didn’t he?’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ I nodded.

‘And why not?’

‘Because I still haven’t cleared away all the Thanksgiving dishes,’ I admitted. It wasn’t like I hadn’t put them in the dishwasher, I just hadn’t taken them back out again. For over a week. ‘But I needed it. It’s been a weird day.’

‘You’re disgusting.’ She yelped as she pricked herself for the eighteenth time in two minutes. ‘And it’s been a weird day so you picked up a Christmas tree? You couldn’t just buy shoes like normal people? You’re what’s weird in this scenario.’

‘Something’s going on at work,’ I said, jabbing at the buttons and willing the doors to close faster. ‘I’m sure of it. Delia and Mary are being all whispery behind closed doors.’

‘Don’t you and Mary share an office?’ Jenny asked. ‘What are you doing, following them to the ladies’ room?’

‘Um, yeah, we have separate offices now.’

Mary, the editor of Gloss, and I had started off sharing a big, beautiful office but since I apparently couldn’t stop singing show tunes when I was trying to concentrate and occasionally enjoyed the odd YouTube video of kittens with narcolepsy, she’d had a wall put up in the middle of the room. I tried not to take it personally. If she couldn’t appreciate my celebrated (by me) rendition of ‘I Know Him So Well’, that was her loss.

‘Something’s definitely going on, though. They’ve both had time blocked out in their diaries and—’

The silver doors slid together for just a moment, before springing back apart to let another passenger inside.

‘Not the super, not the super, not the super,’ I whispered into the branches of my glorious tree.

‘Hi, I’m Jenny.’

Before I could deliver my admittedly paranoid work theories, Jenny interrupted me with her best ‘hello, you’re a hot man’ purr. Nestled behind the bulk of the tree, I might not have been able to see either of them but I could hear her sparkliest smile twinkling through her introduction. Lowering myself into a squat, I squinted through the branches to get a better look at her target but all I managed was an eyeful of sap and the suggestion of some very shiny brown hair.

‘Oh, uh, hi,’ a deep voice that most definitely did not belong to my gnarled Italian super replied. ‘I’m Doug.’

‘Doug?’ Jenny repeated his name like it was the most interesting thing she had ever heard. I wondered whether or not someone had actually pressed a button. I was desperate for a wee. ‘You must be new to the building, right?’

‘Pretty new,’ he confirmed. I leaned back against the wall of the lift and pushed up onto my Converse tiptoes, trying to get a look at this ‘Doug’. If that was his real name. ‘You live on the top floor?’

‘More or less,’ she replied, with a tinkly laugh that made me want to punch her in the boob. ‘I’m a Manhattan gal. This is my best friend’s place, which I guess means I almost live here, right?’

‘Nice to meet you,’ I shouted in his general direction through a mouthful of tree. Which did not taste as good as it smelled. ‘I’m Angela.’

‘Oh shit,’ Doug replied. ‘I didn’t know you were hiding in there. Hi.’

‘She’s behind the tree,’ Jenny explained. Doug made an ‘oh’ sound. Doug was clearly not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

‘This is my stop,’ he announced as the bell sounded and the doors opened on the third floor. ‘Have fun.’

‘Oh, we will,’ I heard Jenny promise. ‘We always do.’

‘You massive slag,’ I said as the doors closed quickly, slicing through the sexual tension. ‘Haven’t you got a boyfriend?’

‘No, I don’t have a boyfriend and I was just flirting.’ Somehow Jenny managed to find a way through the tree to punch my arm. ‘Relax, Mom.’

I paused, thought better of my question, then asked it anyway. ‘Was he hot?’

‘Super hot,’ she sighed. ‘He looked like Clark Kent. Real gentleman. Can I set off your smoke alarms? See if he comes to help us?’

‘That’ll be a fun one to explain to Alex,’ I muttered, pushing Jenny backwards out of the door as we arrived at my floor. ‘Oh, sorry, darling, we burnt the apartment down to see whether or not the new neighbour downstairs was as chivalrous as Jenny assumed he was after a fourteen-second conversation.’

‘Screw you,’ she replied, giving me the finger for extra emphasis.

‘A real lady, worthy of a real gentleman,’ I smiled over the top of the tree.

One hour, two arguments and three beers later, the Christmas tree was safely(ish) in its stand and towering proudly over my apartment. It only leaned ever so slightly to the left and somehow we’d managed to string the fairy lights without throttling each other, but sheer exhaustion and desperate thirst meant we’d been forced to pause in the decorating for a beer break.

‘So, you didn’t finish your story.’ Jenny picked a single stray pine needle from her sweater and tossed it on the floor with disgust. She was so thoughtful. ‘What’s going on in the office?’

‘I didn’t finish because you were too busy cracking on to “Doug” to let me finish,’ I stated. ‘Actually, I’d barely even started.’

‘Then stop whining and start now,’ she said, curling her legs up underneath her. ‘What’s the goss at Gloss?’

Gloss had launched ten months earlier and, against all odds, it was doing really, really well. While other magazines were disappearing from the stands, our weekly freebie was everywhere. We had even launched an enhanced iPad edition that people were actually paying for – it was crazy. And while I was the first to put my hand up and say the editorial was fantastic (possibly because I was deputy editor), it really was all down to Delia. She was an incredible businesswoman and no one on earth was able to say no to her. Every time I saw her, I wanted to do a little dance and sacrifice a goat. Or maybe just give her a Kit Kat. Admittedly, I saw her less and less as the magazine got bigger and bigger. I knew her grandfather, Bob, the president of Spencer Media and ultimately our big boss, was grooming her to move up in the company and while I was happy for her, I wasn’t ready for her to disappear from the mag. Bob was basically the Donald Trump of publishing, which might have sounded like an exaggeration if I hadn’t known for a fact that Delia and The Donald were on first-name terms. While the New York billionaires’ club was bigger than you might think, it was still pretty cliquey.

‘There’s nothing specific,’ I said. ‘It’s just a feeling. Mary and Delia have been in and out of each other’s offices all week and they’ve both been very quiet around me or so—’

‘They’ve been quiet or you’ve been extra loud?’ Jenny asked. ‘It is December. I figure you’ve been running around in some ugly Santa sweater singing holiday songs since the first, right?’

‘Don’t interrupt me.’ She didn’t need to know that was exactly what I’d been doing. ‘They’ve been weird, all right? Something is up.’

‘You didn’t think to just ask them?’

I stared at her revelatory concept. Oh Jenny, you and your common sense.

‘Um, no?’

‘Right,’ Jenny sighed, ‘because why would you do something as obvious as that?’

‘Oh, fuck off.’ I hopped up and grabbed two fresh beers from the fridge, popping the tops and handing one to Jenny. ‘I want everything to be OK, that’s all.’

‘You’d know if it wasn’t,’ she reassured me. ‘You’re a pain in the ass like that.’

I nodded slowly, considering her sage advice. Tomorrow, I would march into Mary’s office and ask what was going on. Definitely tomorrow or the day after. Although maybe it would be better to wait until Monday. By Monday, I would totally know when I was going to ask.

‘We ought to be drinking mulled wine.’ I frowned at the bottle of Brooklyn lager, changing the subject. ‘Or at least eggnog.’

‘Mulled wine takes too long and eggnog tastes like shit,’ Jenny pointed out. While my old Topshop jeans and Splendid T-shirt were speckled with a year’s worth of dust from the tree ornament boxes, Jenny’s black leather leggings and white cashmere sweater looked like she had just slipped them on. Probably because she’d been about as much help as a chocolate teapot as soon as she’d taken her coat off. ‘Besides, you’re the one who insists on living in hipsterville. I don’t think you would find either of those things on Bedford Avenue.’

‘I can sniff out Christmas like Rudolph the red-nosed bloodhound,’ I said, sipping the cool, bubbly goodness. ‘Christmas makes everything better, even hipsters.’

‘Nothing makes hipsters better,’ Jenny disagreed. ‘Give me a man in a suit any day.’

‘Aren’t you dating a hipster?’ I reminded her, putting my beer down and grabbing my handbag while I was still sober enough to climb the stepladder. ‘And haven’t you been doing so for some time?’

‘Yeah, I think that might have come to a natural end, you know?’ she said, watching me drag the stepladder away from the wonky Christmas tree and position it underneath the air-conditioning vent. ‘What the hell are you doing?’

‘I’m going to hide a copy of The Great Gatsby in the ceiling,’ I explained, holding up a small padded envelope. ‘It’s Alex’s Christmas present and I know he’ll go looking for it if I don’t hide it.’

‘I think you’re confusing Alex with yourself.’ Jenny eyed my climb up the ladder with badly hidden nerves but didn’t offer to get off her arse and help. ‘Never had him pegged for a reader.’

‘Unlike you, he reads all the time,’ I replied, straining to open the vent cover. There was a reason I let boys do things like this, feminism be damned. ‘I’ve tried to get him to watch telly like normal people but he won’t have it.’

‘I read,’ she protested, flat on her back across the sofa. ‘Like, every day.’

‘I don’t know if self-help books actually count as reading.’ I finally got the vent open enough to slide the book inside without trapping my fingers. ‘And have you read them all yet? When do you know if you’re self-helped?’

‘Self-improvement is a process, Angela,’ Jenny announced. ‘It’s a journey without a destination.’

‘It’s a journey that’s keeping Barnes & Noble in business,’ I replied. ‘What’s going on with Craig?’

‘Nothing. Ever. That’s kind of the issue.’ She pulled a thick strand of shiny hair upwards until the curl straightened out, then let it spring back down onto her face. ‘I think I’m ready to date a guy who wants to take me out for dinner instead of ordering pizza. There are only so many evenings a girl can spend watching Breaking Bad until three a.m. without going totally crazy.’

‘Yeah,’ I agreed, wondering whether or not that number was as high for Jenny as it was for me.

‘Dude, can you believe Erin has two babies? Two of them. It’s crazy.’

‘It is weird.’ I pretended not to notice that she’d changed the subject. I figured we’d get around to whatever was really bothering her sooner or later. ‘One minute there were no babies, now there are two babies. It feels like she moved away or something.’

Our friend Erin had recently rebranded herself from a super-hot PR maven into a baby-making machine. As soon as she was married, she got pregnant with Arianna and as soon as Arianna was sitting up straight, she was pregnant with Thomas Junior. Obviously, she wasn’t quite so available for manicure dates and spur-of-the-moment cocktails as she used to be.

‘I know, I talked to her yesterday for the first time in a week. Says she’s coming back to work super soon.’ Jenny made a clucking noise. ‘But, dude, one baby and your own business is one thing, but two? It’s not going to be easy.’

‘Erin has two babies.’ I rested my head on the cool steel of the stepladder and shuddered. ‘I can’t even process the fact that she has one. It’s madness. It’s like you having a baby.’

‘And why wouldn’t I have a baby?’ Jenny looked up sharply. I saw her tightly drawn mouth and arched eyebrow and closed my eyes. Oh bollocks. ‘What? I’m fundamentally unbabyable?’

‘That’s not what I meant.’ I was too tired to pick my words as carefully as they needed to be picked. It had been a long day, I’d just put up a Christmas tree and I was halfway inside an air-conditioning vent. Me and my bright ideas. ‘I only meant that it’s strange that when I moved here, we were all single and going out and dating different guys and stuff and now Erin’s got two babies, you’ve been dating Craig forever, I’m married to a boy and it just seems weird when you think about it.’

There. That should do it. And now to shuffle backwards out of the air-conditioning vent and safely back down the ladder. Piece of piss.

‘So you think it would be weird for me to have a baby? You think I wouldn’t be a good mom?’

Oh, for fuck’s sake.

‘No, I’m sure you would be amazing,’ I said, shuffling half an inch at a time, clenching my hands into tiny, tight fists and then stretching out my fingers as far as they would go. A yoga teacher had once told me it would calm me down in stressful situations. She was incorrect. ‘What’s this all about? Where’s it coming from?’

‘Well, I’ve been thinking,’ Jenny said, sitting up and fluffing out her hair. ‘I want to have a kid.’

I paused on the ladder, took a moment and considered my response.

‘You mean you want to have a baby at some point in the distant future?’

Jenny shook her head. ‘I mean I want to have a baby now.’

I breathed out slowly, puffing up more dust, and spun my wedding ring round and round on my finger. Maybe if I rubbed it hard enough a genie would appear and I could wish some common sense into my best friend.

‘I’ve been thinking about it,’ Jenny said, launching into her clearly prepared speech before I had a chance to get a word in. ‘There’s never going to be a better time. I’ve got a great job with great maternity benefits and I’d absolutely be able to work around my pregnancy. So many of the girls in the office are pregnant right now, Erin’s been talking about opening a day care centre in the building.’

‘In the building?’ I asked.

‘Next to the gym,’ Jenny nodded.

‘Of course.’ I raised my eyebrows and tried to restrain the tutting noise I was desperate to make. ‘Where else?’

Sometimes I forgot Erin was obscenely wealthy. Most people would just get a childminder but why bother with that when you could open your own nursery?

Jenny had been working for Erin’s PR company for a couple of years and she was good at it. She was also good at making rash decisions without thinking about the long-term effects on her life. Usually it meant spending a month’s rent on shoes, dip-dying her hair badly or indulging in the odd love affair with a complete dickhead, but a baby? This was a worry.

‘I’ve got a great apartment, great friends, I’m healthy, financially stable and I want a baby.’ She sounded so pleased with herself, I didn’t quite know what to do. ‘Why wouldn’t I do it? The longer I wait, the harder it’s going to be.’

‘I’m going to say something controversial now,’ I said, shuffling down the ladder with three drinks’ worth of utter grace. ‘But is Craig, who is still technically your boyfriend as far as I know, the best candidate for Father of the Year?’

I tensed, gripping the metal handlebars, expecting her to pull the ladder out from under me. Instead, she laughed. It was tough to say whether or not a shot to the chops would have surprised me more.

‘Oh Angie, Craig?’ Something I’d said had clearly tickled her. ‘No way! Craig can barely look after himself. And it’s been fun but we both know it isn’t serious.’

I was confused. Did we know that?

‘We, you and me, or we, you and Craig?’ I asked.

‘We, me and everyone.’ She spoke very slowly, rolling her eyes. Really? I thought. As though I was the mentally unstable one in the situation? ‘Craig knows this is what it is. He’s not ready to have a baby.’

‘But you definitely, definitely, super certainly are?’ I trod as carefully as humanly possible, metaphorically and literally. After all, a slap could still be in the offing. ‘This is the biggest decision you’ll ever make, Jenny.’

‘Which is why I’ve been thinking about it so seriously, Angie.’ She gave me a gentle, knowing smile. I assumed she’d been working on it as her ‘maternal’ look. ‘It’s all I’ve thought about for, like, days.’

‘Days?’

And that was the precise moment when I lost my shit.

‘Like, a week. Two weeks,’ she muttered into her beer bottle. ‘Since Erin had TJ.’

‘You’ve been thinking about it for days?’ I knew I was shrieking but I had absolutely no control over the volume or pitch of my own voice. ‘You can’t make a decision like this that quickly, Jenny. Just because someone you know recently heaved a tiny person out of their vagina doesn’t mean you should do the same. If Erin jumped off a cliff, would you jump after her?’

I jumped off the bottom step and gave her the frowning of a lifetime.

‘It’s hardly the same,’ she snapped back. ‘I want a baby.’

‘And I want a unicorn to fly me to work every day but that’s not going to happen, is it?’

‘Unicorns don’t fly!’ Jenny shouted.

‘That’s not the point!’ I shouted back.

We stared at each other in silence for a few moments, Jenny sipping her beer, me imagining how useful a flying unicorn might actually be. Anything else was too traumatic to think about.

‘I have an appointment with my ob-gyn tomorrow after work,’ Jenny said quietly after a couple of minutes. ‘I was going to ask you to come with me but if you don’t feel comfortable, I’ll ask Sadie.’

‘Of course I’ll come, you daft cow,’ I replied, lifting up her legs and dropping onto the sofa. Clearly I was going to have to go along, if only to make sure she didn’t accidentally fall on someone’s penis en route. ‘I just don’t want you to rush into anything that’s permanent. Life-changing.’

‘Like running away from home and moving to New York without knowing a single soul and ending up married to one of the only decent men left in the Tri-State area and landing your dream job?’ She pursed her lips and raised her eyes to the ceiling.

Ooh, the sneaky cow would use my own silver-lining fuck-ups against me.

‘Yes, exactly like that,’ I replied with a gentle slap on the back of her head. ‘Because if I hadn’t met you and listened when you tried to talk some sense into me, I would have been back at home by now, either living with my parents or, God forbid, married to a horrible man who was cheating on me.’

‘Whatever,’ she replied, setting her empty beer bottle on the floor and slapping me back. ‘But you’ll come with me tomorrow? To the doctor’s?’

‘I’ll come to the doctor’s with you.’ I held her cold, damp hand in mine and gave it a squeeze. ‘But I’m staying at the head end. I’m not getting involved with anything in stirrups.’

‘You’re such a prude,’ she sniffed, pulling away and turning her nose up at my filthy sweater. ‘I would totally take a look at your cervix if you asked me to.’

‘And I never, ever will,’ I promised.

‘Well, would you look at that – we have a tree.’

I heard the door close behind Alex an hour or so after Jenny had left, while I was busy adding the decorations to my masterpiece. It was taking longer than I had anticipated and I’d already cried twice. Dressing the Christmas tree always made me emotional. As did drinking four beers in an hour and a half with my wannabe-babymama best friend.

‘We do,’ I said, turning my face up for a kiss as he tossed the mail on the coffee table behind me. ‘I was on my way home and Jenny was coming over and I thought, well, we might as well pick it up and save you a job at the weekend.’

‘You’re so thoughtful,’ he replied, looking over at the blatantly-still-full dishwasher. ‘The dishes are still totally in there, aren’t they?’

‘I love you so much. Have I told you how much I love you?’ I replied with another kiss. ‘Isn’t it pretty?’

‘It’s beautiful,’ Alex replied, picking up a silver bauble and hanging it on a random branch. ‘Like you.’

‘Charmer.’ I waited until his back was turned and his attention fully on finding a beer before moving the bauble to a more suitable spot. ‘Where have you been?’

‘Around,’ he said, leaning against the kitchen counter and wiggling his eyebrows at me. ‘I was gonna get a haircut but I didn’t.’

‘Around?’ I carefully placed a blown-glass Santa Claus on a low branch of the tree. ‘You are an enigma, Alex Reid.’

‘I know, I’m trying to cultivate an air of mystery so you don’t get bored of me.’ He popped open his beer and took a deep drink. ‘How was your day? How’s Lopez?’

‘Something weird is going down at work – my money is on an alien invasion – there was half a mouse in someone’s sandwich at lunchtime and Jenny has decided she wants to have a baby.’ I added a delicate silver star above the little Santa. ‘What do you fancy for dinner? Don’t say half a mouse.’

To his credit, Alex didn’t even look fazed. Instead, he just sipped his beer and nodded slowly, keeping his eyes on the tree.

‘Half a mouse?’ he asked, swinging the beer bottle between his thumb and forefinger. ‘Was it fried at least? Everything tastes good when it’s fried.’

I smiled and felt my shoulders drop. Just being in the same room as him made my life a thousand times better. I let my attention waver from decorating the tree for a moment, just long enough to get a good look at the hottest man I had ever had the privilege of touching. His green eyes were dark and heavy against his pale skin and his cheeks glowed from the cold outside in a way that not even Gloss’s beauty editor could replicate. He gave me a questioning smile and brushed his too-long hair out of his face, tucking the fringe behind his left ear. I still wasn’t quite sure how I’d managed to lock him down but, sparkle sparkle, the two rings on my left hand reminded me I had pulled off that miracle.

‘Can I help with the tree or should I keep a safe distance?’ He hovered by the tree for a moment, before settling on the arm of the sofa, poking around in the ornaments.

‘I’d stick with a safe distance,’ I admitted, stopping myself from slapping his hands away from the glittery box of joy. ‘This is not me at my best.’

‘I know, you’re a tree Nazi,’ he said with a half-yawn. ‘My mom was the same, I get it. So, what do you want to deal with first? The aliens, the mouse, Jenny or my hair?’

Finishing off his yawn for him, I shook my head and picked out a pretty glass snowflake. ‘Start where you like, they’re equally unpleasant.’

‘I didn’t see anything on the news about an invasion of the body snatchers today, so I think you’re OK there.’ He rolled his head from side to side and stood up, wrapping his arms loosely around my waist as I tended to my tree. ‘And I don’t think there’s much we can do for the mouse.’

‘It was not a dignified end,’ I replied, revelling in the feeling of his body pressed against mine. It never got old. ‘But it definitely woke everyone up for a bit.’

‘I can see how it would.’ He pulled my hair away from my face and held it back in a makeshift ponytail, making me catch my breath. I was conflicted. As nice as it was, these were not the ideal conditions for tree trimming. ‘And as for Jenny, you know how she is. She’s seen a baby, she wants a baby. Last time I talked to her, she was obsessed with those dumb little dogs, right?’

‘She was quite intent on Pomeranian ownership, yes,’ I agreed, my heart beating a fraction faster as Alex slid his hand down my hair until it rested on my shoulder. He wasn’t the only one who needed a haircut.

‘Right, and she forgot soon enough.’ His breath was warm on my skin and I was just tipsy enough to have developed a sudden case of the raging horn. ‘And I can’t see Craig pushing a stroller any time soon, so I wouldn’t let that worry you too much.’

‘I don’t think she’s really involving Craig in her plan.’ I spoke in a whisper in case my voice broke and tried to turn around to face him, but instead Alex tightened his grip around my waist, pinning me in place. He carefully took the snowflake bauble from my hand and hung it somewhere on the tree. I stared at the floor and tried to steady my breath. Where he had stuck the ornament didn’t seem terribly important anymore. I was so fickle. I tried to keep my breath even as he ran his fingertips down my back but it was all too much when I felt his teeth against my ear. I heard a tiny gasp escape from my lips and Alex had to pull me backwards just to keep me upright.

‘Maybe you shouldn’t worry about Jenny’s plans so much.’ His voice was low and warm in my ear. ‘Maybe you should only worry about my plans.’

‘Why?’ I asked, clasping my hands over his to stop them from moving lower and to stop me from toppling over into the Christmas tree. ‘Are they dangerous?’

‘Only if you don’t do as you’re told,’ he replied, spinning me round for a kiss. Even though his eyes were dark and dilated, he was still smiling. My stomach fluttered and I felt myself blush before I kissed him back. ‘You’re going to have to finish the tree later.’

‘Sounds fair,’ I squeaked, following him happily into the bedroom, tree be damned.

Afterwards, when Alex was fast asleep and I was too restless to sleep, I padded back into the living room in my knickers, picking my jumper up off the floor where it had been abandoned and slipping it over my head. I turned out the big lights and perched on the edge of the sofa, just as Alex had an hour earlier, picking up his abandoned beer and taking a sip. It was flat and a bit warm. So obviously I kept drinking it.

‘American beer is like pop,’ I told the tree. ‘Practically shandy.’

But that was the good thing about Christmas trees, they never judged. They just stood in the corner, looking all stately and wonderful, reminding you that it was the most wonderful time of the year and that all would be well. I had always loved Christmas, ever since I was tiny, and every year I worked my arse off to make sure the season was as jolly as the many, many adverts on telly promised that it would be. But this year … this year was going to be the best Christmas ever. Since I no longer had the Boots Christmas catalogue to tell me It Was Time, I now had to rely on the red Starbucks cups, the Coca-Cola advert and my own in Christmas-dar, honed from decades of seasonal celebrating. I’d spent months searching for the perfect present for Alex and finally found a first edition copy of The Great Gatsby, his favourite book, which I hoped would make up for the time we saw the movie, which I loved and he hated. It really was the closest we’d come to divorce – there had been a distinct threat of legal action in his eyes as we walked to the subway that night.

As well as excelling at gifting, I’d been squirrelling away my favourite things for months. Not quite whiskers on kittens but there were some brown paper packages, tied up with string. Louisa, my best friend from forever, had been sending care packages from England ever since the Boots Christmas catalogue came out. I had assorted advent calendars, boxes of crackers and endless supplies of Ferrero Rocher, After Eights, Quality Street and Cadbury’s Roses hidden away in the top kitchen cupboard. I hoped she hadn’t forgotten the savoury selection … On top of the British Christmas essentials, I’d already ordered my turkey and, following a Thanksgiving nightmare that involved a paring knife, a stubborn carrot and the tip of my left little finger, many pre-prepped vegetables. I would still be making the pigs in blankets myself, though, I wasn’t a complete heathen.

Christmas was going to be perfect. I hadn’t taken more than two days off since the wedding and I was completely exhausted. For the first time in forever, I’d booked an entire week’s holiday and, quite frankly, I was going to Christmas the shit out of myself. I wanted to OD on the season of goodwill to such an extent that the sight of a candy cane would make me vomit by the end of it.

As long as it had been since I’d had time off, it felt even longer since me and Alex had spent quality time together. Now I was working full-time, it seemed like every weekend was filled with chores and obligations. I hated for him to feel like he should do the food shopping or the laundry in the week just because he wasn’t working a nine-to-five in an office, mainly because when I wasn’t working a nine-to-five in an office, I sure as hell wasn’t doing the washing. But fitting real life around work did mean some of the shine had gone off our relationship. There were no last-minute jaunts to watch him play international festivals or days spent lazing around in McCarren Park just because we could. The week was going to be all about us and I couldn’t bloody wait.

Seven straight days of festive fun, culminating in twenty-four hours of just me, Alex, loads of food and an entire day sat in front of the TV, playing with my presents. And just in case he didn’t quite come through on the gifting front, I’d picked up a couple of things for myself on one of my Christmas shopping binges and informed my mother she owed me the money. I was a very considerate daughter.

The lights on the tree twinkled on and off in an unfathomable pattern, echoed by the lights of the city outside the window. I closed the drapes on Manhattan and stared at the tree. I couldn’t remember how I’d set them not to blink last year but then I couldn’t remember how I’d made my wireless printer work two days earlier so that wasn’t such a shock. I just wanted them to be the same as they had been. I just wanted one thing to be predictable for one moment. And that moment needed to start with Jenny. Alex was probably right, she would have her heart set on something else soon enough. And if she didn’t, I’d just have to remind her how horribly Erin had suffered through both of her pregnancies – the morning sickness, the uncontrollable lactating, not being able to get into a single pair of her beautiful, beautiful designer shoes for over a year.

Emptying my beer, I picked up a stack of mail from the coffee table and leafed through the assorted flyers and bills. One was a reminder that I was due for a check-up at my own gynaecologist. It had been a year already? If there was one thing you could say about the US healthcare system it was that they were thorough. As long as you had insurance anyway. I pressed my hand against my belly and, just for a second, I stopped wishing it was flatter and pushed it out against my palm. I had spent so much time and energy over the years trying to get thinner, the idea of suddenly ballooning up, full of baby, was terrifying.

Halfway down the mail pile was a thick cream-coloured envelope with mine and Alex’s name written in elegant script. Ooh, the first Christmas card of the season! I smiled beatifically at my Christmas tree. It felt good not to be the only seasonal crazy in the city.

But it wasn’t a Christmas card. It was an invitation.

To the wedding of Mary Stein and Bob Spencer.

CHAPTER TWO

‘You’re getting married?’

‘Good morning, Angela,’ Mary replied without looking up from her computer when I raced into her office and slammed the door the following morning. The door-slamming was accidental but it did add to the dramatic effect.

‘You’re getting married to Bob?’

Mary took a deep breath, pushed her glasses up her nose and looked up at me with all the patience she could muster. Which with Mary was never that much.

‘Delia told you?’ she asked, carefully rolling up the sleeves of her crisp white shirt. Everything about Mary was crisp – her steel-grey bob, her Manhattan-born-and-bred accent, even her eyeliner. ‘I told her I wanted to tell you myself.’

‘Delia didn’t tell me,’ I said, taking an unoffered seat. I felt like such a shambles in front of Mary. She was almost the same age as my mother but always a thousand times more put together than me. I’d left the house in the same old Madewell pencil skirt I’d worn the day before and a neon pink and white striped T-shirt. Somewhere in the bottom of my trusty old Marc Jacobs handbag there was a bright blue Paul & Joe jumper that absolutely failed to bring the entire outfit together. My spring–summer hand-me-downs from Jenny were on the brighter side this season. ‘I got an invitation. To the wedding. Your wedding, to Bob. Bobbity Bob Bob Spencer Bob.’

‘I don’t think we’ll be using his full name in the vows.’ Mary pulled a face and immediately began clicking through screens on her Mac. ‘They went out already? That’s a week early. Honestly, you just can’t hire the right people these days.’

‘Oh no, what a nightmare.’ I rapped on the desk for her attention and repeated myself. ‘Mary, you’re getting married to Bob Spencer?’

‘Well, if I weren’t, the invitations would be kind of an elaborate joke, wouldn’t they?’ Mary took off her glasses and I could swear I almost saw her smile. ‘Yes, Angela, I’m getting married to Bob.’

She paused and waited for me to speak but I didn’t have anything. No words. Not even swear words. Which was odd for me. After a quiet sigh, she picked up her phone and punched in an extension number.

‘Delia, could you come down? Angela appears to have become mute.’ I watched, still silent, and this time there was definitely a smile on her face. ‘Yeah, I checked, she’s still breathing.’

‘I knew something was going on.’ My voice found itself before I managed to exercise any control over its volume. ‘I mean, not in the sense that I had any sort of actual idea but I knew you were up to something. So that’s why you’ve been having all these secret meetings with Delia.’

‘Kind of,’ Mary replied.

‘Kind of?’ Brilliant. I loved it when Mary was vague. That was my favourite. ‘What do you mean, kind of?’

‘My getting married isn’t the only change on the horizon, Angela,’ she replied. ‘Delia and I wanted to have everything ironed out before we presented you with the new plan. So there wouldn’t be any reason for you to panic.’

‘New plan?’ I panicked. ‘What’s going on? Is Gloss closing? Have I been fired?’

It had to be all the pens I’d ‘borrowed’. I couldn’t help it, I was a stationery klepto. I feverishly tried to work out how many had found their way into the bottom of my handbag so I could replace them but there was no use, I’d literally had hundreds away.

‘You haven’t been fired,’ Mary said with a sigh. ‘You always jump to the worst possible conclusion. Why on earth would you be getting fired?’

Don’t say the pens, don’t say the pens, don’t say the pens …

‘I’ve nicked loads of pens.’

‘I’m not even going to dignify that with a response.’ She pressed her lips into a thin line and shook her head, just as the office door opened and Delia appeared. ‘Thank Christ, you’re just in time.’

‘Have I missed anything?’ Delia asked before leaning down to kiss me quickly on the cheek. She smelled like angels would smell if they happened to have spent a spare half hour in Bergdorf with a Black Amex.

‘Angela just confessed that she is heading up an international stationery smuggling cartel,’ Mary replied. ‘But apart from that, no.’

‘So nothing then,’ Delia said, smoothing down her perfect pencil skirt and slipping into the big comfy chair. ‘Right. Where do we start?’

‘Mary’s getting married to Bob.’ I was shouting again. ‘Your granddad, Bob.’

‘Yeah.’ Delia looked at Mary, then looked at me. ‘I know about that one.’

‘And you didn’t tell me?’

How to go from shouting to squealing in two easy steps by Angela Clark.

‘OK, I’m taking this over.’ Mary clapped her hands together and leaned across her desk. ‘Angela. We have a lot of good news to share. And a lot of it concerns you.’

‘Now I know I’m not going to like what you have to say,’ I replied, smoothing down my unironed pencil skirt and wishing I’d worn something more appropriate for running away. ‘Spill it.’

‘Delia has been promoted,’ she said simply. ‘As of January first, she will be VP of business development and acquisitions for all of Spencer Media.’

‘Oh my God, that’s amazing!’ I turned to stare at my friend with wide eyes. ‘I’m so proud of you. You’re literally superwoman. This is incredible.’

‘Thanks, Angela,’ Delia said, blushing a pretty pale pink. ‘It’s kind of amazing.’

‘It’s totally amazing.’ I could feel myself tearing up and tried to fight back the stinging in my eyes. Mary would not appreciate blubbing in her office. ‘Mary’s getting married, you’re getting a promotion …’

‘Watch it, Clark,’ Mary warned.

‘Watching it,’ I replied with a sniff.

‘But it does mean I won’t be around quite so much at Gloss,’ Delia said, placing her hand on my knee and looking at me with big, earnest blue eyes. ‘We’re the reason I’m getting this job. I told Grandpa there was no way I’d sign off on us completely, but there will be a new publisher. I’ll be executive publisher.’

Now was not the time to freak out, I told myself, pasting on a smile and patting Delia’s hand in a way that I hoped was reassuring and not threatening. I wasn’t sure, though. Delia was an amazing businesswoman, this was only ever a matter of time. I knew this was coming, I just wasn’t actually ready for it.

‘And the new publisher will be brilliant,’ I told her. And myself. ‘Don’t you worry about me and Mary. We’ll muddle through.’

‘OK.’ Delia gave an awkward laugh and turned towards Mary. ‘Your turn?’

‘I’m not going to dick around here, Clark,’ Mary said, as casually as humanly possible. I felt my heart rate soar and my face blanch. Thank God I was already so incredibly pale. ‘When Bob and I get married, I’m taking a three-month sabbatical.’

‘But you and Bob are getting married on New Year’s Eve.’ I felt my bottom lip start to quiver. ‘That’s in three weeks.’

‘Plenty of time to get you where we need you,’ she replied with a half-smile.

‘Where do you need me?’ I could hear my voice getting weaker and weaker. They couldn’t actually send me to prison for nicking some pens, surely?

‘We want you to hold down the fort while Mary’s away,’ Delia explained. ‘We want you to be the interim editor of Gloss.’

Ridiculous wasn’t a good enough word for it. We needed to make up a new one – this was supercalifragifuckedup. I took back everything I’d ever said about Delia being a good businesswoman. Clearly she’d gone completely insane. Power made some people mad.

‘Angela?’ she said, reaching out for my hand. ‘You’ve gone quite pale.’

‘OK, one thing at a time,’ I said, clearing my throat and pointing at Delia. ‘You’re leaving?’

‘Not leaving, I just won’t be around for the day-to-day,’ she clarified. ‘But you’ll have a new publisher who you can help hire to support you.’

‘So you’re leaving,’ I corrected her. She sighed and nodded. I turned and pointed across the desk. ‘And you’re leaving?’

‘I’m going on sabbatical,’ Mary confirmed. ‘For three months.’

‘And when you’ve both left,’ I said, taking a deep breath, ‘you want me to be the editor of the magazine?’

‘Yes,’ Delia said, beaming.

‘Interim editor,’ Mary qualified, not beaming.

And that was the part I was having most trouble with.

Absolutely, I’d been a writer of sorts for years and I’d been working as a journalist since I’d moved to New York three and a half years ago, but this was sudden. This wasn’t something that happened. I’d be a laughing stock. Other than Delia’s savvy publishing, one of the reasons Gloss had done so well was because people loved Mary. She was an institution in the industry, she was respected. I was a random English girl who came to meetings with toothpaste down her jumper. And occasionally Ready brek.

‘You’ll have a new deputy. We can talk about whether we promote internally or look for an external hire.’ Delia had clearly practised her argument before coming to me. She really was very clever. ‘And we’re going to hire you an assistant to help out with your schedule and manage the office but you can do this, Angela. I’ve talked to Grandpa about it and so has Mary and he’s willing to take a chance.’

Mew. I quickly translated that into the truth. Bob Spencer thought promoting me to editor, even temporarily, was as good an idea as I did. Unfortunately for Bob, I was just about contrary enough for that to convince me to give it a go.

‘Gloss is your baby, don’t turn this down.’ Delia grabbed hold of my wrists and shook her blonde ponytail at me. She really was so much stronger than she needed to be. ‘If you think about it and you really don’t want to do it, we can find someone else. It won’t be hard to fill the position. But with me and Mary out of the picture, if you and the new editor don’t get along, who knows what would happen.’

Awesome. So if I took the job I didn’t have a clue how to do, there was every chance I’d run my magazine into the ground, and if I didn’t, there was every chance a new editor would kick me out. And this new, hypothetical editor didn’t even know about the pens.

‘Do I have any time to think about it?’ I asked both of them. I really wanted Delia to let go of my wrists so I could bite my nails but she wasn’t going to. Probably for the best. ‘Just a day would be … I just need until tomorrow morning.’

‘I told Grandpa I’d let him know at the end of the week,’ Delia said, a small smile breaking on her face. ‘But I knew you wouldn’t need that long. Anna Wintour, eat your heart out.’

‘I’ve heard she doesn’t have one of her own, that’s why she has to eat other people’s,’ I said in a weak voice. ‘Will I have to start wearing a suit?’

‘Maybe not a suit but you will have to look into getting an iron,’ Mary answered quickly. ‘Really, they’re not that expensive.’

‘You realise, if I agree to this,’ I said, flexing my wrists as Delia let go to give herself a little clap, ‘I’m going to be an emotional wreck. And I’m probably going to have to start self-medicating and drinking at lunch and keeping pills in my desk and everything?’

‘Oh, Angela.’ Delia jumped up and pulled me to my feet for a hug. ‘You’re a real journalist now.’

‘Yeah, a hardened artery away from a Pulitzer,’ Mary added. ‘Delia, you want to leave us to it? So we can discuss the finer details?’

I stared at Delia, begging her to say no and insist we all immediately leave the office and fly to Vegas to celebrate, but instead she broke our hug and nodded as sombrely as possible, which was not sombrely at all, and headed for the door.

‘You’re going to ace this,’ she said with a wink. ‘In three months you’ll be begging Mary to take another trip. Trust me.’

‘Of course,’ I nodded, waving her away with a smile on my face and waiting for the door to close behind her. ‘For fuck’s sake, Mary, what are you thinking? Please don’t leave the magazine.’

‘I assume you mean, please don’t leave me?’ She gave me her most teacherly look and frowned.

‘Yes,’ I replied, pulling my chair closer to her desk. ‘Of course that’s what I mean.’

‘It’s time, Angela,’ she shrugged. ‘Bob is taking a step back from the business. I’ve been at this desk or one just like it for more than thirty-five years. I want to actually see the world rather than write about it. Preferably while I still have control of my bladder. I think we’re leaving things in very capable hands.’

‘Yeah, Delia’s,’ I said, torn between wanting to give her a big hug and wanting to cling to her leg and beg her not to go.

‘And yours,’ Mary said. ‘As weird as it feels saying this, I’m not worried about Gloss or you. You’re smart, you’re driven and you care more about this magazine than anyone. Plus, you’ve been working for me for nearly four years. If you haven’t picked up what you need in that time, you never will.’

I suddenly regretted dedicating so much time to beating my high score on Candy Crush Saga during all those editorial meetings.

‘You’ll be fine,’ she went on. ‘And I’m only ever as far away as the end of the phone. Or more likely an email – I might be overseas. Bob is talking about chartering a boat.’

A sudden vision of silver fox Bob and his blushing bride giving it the full Titanic on the front of some mega-yacht popped into my head. I’m flying, Bob! And try as I might, it would not go away.

‘You can’t fuck this up, Angela.’ Mary snapped her fingers in front of my distressed-looking face. ‘This magazine is idiot proof. I’m not going to sit here and puff up your ego by telling you how amazing you are, desperately trying to convince you that you can do a job you know perfectly well that you’re capable of.’

‘I am capable,’ I repeated. Only I wasn’t sure of what.

‘Exactly,’ Mary agreed. ‘This magazine might have been your idea but I’ve been the editor since launch. It’s my baby. There’s no way I’d sit back and watch someone run it into the ground for fun.’

It was the closest thing to a compliment she’d ever given me.

‘Any other concerns?’ she asked, turning her attention back to her computer.

‘So, you and Bob, eh?’ I said, standing and making a clucking noise. ‘That old devil.’

‘Go get a coffee and try not to speak to anyone until you’re properly caffeinated.’ She raised a hand to wave me away. ‘And don’t slam the door on the way out or I’ll fire you before you can take over.’

I assumed she was joking but that didn’t stop me closing the door extra quietly, just in case.

By the end of the day, I was ready to jack it all in, let Alex knock me up seventeen times, move to a farm in the middle of nowhere and be milked like a cow until the end of my days. Even though I hadn’t technically accepted the job, it seemed the entire office already knew what was going on and I wasn’t quite sure what to do with myself. There were cover lines to come up with, future features to approve, freelancers to look at and now apparently I needed to attend lots of exciting circulation meetings and schedule all sorts of thrilling executive appointments that almost all involved Excel spreadsheets. I hated Excel spreadsheets. Someone in finance had emailed me about something called a pivot table three times and I’d already come out in a rash. On the upside, I now had hot and cold running coffee, morning, noon and night, hand-delivered by writers who had barely acknowledged my existence before today, and someone from an entirely different magazine who was looking to make a move to ‘the most exciting publication in the company’ brought me a bagel. Power, it turned out, was delicious but exhausting. I was fairly certain, if it weren’t for the three and a half venti Starbucks I’d put away, I’d have passed out at my desk by five p.m.

My brain was buzzing with numbers and pictures and Taylor Swift’s love life and I desperately needed to hear the voice of someone normal. Reaching for my phone, I dialled the only number I knew would help me make sense of such a ridiculous twenty-four hours.

‘You’ve reached Louisa. I’m not around to take your call right now but leave a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.’

With an audible sob, I replaced the handset and cursed the Atlantic Ocean. I couldn’t really complain when Lou wasn’t able to take my calls – she had an actual baby to keep her busy and, to her credit, she had never been one of those mothers who made it sound easy. I’d known Louisa my whole life and no one had ever been better suited to motherhood – her mum used to joke that she would have changed her own nappies if she’d been able – but even she couldn’t paint parenthood as a walk in the park. Lou was obsessed with baby Grace. Since the second she had popped out of her vajay-jay, she had been her everything. Lou had left her job when she got pregnant and now it even felt like her husband, Tim, barely got a look-in. The last time we had spoken, she didn’t even know what had happened in the last season of True Blood. It was that serious. But she was pragmatic and honest and she always knew just what to say to make me feel better. When she answered her phone.

‘Hey, only me,’ I told the beep. ‘Just feel like we haven’t talked in ages. Give me a call when you can. Love you.’

The second I hung up, the phone rang again.

‘Louisa?’ I was almost too excited.

‘Angela?’ a confused voice, not Louisa, replied. ‘It’s me. I’m waiting in the lobby?’

‘Jenny?’

Of course. I suddenly remembered, the doctor’s appointment.

‘I’m sorry. I’ll be right down.’

There was no rest for the wicked, or for friends of Jenny Lopez.

Although she was wearing her ‘take me seriously’ shoes and most resolute face, I could tell Jenny was nervous. She talked about her plans for Jenny Junior all the way up Madison but I couldn’t quite tell whether she was trying to convince me or herself that it was a good idea. I listened quietly, making encouraging noises often enough to sound supportive but not regularly enough to sound thoroughly enthused. Because I wasn’t. I heard my phone chiming inside my Marc Jacobs satchel just as we arrived but since Jenny had turned absolutely ashen, I decided to let it ring through to the answer phone.

‘It’s just a doctor’s appointment, nothing to worry about,’ I reminded her, taking her hand and giving it a squeeze.

‘I know,’ she said with absolutely zero conviction. ‘I just want to ask some questions.’

She stopped outside the building and looked up at the skyscraper.

‘Can we get drinks afterwards?’ she asked.

‘We can,’ I agreed.

‘Because I won’t be able to drink once I’m pregnant, right?’ her voice shook a little, even as she laughed. ‘Better make the most of me while you can.’

‘Let’s go in.’ I pulled her through the fancy gold and glass doors and smiled at the doorman. If she was this nervous going in to ask questions, maybe Alex was right, maybe this phase would be over before New Year’s. ‘We’ll be late for the doctor.’

The doctor in question was in fact Erin’s gynaecologist and former college roommate, Dr Laura, and her surgery looked more like a spa than any office I’d ever had the pleasure of visiting on the NHS. There were orchids where there should have been browning rubber plants, copies of Vogue and W instead of a 1996 Take a Break summer special and I couldn’t see a single broken Etch A Sketch anywhere. I kept waiting for someone to offer me a manicure.

‘Jenny?’ Dr Laura Morgan opened a frosted-glass door into the plush waiting room almost as soon as we had sat down. ‘And Angela! Wonderful. Come this way, ladies.’

Obviously, I’d heard that doctors in America were loaded and I’d met Laura a couple of times before, at Erin’s wedding and then at assorted baby-related events, but I hadn’t realised quite how, well, glossy she would be at work. Her hair was tied back in a perfect shiny black ponytail and underneath her slim-fitting white coat, she was wearing a gorgeous white silk shirt and camel-coloured skinny trousers. As a general rule, I hated women who looked good in trousers, primarily because I didn’t, and she looked amazing. The nude patent Louboutins didn’t hurt either. I had a minor sulk about my Topshop ankle boots and then reminded myself that I had owned Louboutins once upon a time, and I would again. Just as soon as I considered myself enough of a grown-up not to fuck them up the first time I wore them. Besides, as I reminded myself every time Delia pranced into the office wearing them, there were other shoes in this world. Just none that were quite so pretty.

‘So, Erin said you wanted to see me.’ Laura waved us into her cushy office, all pale greys, fresh whites and soft pinks, and called out to her assistant for coffee. Her assistant was dressed head to toe in flowered scrubs, topped off with a your-last-minute-appointment-is-keeping-me-here-after-hours scowl. I noted that the designer shoes weren’t uniform for everyone. Poor cow. ‘Or at least she said Jenny wanted to see me. What can I do for you?’

‘I want to have a baby,’ Jenny declared, leaning forward in her overstuffed armchair, confidence back ten-fold. ‘And I just want to make sure everything’s in working order.’

‘That’s exciting news,’ Laura replied, glancing at my worried expression and then back at Jenny’s wild-eyed mania. ‘I just want to check, I’m not going crazy, am I? You two aren’t a couple?’

‘Jesus Christ, us?’ Jenny looked at me in horror. ‘Shit, can you imagine?’

‘I think what she’s trying to say is no,’ I translated. ‘I’m here for moral support.’

‘And her husband wants to put a baby in her too,’ Jenny added. ‘But she’s all “la la la, I don’t need a baby right now”, right, Angie?’

‘Shall we deal with one crisis at a time?’ I asked, giving Jenny my best ‘behave yourself’ glare. She ignored it, as usual. ‘We don’t need to worry about me.’

‘Well, I’m not worried about either of you.’ Laura tapped her pen against her desk and remained impressively calm. ‘You both look pretty healthy, you’re not an age risk, I can’t really see any issues. But I’m super happy to do a physical, get some blood work done. There are a couple of tests I can run to make sure your hormone levels are where we’d want them and then after that it’s really all down to you and the baby daddy. Or daddies in this case.’

‘That sounds great,’ Jenny breathed out, her shoulders slumping inside her black blazer. ‘I mean, I don’t technically have a baby daddy right now but I want to know that everything’s working as it should be.’

‘Uh, that’s OK.’ Laura looked slightly puzzled for half a second and then went back to tapping her pen. ‘But this is something you’re looking into imminently?’

‘Yes.’

On cue, Laura’s assistant opened the door with three cups, a coffee pot, a jug of boiling water and assorted teabags, cream and sugar options. I was so far away from home. The best I’d ever got at my doctor’s at home was a paper cup of tap water when I needed to do a urine test and couldn’t go. Somehow I was certain it was all Margaret Thatcher’s fault.

‘I see a lot of single women in their thirties who just want to check things out and, you know, there are a lot of options these days,’ Laura said, taking a cup and pouring herself a stiff black coffee, into which she emptied three packets of Splenda. ‘I can always refer you to a therapist if you want to talk through your feelings. Before you start any kind of process.’

Clever Dr Laura. I gave her a small, thankful smile as I made myself a cup of Earl Grey. Send Jenny to a psychiatrist who would take one look at her before forcibly applying a chastity belt and throwing the key into the East River.

‘Maybe.’ Jenny ignored the drinks and started drumming her fingers against her folded arms. ‘Can we do the blood and hormone tests now?’

‘Sure we can.’ Laura took a calm sip from her cup before setting it down and pressing a button on her phone. ‘I’ll have Theresa set everything up in the next room. We can do both of you at once.’

‘Both of us?’ I immediately poured boiling water all over the floor. ‘I’m fine. Really.’

‘I want you to,’ Jenny said, turning on me in a heartbeat. ‘And it can’t hurt to know everything’s OK, surely?’

‘What’s to know?’ I whispered with a smile. It was hard to be startled, pissed off and still polite to a doctor all at the same time. But you had to be polite to doctors, my mum said. ‘I don’t need this. I’m not doing it.’

I was prepared to do a lot of things for my friends, including and not limited to doctor’s visits on a Friday night, holding back their hair while they vomited into my lap and even watching multiple Saw movies, but this was something else. She was literally asking me to bleed for her. And it wasn’t even because she needed the blood.

‘Obviously, this is all between us.’ Laura stood up and rearranged her white coat. ‘Just a friendly favour to you guys. It doesn’t need to go on your records, it’s just a fun thing to try.’

‘How is getting a needle jabbed in my arm a fun thing?’ I asked both of them. ‘Ever? Unless you’re a smackhead?’

‘That … that’s a joke, right?’ Laura suddenly looked very concerned. ‘Because that kind of thing definitely affects these tests.’

‘I’m not a smackhead,’ I groaned. ‘I just don’t think I need these tests.’

‘Do it for me,’ Jenny pleaded, gripping my hand in hers and practically dragging me out of the lovely, calming office and following Laura into an altogether less artfully lit room full of medieval-looking medical equipment. And there it was. The chair. With the stirrups. I felt my vagina seize up in protest.

‘I’m just going to take a little blood,’ Laura said over the not at all reassuring sound of snapping rubber gloves. ‘And then we’ll do a urine test. You don’t need my help with that. The results will be back in a couple of weeks and they’ll show us generally how you’re looking, what your hormone levels are like and how many eggs we’re dealing with.’

While eager beaver Lopez shrugged off her blazer and rolled up her sleeve, I took a moment to think about my eggs. I couldn’t say I’d given them the time of day before, unless I was cursing one of them for chaining me to the sofa with a hot-water bottle and an entire jar of Nutella while it took its own sweet time to mosey on out of my cramping uterus. But people talked about bad eggs all the time. What if I only had bad eggs? Sure, they had half a chance, they were going to be fertilised with Alex’s super sperm, but there was still every possibility they’d get my dad’s indigestion and my mum’s asthma and my fallen arches. High heels hurt me. I didn’t wish that on my future child. But what if that was all that was left? Asthmatic, gassy babies who couldn’t walk in anything over a three-inch heel. That took modelling and prostitution off the table for future career choices. What if my next period was the last decent egg? My last chance at birthing a professional footballer or Nobel peace prize winner or X-Factor semi-finalist?

‘Angela, your turn.’

Jenny was carefully prodding a tiny round plaster on the inside of her elbow as Laura advanced on me with a length of rubber tubing and a hypodermic needle.

‘You ready?’ she asked.

‘No,’ I replied.

And, dear God, was that the truth.

CHAPTER THREE

One of the most common phrases I heard in New York was ‘go big or go home’. Usually, this made me very happy. Everything was more over the top here – the people worked harder, the bars opened later and there was bacon in everything – but today, even the weather was acting like a real New Yorker. Whoever had upset the wind and brought the brutal sleet shower that slapped me in the face when I stepped out of my apartment needed a kicking. It was days like this that I was reminded I was not a true New Yorker. A born-and-bred city gal would have pulled on her North Face jacket, muttered ‘fudgedaboudit’ and gone about her business. I stood on my doorstep in a duffel coat and a fancy scarf that became immediately sodden, and whimpered until a cab buzzed by. I couldn’t think of a day I’d been happier to stick out my arm and jump inside. This was an open-minded city but murdering commuters because you had had too many drinks and not enough hot dogs the night before was generally considered a no-no and, I imagined, it was especially frowned upon at Christmas time.

As soon as we left the doctor’s office, Jenny and I had headed straight to the St Regis for ‘dinner’. Only dinner turned out to be a bowl of bar nuts and three martinis, a choice that was neither nutritious nor conducive to an easy morning commute. Thank God it was perfectly acceptable to wear sunglasses indoors in December in this city. My comfy, comfy leggings, cocoon-like Club Monaco sweater and battered old Uggs combo had been frowned upon by the girls in the office but I was fairly certain I’d got the greasy egg, bacon and cheese sandwich past them without anyone detecting it. My satchel was going to stink for weeks. Stink like heaven.

No sooner had I sat down to take my first bite than my phone began to ring. I picked up as quickly as I could, just to stop the noise, fumbled with the handset for a moment and finally managed to answer.

‘Angela? It’s Mandy from human resources. The first interviewee for the assistant position is here. Are you on your way up?’

The assistant position. Interviews. I had to sit in a room and talk to strangers about a job I didn’t really want to give them. I looked longingly at the greasy paper bundle in my handbag and sniffed.

‘I’ll be up in five minutes,’ I croaked into the phone. ‘How many are there?’

‘Eight,’ Mandy replied. ‘Five minutes.’

For a moment I wondered if HR at Condé Nast spoke to Anna Wintour like that. Taking one delicious bite out of my sandwich before trudging back out of my office, I figured they must. Even a Prada-wearing devil had to hand in her appraisals on time, surely?

Of course, the interviews were torture.

Even if I hadn’t had a seventeen-piece orchestra tuning all their instruments at the same time inside my head while my stomach behaved like it was on a roller coaster, on the deck of a cruise ship, travelling through very choppy waters, it would have been unbearable. In fact, trying not to vomit was pretty much the only interesting thing I had to focus on throughout. One after another, shiny-haired, impeccably dressed and wildly overqualified boys and girls filed in, sat down and showed me the result of their very expensive childhood orthodontist work and even more expensive education. Not one of them had a single, solitary hair out of place and not a single one of them had woken up with a little bit of their own sick on them. Was it weird to feel intimidated by your own potential assistant? Alistair, Chessa, Tessa, Betsy, Beatrice, Sarah, Sarah and Sara were all exactly the same human being. Well, Alistair obviously had some differences from the girls but he was wearing very expensive designer shoes and did also like kissing boys, so not that many. They were fashionably put together but not making any sort of statement. They had all attended expensive, liberal arts colleges and had degrees that had great potential to be entirely useless in the outside world. They all lived on the Upper East Side with their families or had just moved out to Brooklyn and they all had an uncountable number of internships under their belt. Basically, everything added up to ‘they were all really rich’. It wasn’t like I’d grown up without two pennies to rub together, or like I hadn’t met some very rich people in my time in New York who weren’t entirely dreadful, but something about that soft-focus sheen that money gave a person made me nervous. The idea of having to ask someone to go and get me a coffee when they had never had to light up the inside of their handbag with their pay-as-you-go mobile looking for a last pound coin to pay for their kebab on the way home from Wetherspoons made me feel a bit, well, weird.

As the interviews dragged on, I discovered that they were all perfectly nice and had excellent interview skills. They all wanted to work in journalism and they were all so excited about the opportunity to work on a magazine as fun and as fantastic as Gloss. Blah blah blah. Why hadn’t anyone thought to bring me a snack as a bribe? After the first hour, I would have given them my job if they’d have just given me a bag of Doritos. As soon as Tessa had finished telling me about her award-winning humanist-slash-beauty-slash-kitten fancier blog and wafted out of the room on a cloud of Chanel, I leapt to my feet and told Mandy I had an important conference call that meant I absolutely had to get back to my desk. There was no way I could sit and discuss the subtle differences between Sarah’s English major and feminist theory minor versus Sara’s English major and quite blatant cocaine addiction minor. I felt like I’d just interviewed the entire cast of Gossip Girl and I needed a quiet sit-down.

And so that was exactly what I was not about to get. As I sloped back to my desk, I spotted a blonde head poking up from the chair in front of my desk. Delia. At least she might take sympathy on me, I thought, cheering slightly at the thought of some empathetic nodding. And most importantly, she wouldn’t judge me when I ate the shit out of that cold egg sandwich.

‘Fuck me,’ I announced, pushing the glass door open and letting it close loudly behind me. ‘Interviewing is too hard. All I want to do is bury myself in a vat of Ben & Jerry’s and eat my way out.’

‘Ew.’ Delia wrinkled up her tiny, surgery-free nose and gave me the filthiest look she could muster. Which would have been a strange response for Delia, if it had in fact been Delia. But it wasn’t. Of course it wasn’t, because today was turning out to be a day of complete and utter shittiness and that could only mean one thing. Delia’s twin sister Cici had come to pay me a visit.

Fucking. Brilliant.

I sank down in my chair and stared at her. It was like being in the same room as a spider – I wanted it to go away but I didn’t dare take my eyes off it in case it came to get me when I wasn’t looking.

‘Cici,’ I said eventually.

‘Angela,’ she replied, wiping off the look of disgust and replacing it with a bland, easy smile I recognised from the poor little rich girls I’d just interviewed.

‘I am too tired today.’ I prayed she would make it quick. ‘Can you just punch me in the face and leave?’

Cici looked at me blankly for a moment and then threw her head back in a terrifying laugh that I’d previously only seen written down in Jenny’s most manic text messages. ‘Oh, hahahahahaha. That’s funny.’

‘Is it?’

Just for a moment, I really wished I’d had a panic button installed under my desk.

‘Yes?’

I breathed in, breathed out and waited but apparently she really didn’t know what I was talking about. Cici sounded the same but, while I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, something was very slightly off. Her super-trendy outfits had been replaced by a pair of bootcut jeans and a regular-looking sweatshirt and her hair, gorgeous as it was, didn’t look like it had seen a straightening iron in, well, at least five seconds. Maybe she was dying? I peered under the table. She was wearing trainers. No heels. Perfect for a speedy getaway.

‘Oh.’ Finally, she clicked. ‘Because you think I hate you and, you know, all that stuff that happened.’

When Cici said ‘all that stuff that happened’ I assumed what she meant was the time she’d had my suitcase blown up at the airport in Paris and tried to sabotage my career by blackmailing my assistant into screwing me over. Or maybe when she got me fired, which meant I almost lost my visa and could have been deported. Or maybe it was the time she tried to destroy Gloss, the magazine her very own sister was working on, before it had even launched. Of course, I had responded to this evildoing with grace and maturity and had risen above the whole thing. Aside from the time Louisa almost beat the living shit out of her. But that was totally by the by.

‘If you’re not here to ruin my life, or at the very least Christmas, what do you want?’ I asked. I was too weak to get into a scrap again, although throwing up on her would be new and, I imagined, quite effective.

‘So, Deedee told me you need a new assistant.’ She flicked her hands out to the side in a kind of jazz hands gesture. Her nails were all chipped and bitten down. Cici Spencer hadn’t had a manicure … OK, she was definitely dying. ‘So, like, I’m here to be your new assistant.’

More often than not, in situations where most people would have been rendered speechless it was my unfortunate habit to let out a string of expletives and unintelligible noises. However, in this instance, I was quite simply gobsmacked.

‘I know we’ve had some issues in the past,’ Cici went on, ignoring the horror on my face and the fear in my eyes. ‘But I’ve totally changed. I’ve been in India at a yoga retreat.’

As if to convince me that this complete and utter spiritual shift was complete, she tugged on a tiny plait, interwoven with gold and red threads, hidden in her hair.

‘I was there for six weeks.’

For a moment, I was very worried that I had actually drunk myself to death the night before and this was some sort of purgatorial test but a quick and painful pinch of the arm proved that whether I liked it or not, this was happening.

‘So, you went to a spa in India, got your hair done and now you’re a new person?’ I just wanted to get all my facts straight before I called the police.

‘I mean, they called it a spa,’ Cici said with a raised eyebrow. ‘But, you know, I didn’t dare sit in the steam room on my own and I had to take my own towels. And for some reason there were, like, cows and elephants everywhere.’

‘Because you were in India?’ I suggested.

‘Yeah, at a spa,’ she repeated.

‘Right.’ I used my last reserve of strength to stand up and press my hands onto the desk, trying my hardest to look stern and as though I wouldn’t fall over if a kitten pushed me with a whisker. ‘This has been fascinating but you have to leave. I’m sure you’ve got whatever hilarious kick you were after out of my outfit anyway.’

‘Listen, Angela.’ Cici flushed bright red and stood up until we were face to face. Except for now she was about five inches taller than me, even in trainers. Albeit nice ones. ‘I really have changed and I really want to make a new start. I guess in some weird, abstract way, I sort of kind of feel like you and I owe each other an apology.’

‘That is interesting,’ I said as my psycho alarm began to blare inside my head.

‘But clearly you want to hold a grudge.’ She sniffed and feigned a sad face. ‘I guess spending all that time soul-searching and working out how I can be a better person, how I can make my pops and my sister proud, I guess all that was for nothing.’

‘It would seem so,’ I said with as much sympathy as I could muster. ‘I hope you at least got a good massage out of it.’

‘You’ve changed.’ Her eyes flashed, as though she was being hard done by, as though she might actually be able to squeeze out a tear. ‘I know you don’t believe it but I liked working with Mary when I was her assistant, you can ask her.’

‘Well, yeah,’ I admitted. ‘But I’m fairly certain you never accidentally on purpose dropped a picture of a huge penis in any of her PowerPoint presentations either, did you?’

‘You have changed, Angela,’ she nodded, smiling. ‘What, now you’re a big shot editor with your dumb dip-dye colour job, you’re too big and important to give a girl a second chance? And FYI, I wasn’t even going to mention your cruddy outfit.’

‘By my count, this would be your fifth chance,’ I pointed out. ‘And it’s not dip-dye, I just haven’t had time to get the roots done.’

‘Whatever,’ she snapped. ‘Namaste.’

I watched Cici and her wounded karma flounce all the way down the office, confusing the newbies who thought she was Delia in a never-before-seen huff and scaring those who remembered her from her previous reign of terror at Spencer Media. I fixed my eyes on her tiny bottom until she was safely in the lift and safely out of the building. And then I sat down. And then I sighed. And then I threw up in my bin.

My name is Angela. I am disgusting.

Two hours later, I was still sat at my desk, surrounded by Christmas cheer I was struggling to feel and desperate to get outside into the fresh air. But sadly, if I wanted to take any time off the following week, there was a lot of work to be done. I’d already had an email from Mary saying they needed me in on Monday but I was still hoping to take the rest of the week off. Four days of fun was better than none.

I rubbed my eyes to stop them from blurring as I stared at a page of mascara reviews, only to pull away my fists covered in blackish brown smudges. I’d been looking at my computer for too long and I was a long way from being finished yet. There was every chance I shouldn’t have spent half an hour streaming the Come Dine With Me Christmas special after Cici left but how else was I supposed to get back my seasonal spirit? That girl brought out my inner Grinch. Before I could focus my eyes back on the screen, my iPhone rattled across the glass top of my desk, flashing up a name that made me very, very happy.

‘Hello!’ I screeched, mentals and mascara smudges completely forgotten.

‘Clark, get your arse outside. I’m freezing my bloody balls off.’

Even though it was not Santa, I would have been hard-pressed to be more excited. This was someone who gave much better gifts and visited far less regularly.

‘On my way,’ I replied, hanging up and clapping my hands. The magazine could manage without me for ten minutes. Probably.

‘All right, you old slag.’ As soon as I stepped out of the Spencer Media lobby James Jacobs, my absolute favourite formerly closeted gay actor from Sheffield, threw his huge arms around me and squeezed until I squeaked. I hadn’t seen him since my wedding, despite repeated promises and four a.m. text messages swearing he’d swing by the next time he was in New York. Oh, to be so jet-set-slash-busy doing it with boys. We hugged it out while I wrapped my not nearly warm enough but very cute Theory duffel coat and jumped up and down, half because I was so excited and half to warm up my feet. It really was bloody freezing.

‘Why didn’t you tell me you were coming to visit?’ I demanded, still mid-hug. Sometimes his hugs went on a bit and I couldn’t quite breathe but they were very lovely. ‘Or are you on the run?’

‘How did you know?’ he asked, letting me go and holding me at arm’s length to get a good look. ‘I’m here for work and to tell you to get your hair cut. Where do we go?’

‘We could just go upstairs?’ I suggested. ‘I’ve got an office with walls and windows and everything.’

‘As impressive as that sounds,’ James said, patting me on the top of the head, ‘I’d rather not.’

‘Because of the celebrity mags?’ I asked, all sympathetic and understanding.

‘Because I shagged one of the blokes who works on reception once and never called him,’ he replied. ‘So, where are we going?’

I thought for a moment. He didn’t want to go to the office, I didn’t want to go to the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company and neither of us wanted to stand in the street freezing our nuts off, which did not leave us with many options. Looking up at James, six foot something, glossy brown hair, huge eyes, cheekbones that would slice bread, I frowned. Did he have to be quite so bloody tall and gorgeous? If we couldn’t go somewhere he wouldn’t be recognised, we had to go somewhere no one would care. Somewhere people had other things to think about. Somewhere in Times Square …

‘I know just the place.’ I grabbed his hand and dragged him down the street. ‘I’m a genius. Follow me.’

‘You’re a genius?’ James shook his head and folded his arms. ‘Sometimes, Angela Clark, I worry.’

‘Embrace it,’ I replied. ‘It was close, it’s quiet and no one in Toys R Us a week before Christmas gives a shit about you. They just want a Buzz Lightyear or Teletubby or whatever the kids are into these days. Plus, I’ve got a bag of Sour Patch Kids in my handbag so you’ll even get a snack. What more could you want?’

When most people were stressed or unhappy, they went to look at the ocean or hang out in the park. Others opted for retail therapy – Holly Golightly went to Tiffany, Jenny Lopez went to Saks Fifth Avenue, I went to Toys R Us in Times Square. Admittedly, it was a bit odd when I didn’t have any kids of my own but I had yet to find anywhere else within ten minutes’ walking distance of my office as distracting as the giant animatronic dinosaur in the Jurassic Park section of the store. When Bergdorf put one of those in, I’d walk the extra ten blocks. Until then, I was staying here.

‘Sour Patch Kids are not a snack,’ he said, taking a handful anyway and raising his voice over the extra-loud music. ‘Jesus, I haven’t eaten this much sugar in about seven years. Incredible. Your logic troubles me.’

‘But you do admit it’s a kind of logic,’ I said, ‘so that’s something.’

‘If anyone tweets about this, I’ll kill you,’ he said, pausing to offer the kids in the My Little Pony car below us a dazzling smile and flip his curly brown hair away from his face. Yes, he clearly hated the attention. ‘And if I get motion sickness, I’m going to throw up on your shoes.’

I crossed my legs, tucking my Uggs under the seat, and hoped he was joking. It was a miracle I’d never thrown up on them, I’d be damned if someone else was going to do it.

‘OK, what’s going on?’ I asked, popping a handful of sour sweets in my mouth and leaning back to enjoy the ride. ‘Aside from making my Friday complete, what are you doing here?’

‘You can’t tell anyone,’ James leaned in to whisper in my ear with unnecessary but very welcome theatrical flair. ‘I just auditioned for a musical.’

I stared at him with a completely blank expression.

‘Fuck off.’

James. In a musical. Ha. Yes, he was an actor and yes, he was as gay as the day was long but he was far from camp and, above all else, he was a boy from Sheffield. It just wasn’t possible. Boys from Sheffield weren’t in musicals. They could be in bands but they could absolutely, positively not be in musicals.

‘I did! I just auditioned for a musical!’ he insisted, just loud enough for everyone in the shop to update everyone they knew on every form of social media known to man. So much for subtlety. ‘I’m serious.’

And according to the slightly annoyed glint in his eyes, he was.

‘Hollywood wasn’t enough?’ I sipped my water and tried to rein in my excitement. I loved a musical – it was my not-so-secret secret shame. The fact that tickets were so incredibly bloody expensive was the only thing that stopped me from singing along with Pippin every single night. Well, ticket prices and the fact that everyone I knew would disown me. ‘Which one?’

‘Les Mis,’ he replied casually as he popped another sour sweet with relish. ‘God, I’ve missed junk food. Maybe I’ll get really fat next year and then do Dancing with the Stars to get it all off.’

My heart stopped. My eyes widened. Had he just said what I thought he had?

‘Les Mis as in Les Miserables? As in the best musical ever made? As in I know all the words and sometimes when I’m in the shower I like to pretend I’m Eponine and you can never, ever, ever repeat that as long as you live?’

‘Yes, Angela, you mental, that Les Mis,’ he said. ‘You know they’re reviving it?’

‘Of course I know they’re reviving it,’ I answered in a near shout. ‘There is a blog, James. There are several blogs. I cannot believe you auditioned for it. Who are you playing?’

‘Well, if I get it,’ he said, very clear about the ‘if’, which I ignored, obviously. ‘Jean Valjean. You know?’

I did know. And to communicate this, I pressed my hands to my heart and nodded because I was entirely without words. Twice in one day. It was a new record.

‘And yeah, I had the audition this morning so I flew in last night, met the producers, sang my song …’ He raked a hand through the too-long hair that now made all sorts of sense and shrugged. ‘I’ll know in a few days if they want to see me again, so I thought I’d stick around.’

‘I’d invite you to stay but it’d be the sofa or the airbed and I am sure you are far too fancy for that,’ I said, trying to pretend I didn’t want to talk exclusively about the fact that he was potentially going to appear in my all-time favourite musical ever.

‘Don’t worry about it.’ James pulled a face and stretched his arms out along the back of the car. He was clearly enjoying himself, even if he wasn’t prepared to admit it. ‘I’m staying at the Mondrian. And you know I don’t do Brooklyn. It gives me a rash.’

‘You’ve never been to Brooklyn,’ I pointed out. ‘But if you’re going to be here over Christmas, I’m going to force you over at gunpoint. I’m going to do a Boxing Day thing. Jenny’ll be around. And probably Graham and Craig. You remember Graham?’

‘Graham?’ James furrowed his brow into a vision of contemplation. He was so handsome. When I was thinking hard, I looked like I needed the bathroom, or was about to cry. Because sometimes when I had to think that hard I did cry. ‘Is he the one I met at your wedding?’

‘Yes,’ I replied, practising my judgey face for when I got back to the office. ‘In England and in New York. He’s the bassist in Alex’s band? Very tall, handsome, glasses? You had sex with him several times?’

James clicked his fingers and nodded. ‘Oh yeah. Nice guy.’

‘And so memorable.’

‘It was ages ago,’ he said, as though I was being entirely unreasonable. ‘We hooked up, we weren’t the ones getting married.’

‘I suppose it is easier to remember the names of everyone you’ve ever had sex with when you can count them all on one hand,’ I replied. ‘Names, dates of birth, identifying marks, names of parents, allergies and medical issues.’

‘I can’t decide if you’re my hero or the saddest woman I ever met.’ James squeezed his arm around my shoulders, elbowing Woody and Buzz in the face. ‘Poor lamb. Tell me all about it. Have you got the seven-year itch a bit early?’

‘No,’ I protested, horrified at the very thought. ‘I wouldn’t cheat on Alex. Not even with a Hemsworth.’

‘What about both Hemsworths?’ he asked.

I paused for a moment.

‘Nope,’ I declared. ‘Not even both Hemsworths and a Gosling.’

‘Shit, that’s serious,’ James clucked. ‘You really should think before you say such things.’

‘I mean it,’ I said and I did. ‘Let’s be honest, I was never very good at dating. I’m perfectly happy to have retired early.’

‘Sounds nice,’ he said, contemplative for a second. ‘But yeah, there comes a time when enough’s enough. But what can a boy do when he’s ready for a change?’

‘Secretly pop over to New York without telling his friends,’ I suggested, ‘and audition for a part in a musical?’

‘Oh Clark, you’re not as green as you are cabbage-looking, are you?’ He smiled and gave my shoulder another squeeze. ‘You can be quite perceptive sometimes.’

I smiled. Upsettingly, it was the nicest thing anyone had said to me all day.

‘So what’s going on?’ I asked, smiling broadly at the bored-looking shop assistant who was in charge of shoving people on and off the ride. I wondered if anyone ever fell off. I wondered if anyone ever jumped off. It would be a hell of a way to go.

‘Nothing really.’ He peered over the edge of our car and tapped out a beat on the side of the carriage. I noticed the stubble on his cheeks, the dark shadows under his eyes. I’d assumed they were evidence of too much travelling and fun times but maybe not. ‘Just feeling a bit shit, a bit lonely. It’s been a long time since I’ve had someone around.’

‘And that’s what you want?’ I covered my mouth so as not to offend him with a mouthful of neon goo. ‘A boyfriend?’

‘I want something,’ James said, looking behind us. Buzz and Woody seemed to understand. ‘I want someone to text stupid things to, not just a picture of my knob and my place at twelve? I’m thinking about moving to New York permanently actually. LA feels a bit tired.’

‘Obviously I would love that.’ I decided to ignore the dick pic part of the debate. That was an issue for his agent, not me. ‘You really think the dating prospects are better here than in California?’

‘That’s what I hear,’ he replied with a shrug. ‘And it’s a better place to raise a family for me, I think.’

‘Everyone has gone baby mad.’ I dug my hands deep into the pockets of my coat and tried to remember if I’d taken my Pill that morning. ‘Is there something in the water?’

‘You too?’ James broke into a real smile. ‘That would be amazing. Imagine, our little babies growing up together, going to school together, beating each other up, having incredibly awkward sexual encounters and then crying about it all in therapy twenty years later. Amazing.’

‘Well, as special as that sounds …’ I couldn’t quite return his big grin but I mustered up the ghost of a smile so as not to let him down. ‘It’s not me just yet. Alex, maybe. Jenny, yes. My friend, Erin, just had her second.’

‘You’re not ready?’ he asked.

I fiddled with my engagement ring and shook my head.

‘I just pulled a half-empty, family-sized bag of Sour Patch Kids out of my handbag and that was supposed to be my lunch,’ I said. ‘No, I’m not ready. How am I supposed to take care of a baby? I am a baby.’

‘You know what they say, there’s never a right time,’ he said, taking another handful of sweets and throwing them into his mouth. ‘But I have just crossed you off my surrogate list.’

‘Thank you.’ I scooped up the rest of the sweets into my hand and folded the bag as small as possible to avoid filling the bottom of my satchel with sour sugar. Again. ‘It is appreciated.’

‘You say Jenny’s feeling broody?’ James did not extend the same mouth-covering courtesy to me that I had shown to him. Gross. ‘She seeing someone?’

‘Yes, she is, and sort of, but maybe not by now. She’s being ridiculous. It’s totally out of nowhere.’

‘Hmm.’ My favourite gay leaned forward, elbows on knees, swinging the carriage forward. I just managed not to squee with delight. ‘Biological clocks are pretty intense, Clark, and she’s a couple of years older than you, isn’t she?’

‘I know,’ I said, feeling a tiny bit guilty. ‘I’m not giving her a hard time, or at least I hope I’m not. I just don’t want her to rush into something this massive and then regret it. I don’t know if she really wants a baby or she just doesn’t want to be on her own. I don’t think dating Craig has really been the relationship of her dreams.’

‘Which one is Craig?’ he frowned.

‘The one in Alex’s band that you didn’t have sex with,’ I said. ‘I hope.’

‘I definitely only did the one in the glasses,’ he said, squinting with the effort of remembering. ‘But I think I remember him. He’s hot.’

‘He is,’ I acknowledged. ‘But I don’t think he’s particularly thinking about the future right now. He’s a straight, good-looking thirty-two-year-old musician in Brooklyn. That gives him the emotional maturity of a nineteen-year-old anywhere else in the world.’

‘Alex manages monogamy,’ James said, his foot tapping along to ‘Frosty the Snowman’ as he spoke. ‘Maybe you’re just being cynical.’

‘And I fully expect to wake up from my coma and find out Alex was all a dream any day now,’ I replied. ‘He is not the norm here, you know that. Dating is hard. I think that’s a bigger problem for Jenny than the baby thing. I just don’t think she wants to admit it.’

‘It’ll all come out in the wash,’ he said with a yawn. ‘You’ll get the truth out of her eventually. Probably when you’re hammered.’

‘You know me so well,’ I said, wincing at the thought of ever having to drink again. I could not hold my ale like I used to and that was saying something. ‘Why don’t you come over for dinner? I’ll call her, we’ll get her liquored up together?’

‘In Brooklyn?’

‘Yes?’

‘Oh, Clark,’ James replied with a friendly smile. ‘How many times? I Don’t Go There.’

You had to admire a man who had his principles.

CHAPTER FOUR

‘Are you planning on getting out of bed at all today?’

I opened one eye and squinted up at an unusually perky-looking Alex Reid. Instead of hiding from any sort of natural light, which was how I found him almost every single morning, he was up, dressed and sat on the edge of the bed, holding a steaming cup of coffee. Weird.

‘No?’ I closed my eye and pulled a pillow over my head.

It was Saturday. A quick shuffle of my feet confirmed my body was entirely covered by the duvet and I didn’t need a wee. There was absolutely no good reason I could see as to why I should move at all.

‘It’s just that I kind of need you to get up so we can go check in on your Christmas present.’

I opened both eyes. I moved the pillow. I looked at my husband.

‘Give me fifteen minutes,’ I replied.

A little over an hour later, Alex and I emerged from the deepest, darkest depths of the G train, thirty minutes from home and in the middle of a neighbourhood I barely knew.

‘We’re in Park Slope?’ I asked as he took hold of my hand and squeezed it through my bright knitted mittens. ‘I should not be wearing shorts.’

‘It’s below freezing,’ Alex replied. ‘That’s why you shouldn’t be wearing shorts.’

‘What are we doing?’ I asked, looking left and right at quiet, orderly streets. ‘My Christmas present is in Park Slope?’

‘Your Christmas present is in Park Slope,’ Alex repeated, nodding his head and pointing with the hand that held mine. ‘This way.’

I was full of questions but Park Slope was a library of a neighbourhood, shushing me before I could speak. Alex and I didn’t hang out this south of Williamsburg often. Or ever actually. Brooklyn was a big borough, full of diversity and adventure, but for the most part, there were three different kinds of neighbourhoods. There was the trendy, hipster part where people rode their bikes everywhere and had ironic moustache tattoos on their fingers, there were the incredibly dodgy bits where I was too scared to get off the subway, and then there were the yummy mummy, super-swanky parts with lots of trees, lots of iPads and lots of odd shops that sold things like artisanal mayonnaise or handcrafted hats. And only two things united all three areas – a fierce love of Beyoncé and men with beards. Park Slope was the epitome of the third type of neighbourhood.

Everywhere I looked, there were attractive couples in their gym clothes pushing elaborate prams and drinking from reusable water bottles, well-groomed women walking expensive-looking dogs and coffee shop after coffee shop after coffee shop. I knew that somewhere nearby there was a huge, beautiful park where Alex’s band, Stills, had played at a festival the summer before and I’d been saying I was going to come back and visit for months on end but, like so many things I was ‘going to do’ in New York, I still hadn’t got around to it. But I did remember that Park Slope in the summer had been beautiful, all sunny skies and green trees, and if it was possible, today it was even more picturesque. The streets we strolled down were orderly and clean, punctuated with stately trees and lined by big brownstones, the kind of houses that made me want to put on my best shoes, sit on my stoop and flag down a yellow cab. Inside, I saw warmly lit trees and menorahs, and almost every other door had a beautiful red-ribboned wreath hanging outside. Even though we were half an hour away from Manhattan, this looked like the New York you saw in the movies and it made my heart sing.

‘You really have no idea where we’re going?’ Alex asked, sheepdogging me down another street, away from the coffee shops and past a church and a synagogue and another church. With its own coffee shop. ‘I can’t believe I’ve actually been able to keep a secret from you.’

‘I’ve been busy,’ I explained, looking up at the street signs and trying to work out what he was talking about. ‘Is it food?’

‘No, it’s not food,’ he sighed. ‘It’s better than food.’

‘Seriously, I got dressed before midday on a Saturday and you’re not even going to feed me?’ What was better than food? ‘Was that Anne Hathaway? She lives here.’

‘You got half dressed,’ he reminded me. His eyes were shining so brightly I couldn’t help but smile. ‘These are the things I worry about when I’m away on tour. And no, I don’t think it was Anne Hathaway.’

‘It might have been.’ I was trying not to be too grumpy but Alex (and anyone who had ever spent more than half a day with me) was well aware that I was difficult when I was hungry. ‘You don’t know.’

‘Yeah, I do know because it was a fourteen-year-old boy.’ He squeezed my hand and stopped short in the middle of the street. ‘We’re here.’

But we weren’t anywhere. We were stood in the middle of 9th Street, right between 8th and 9th Avenues, looking at nothing with no one in sight.

‘Alex?’ The front door to the brownstone in front of us opened and a tall, glossy woman with too much too blonde hair appeared, smiling at my husband.

‘Hey, Karen,’ Alex replied cheerfully, heading up the steps and pulling me along behind him. He pushed me in front of him to shake the woman’s outstretched hand. ‘This is Angela.’

‘Mrs Reid, so nice to meet you at last.’ Karen was older than me – I guessed at least somewhere in her mid-forties, although it was so hard to tell with well-heeled New York women. Either there was some Botox at play or it was a very impressive fake smile she was shining right at me. ‘Alex has told me so much about you.’

‘Um, it’s Angela, please.’ Flummoxed as I was, I’d be buggered if I was going to be called impolite. By a complete stranger. Who appeared to have some sort of close relationship with my husband that I knew nothing about. ‘And it’s Clark. Not Mrs Reid. I didn’t change my name. When we got married. Because of work and … you know.’

Karen’s eyes flitted over to Alex with mild concern. Apparently she did not know.

‘Right,’ she smiled again, although this time more like I was a puppy with three legs, and beckoned us inside. Alex gave me a gentle shove through the front door and a slap on the arse. It did not make up for how incredibly confused I was. ‘Shall we go inside?’

A thousand scenarios were running through my head but none of them seemed quite right. She was an artist and Alex was going to have our portrait painted. She was a chef and Alex had bought me (sorely needed and often referenced) cooking lessons. She was a very unfortunate prostitute and Alex thought it was time to spice things up in the bedroom. Oh God, that was it. She was some sort of sex teacher. We had drunkenly made a ‘no three-way’ sex vow before the wedding but what if my recent sexy bedtime ensemble of a promotional Smirnoff Ice T-shirt and topknot weren’t doing it for him? Things had been a bit quiet in the bedroom of late but I was so tired from long hours at the office and Alex was up all night working on new songs. How had I let things get so bad? I should have been Fifty Shades of Greying the shit out of him every night, I should have—

‘You have to tell me what’s going on in your head right now,’ Alex whispered, ‘because your face is a fucking picture.’

‘Alex, tell me what’s going on right now,’ I replied, having adequately scared myself shitless.

‘So, you’ll be apartment one. The basement and backyard are all yours. Two and three are up the staircase and they have the rooftop.’ Karen gestured absently up a dark, wooden staircase to my right and then unlocked the door on my left. ‘Shall I give the two of you the grand tour or do you want to do the honours yourself?’

‘I’m going to take it from here, if that’s OK,’ Alex said, giving Karen a half-nod and holding his hand out to take the keys from her. ‘We’ll see you outside?’

‘Of course,’ she said, beaming back at the pair of us. ‘Congratulations. It’s a beautiful home. Perfect for a new family.’

‘Thanks.’ Alex waited for Karen to leave and then locked the door behind her. Leaning against it, he smiled awkwardly out from underneath his floppy fringe, hands shoved deep into the pockets of his leather jacket. ‘So, yeah. Merry Christmas.’

Karen was not a sex teacher. She was not going to teach me the art of sensual massage. This was not a well-concealed brothel. This was … well, I still wasn’t sure. I looked up at the tall white tin ceiling. I looked over my shoulder at the huge empty room with its enormous bay windows, elegant fireplace and shiny hardwood floor. I looked back at Alex. He looked completely out of place and so incredibly happy.

‘This?’ I pointed at him, then at myself, then at the floor. ‘You rented this apartment?’

‘I bought this apartment,’ he said, not budging from the doorway. ‘It’s ours.’

I suddenly felt very, very sick.

‘You bought this apartment? It’s ours?’ I couldn’t really make words of my own so I repeated his, trying very hard to keep my voice even and my legs straight. ‘This is our apartment? That you didn’t tell me about? That you bought? Without telling me?’

‘I’m feeling like maybe you’re not as excited as I had hoped you would be.’ He advanced on me slowly, hands held out, either to hug me or hold me off, I wasn’t sure. ‘It was supposed to be romantic. It’s an amazing apartment, babe, let me show you around.’

It was too much. Before he could take another step, I sank to the floor, crossed my legs and rested my head in my palms, hiding behind my hair. Alex had bought an apartment. In Park Slope. Without asking me, without telling me, without even hinting that he was thinking about moving. Usually, I couldn’t get him to order from a new pizza place without having to bribe him with sexual favours. I couldn’t even begin to understand what had possessed him to do this.

‘Don’t freak out, OK?’

I heard my husband outside the safety of my hair but I couldn’t quite look up, not just yet.

‘I was talking to this guy down at the recording studio and he told me he was selling and I came by to take a look and all I could think was how perfect the place is, how much you would love it,’ he explained. ‘Listen, Angela, there’s an office for you, there’s even a soundproofed room downstairs in the basement that I could turn into a studio. The guy used it for practice but it would be perfect for recording. And there are two bedrooms so we could have a place for guests or, you know, maybe a nursery.’

Oh, no.

After a series of deep, calming breaths I remembered from the single yoga class I’d taken three years ago, I parted my hair and peered out at the man I had married. Alex was squatting in front of me, an earnest look on his face that was somewhere between ‘what’s wrong with you?’ and ‘I know I’ve fucked up.’

‘Alex, you bought an apartment without telling me,’ I croaked. ‘What happened to us telling each other everything?’

‘It was supposed to be a surprise.’ he offered with a double thumbs up.

‘A surprise is a Kinder Egg,’ I replied, reminding myself to focus on the matter at hand and not on whether I wanted a Kinder Egg. Which of course I did, I wasn’t made of stone. ‘This is a house.’

Alex bit his lip and reached out to take my hand. ‘Can I show you around?’

Dizzy, I pushed myself up off the floor, ignoring his outstretched hand, and dusted off the back of my shorts. With a sigh, I rolled my eyes at his sad puppy face and allowed him to lead me around the seemingly endless apartment. He was right – it was beautiful, it was perfect, it had everything. Where our current apartment, our home, was brand new and sparkling, this place had character. It was all original features and sympathetic remodelling. The rooms were plain and empty but they were also big and airy and full of light. The bathroom had a roll-top bath – my interior design kryptonite. I was powerless against it. And then there was the garden. Actual grass in an actual outdoor space that was bigger than the average paddling pool. Slowly, I started to see how our lives could fill the space. My desk in the office alongside a big, squishy armchair for reading-slash-online shopping, our bed in the bedroom by the enormous sash window, Alex’s instruments lining the room of his new studio …

Once I’d got over myself, I could see exactly what he could see – this place was made for us. Maybe not the people we were when we met but the people we were now. I couldn’t imagine scared, fresh-off-the-plane Angela rolling up to a leafy Park Slope address with her Marks and Sparks weekend bag, a spare pair of pants and a crumpled bridesmaid dress, but this Angela? Even in my denim shorts and specially-shipped-from-Marks-and-Sparks black tights, I could see it. If I squinted. I was absolutely the sort of woman who lived in a place like this and went out to buy her husband freshly baked bagels on a Saturday morning. Or at least the kind of woman who thought about it, fell asleep again and ended up eating Corn Flakes and illegally streaming Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway.

‘Well?’ Alex hadn’t spoken in an age. He looked genuinely worried. ‘What do you think?’

‘Can we afford it?’ I asked. I was my mother’s daughter after all.

‘You can’t,’ he replied, gazing at the fireplace as lovingly as I had ever seen him look at me. ‘Seriously, you make no money for the hours you work, it’s crazy. But, you know, I’ve been saving for this for years and with the advance for the new album …’ He stopped getting it on with the apartment fixtures momentarily and looked back at me. ‘We’ll be flat-ass broke for a while until we let the other place but yeah, we can afford it.’

And that was when I realised. He must have been planning this for ages. While I’d been all late nights at the office and dragging myself through Monday to Friday so I could sleep through the weekend, Alex had been quietly working away and plotting our future. The sneaky, wonderful git.

‘What do you think?’ he asked in a soft voice I loved.

‘I think it’s amazing,’ I said, mentally punching myself in the ovaries for not being appropriately grateful for what a wonderful man I had. ‘I can’t quite believe it but it’s amazing. You’re amazing. Thank you.’

Alex smiled down at me then cupped his hands around my face and kissed me for what felt like a very long time.

‘Just don’t ever, ever do this again,’ I said, actually punching him in the belly. ‘Because I will fucking kill you.’

‘Duly noted,’ he laughed, rubbing his stomach and pushing me away. ‘Not that I can imagine we’ll need to move for a very long time. This is going to be a great place to raise a family.’

I pulled him back to me, pressed my head into his chest, ignoring both his family comment and the fleeting concern as to whether or not I was still getting an actual Christmas present.

‘Eurgh,’ I mumbled into his sweatshirt. ‘I hate moving.’

‘Oh, yeah …’ Alex’s voice wavered slightly. ‘I figured the sooner the better so I kind of started arranging that already.’

Here we go. I held my breath and counted to ten.

‘That’s awesome,’ I said, as positive as possible. ‘So after Christmas, yeah?’

‘Next week.’ I felt him tense up but there was no fun in punching him when he was expecting it. ‘A week from today.’

‘You want us to move house, across Brooklyn, in seven days?’ I shrieked, composure forgotten. So this was what hysteria felt like. ‘Four days before Christmas?’

‘I’ll do everything,’ he replied as quickly as was humanly possible. ‘I’ll hire the movers, I’ll get the new stuff we need, I’ll make sure it’s perfect. I just thought it would be nice to do Christmas in our new home, you know? And you’re taking the week off so you’ll be around to make sure I don’t fuck up.’

‘And we have plans for that week,’ I said. ‘It was supposed to be relaxing.’

‘Really?’ He raised an eyebrow and looked away. ‘Fighting my way around an ice rink in Central Park isn’t really my idea of relaxing.’

‘Well, it was supposed to be fun,’ I clarified. I turned to take a wistful look at the roll-top bath. Roll-top baths made everything better. ‘And I just wanted us to spend some time together.’

‘It’ll all be fine,’ he said with false certainty. ‘You can still go off and do all your holiday stuff while I organise the move.’

I stared up at him, trying not to look disappointed. Disappointment had a terrible tendency to be misread as ungratefulness and that wasn’t what I was feeling. The whole point of taking this week off, the whole reason I was more excited about this Christmas, even more so than any other, was because I was finally going to be able to spend some time with him. And while it was true, moving house did mean spending time together, I had a funny feeling it wouldn’t be quite so romantic as holding hands beneath the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree.

‘We’ll figure it out, I suppose,’ I said with sagging shoulders. ‘I don’t know what else to say.’

‘Whatever it is, can you say it outside?’ Alex rubbed the back of his neck and pulled the keys out of his pocket. ‘I just remembered we left Karen out there and she’s probably frozen to death by now.’

On the doorstep, Karen was talking on her phone, shivering against the winter wind that had sprung up while we were inside. Well, at least the frozen face thing made sense now – Karen was an estate agent, she could afford Botox and she faked smiles for a living. I stared back over my shoulder as Alex locked the door. A new house was definitely better than cooking lessons. Or a three-way.

After saying our goodbyes, Alex wrapped a leather-clad arm around my shoulder and began chattering away about home improvements as we hunted for a place to get brunch in our new neighbourhood. As we walked, I tried to ignore the overwhelming feeling of panic that was growing in my stomach. My poor, tiny brain was too confused to process what was going on and so the rest of my body was having to pick up the emotional slack. I knew everything that was happening was incredible. Alex had bought us an actual, honest to Santa, real family home, I had been handed an amazing opportunity at work and I was about ten minutes away from eating several thousand pancakes, but I couldn’t fight the feeling of being completely swallowed up. Somewhere along the line I’d gone from having nothing better to do than take a week off to watch chestnuts roasting on an open fire to taking over the magazine and moving house in a week. Had everyone forgotten who they were dealing with or had I?

CHAPTER FIVE

I didn’t know anyone who jumped up and down and cheered for Monday mornings but since I’d started at Gloss I’d taken Monday dread to a whole new level. Before, it meant replying to all the emails I’d ignored on Friday, a bit of a telly hangover from Mad Men, Game of Thrones or True Blood, depending on the time of year. Now Monday meant press day, which meant checking, rechecking and re-rechecking every word on every page of the magazine. Gloss might only have been a teeny, tiny weekly but there were still a good deal of stern looks, raised voices and little cries in the toilets. Mostly Mary took care of the stern looks and raised voices while I, admittedly, was the one having a little cry but now, since she was off on the Love Boat, I had the pleasure of being in charge of the whole shebang. There had been a time when I thought working on a proper magazine at a proper publishing company would be all glamorous like The Devil Wears Prada but in reality it was turning out to be very stressful and a lot of hard work. Like in The Devil Wears Prada. And so far Stanley Tucci had yet to appear to cover me in free Chanel, although I was still hopeful. Hopeful or stupid. I needed a fairy godfather to keep me in designer goods and empowering speeches.

For the want of an avuncular gay mentor, I let Delia drag me out for lunch. Even though I really wasn’t supposed to be out of the office on press day, I really needed to update her on Cici’s nervous breakdown. It was only fair.

‘I can’t believe how long it’s been since we went out for lunch.’ Delia speared a piece of lettuce and munched away happily, as though it was real food. ‘Hasn’t it been ages?’

I nodded in agreement, and shovelled a mouthful on quinoa down my throat, wishing I hadn’t ordered quinoa. One day I would learn not to order something just because I’d seen Jamie Oliver going on about it. It was horrible. We’d settled on The Breslin for our powwow which was always a bit more trendy than I wanted it to be. It was the kind of place that said ‘totally come in jeans!’ but then when you came in jeans it raised an eyebrow as if to say ‘oh, you came in jeans.’ But it was far enough away that there wouldn’t be anyone else from the magazine there, yet close enough that I could escape without being missed. Plus, the food was delicious. As long as you didn’t have the quinoa.

‘I’m so glad you were able to sneak away,’ Delia said as the waiter refilled our water glasses with impressive stealth. ‘It’s like we never have time for each other anymore. Hanging out with you was the best thing about Gloss, it really was, not that I’m not really excited about the new role. I’m really excited. But I’ll miss you.’

‘Yeah, I didn’t think I’d see you before the Christmas party,’ I said, eyeing the bar for celebs. There was a man who looked a bit like Michael Fassbender three tables over but when he stood up he was so short that if it was Michael Fassbender, I didn’t want to know. Why kill the dream?

‘Holiday party,’ Delia corrected me. ‘Non-religious.’

I pouted but said nothing, persevering with my grains.

‘But I’ll be there. I’m glad you’re coming. I never know anyone I actually want to hang out with and I have to go because Grandpa would go crazy if he heard I didn’t go, even though he never goes, but still he expects me to go which is complete double standards, you know?’

If my food hadn’t been so bloody awful, I might not have noticed that Delia was rambling. I stopped chewing for a moment and tried not to freak out. Delia was nervous. Delia was never nervous. What was going on?

‘The exec floor is really dull,’ she carried on, sipping water quickly and then punching her fork into yet more lettuce. ‘I don’t think they’re even doing secret Santa. Isn’t that awful? Grandpa says I’ll get used to it but I don’t know … Maybe it is too soon, maybe I don’t have the experience. I suppose we’ll see. How’s your appetiser?’

‘It’s horrible,’ I said, with fear in my heart. Whatever was going on, I really wanted to know before my main course arrived because if I was getting fired, I was changing my order to the burger and getting a cocktail while I still had a company credit card. ‘Delia, what’s wrong?’

‘Why would anything be wrong?’ she asked in a voice so high pitched it hurt my ears. ‘I’m just a little stressed. That’s all it is.’

Now I knew she was lying. Delia Spencer had never been stressed in her entire life. She was so in control, I had wondered more than once if she wasn’t actually some sort of media magnate cyborg, created by her grandfather to take over the family business. The only evidence to the contrary was her sister. Oh. Fuckity fuck. Of course, her sister.

‘Delia,’ I put down my fork. If she was going to say what I thought she was going to say, I was in for enough punishment, I didn’t need to suffer through another mouthful of superfood. ‘Is this about Cici coming in yesterday?’

She pursed her lips, looked down into her lap and nodded.

‘You mean your new assistant, Cici?’ she asked with unwarranted optimism.

‘You can’t mean it?’ I asked. She couldn’t. I hadn’t had a memo about everyone in the world going completely insane so this must just be a very, very late April Fool’s joke.

For a moment, there was an awkward silence at the table that had never existed between me and Delia before. I waited for her to laugh and tell me she was taking the piss and of course she didn’t genuinely expect me to have her clinically insane identical twin working on our magazine, on our baby, that we had fought so hard for, but she didn’t. She just sat there, pushing some sad little leaves around her plate and waiting for me to say something else. But I didn’t. I couldn’t.

‘I know everything you’re thinking,’ she said after realising that I wasn’t going to speak. ‘And you’re completely within your rights. I know it seems crazy to even think about having Cici around after, well, after everything.’

‘Can I get you ladies anything?’ An overly chirpy waitress in a shirt and tie appeared behind Delia.

‘Do you have anything that’s like a cosmo?’ I asked, unable to take my eyes off Delia. ‘Doesn’t have to be a cosmo but is definitely as strong as a cosmo?’

‘Uh, sure,’ she replied, with almost as much fear in her eyes as there was in mine. ‘Anything for you?’

‘Whatever you get for her,’ Delia muttered, throwing back her water in preparation for something harder hitting her stomach.

‘Two cosmos then,’ the waitress replied, backing away as fast as she could. Sharp instincts. She’d go far.

I took a deep breath, trying to calm down, but my heart was racing and I had a really bitter taste in my mouth. It could have been the quinoa but I was fairly certain it was just straight-up bile.

‘It’s going to sound dumb,’ Delia said, resting her elbows on the table and wiping her hands over her face, ‘but she really has changed.’

‘Because she spent a month at a spa in India and got a dodgy hair wrap?’

‘Maybe,’ she said, pulling on her ponytail. ‘And maybe because Grandpa threatened to cut her off if she doesn’t get another job.’

‘So make her your assistant if you want her around so badly.’ I was trying, but failing, not to squeak when I spoke. ‘She’ll be putting anthrax in my cappuccino within a week.’

‘Don’t you breathe in anthrax?’ she asked, reaching for her phone to Google it.

‘That’s not the point,’ I yelled, slapping the phone out of her hand. ‘There’s no other job in the entire company, the entire Spencer Media empire, that you can shove her in? I don’t believe it for a second.’

‘Of course there is,’ Delia replied. ‘But she wants to work at Gloss. We sat down and talked and I genuinely, genuinely think she’s changed. And for what it’s worth, I think she feels guilty about all the stuff she did to you, and to us. I’ll keep an eye on her, I’ll make sure she’s not up to anything, you have my word.’

‘You can’t babysit your psycho sister while you’re running a publishing company,’ I sighed as it dawned on me that I wasn’t getting a say in this. The deal was as good as done. ‘I just can’t believe you’re doing this to the magazine.’

‘There are two ways to look at it.’ Delia’s cheeks were red from embarrassment. I hated that she felt so uncomfortable, hated putting her in a position where she was torn between work, friendship and family. Unfortunately, I hated her sister more so she was just going to have to get used to it. ‘There is a chance that I’m right, that she isn’t lying and has finally woken up to what a total bitch she used to be. In which case, she’s really smart and she’s going to be an asset to the company. She’s a good assistant, she’s super smart, she kicks ass and she looks after her own.’

‘Because she’s always been so wonderful to you,’ I said, arms folded, bottom lip out, the full grumpy chops.

‘I was never her own,’ she admitted. ‘But she’s loyal to her friends and you have first-hand experience of how far she’ll go when she’s committed to achieving something. Maybe we’ll be able to use her power for good?’

‘Maybe,’ I nodded. ‘Can I just use your phone to check if Hell has frozen over?’

‘The other way to look at it is this,’ Delia said, ignoring me. Probably rightly so. ‘My grandpa is eventually going to cave and give her a job. Would you rather it’s the job she says she wants, in a place where you can keep an eye on her and have the whole staff keep her in check? Or would you rather she was somewhere else in the business, pissed off that you – in her eyes – have screwed her over again and dedicating every moment that she could be answering your phone to destroying your career?’

Well, when she put it like that …

‘You’re going to make me hire Cici as my assistant,’ I said, hardly believing the words as they came out of my mouth.

‘I’m not going to make you do anything,’ Delia replied. ‘Because I’m not an asshole. But it’s genuinely the best idea I have come up with. I’ve been over it a thousand different ways and I can’t think of a better solution. I know you don’t trust her and I don’t expect you to. It’s hard enough for me to give her another chance but really, I do believe she’s different.’

‘I know, she’s been to India and has forgotten to get her nails done.’ So this was how it felt to be backed into a corner. ‘She’s an entirely different person.’

‘She’s been volunteering,’ Delia lowered her voice as though she were telling me a terrible secret. ‘At the park. With old people. She hates old people. Honestly, it’s freaking me out. That’s one of the reasons I want her somewhere I can keep an eye on her. At first I thought she might have hit her head or something but it seems to be sticking.’

‘So it’s not just that she’s got an inexplicable vindictive streak just for me,’ I asked, making sure I had my mad ducks in a row. ‘You now think she’s actually psycho?’

Delia looked pained. But not pained enough to throw herself on the floor and beg my forgiveness. Why hadn’t I just hired Tessa or Blair or Serena van der Woodsen when I had the chance?

‘If I do this,’ I said, thankful for the massive pink cocktail that was set down in front of me as I raised my hand and started counting off conditions on my fingers, ‘and I do mean if, there’s a trial period, she actually has to come into the office every day and do work, she’s not allowed to spit in, on or around me, or anything I might consume.’

‘I mean, it sounds reasonable,’ Delia nodded. ‘She really does have the potential to be so good. She worked for Mary for an age and you know how tough she can be.’

I did know how tough Mary could be. I also knew she had never arranged to have an entire suitcase of borrowed and slavishly saved up for designer clothes – not to mention one very special pair of Louboutins – blown up by French airport security for shits and giggles.

‘And you know, she didn’t suggest this, I did, so it’s not part of a plan.’ She took a tiny sip of her cocktail, politely ignoring the fact I had already almost finished mine. ‘I promise.’

‘Which is just what she would say if it was part of a plan,’ I replied.

‘But you’ll give her a shot?’ Delia asked, her eyes sparkling ever so slightly. From hope or booze, I wasn’t sure.

‘I suppose I’d better get used to the taste of laxatives in my tea,’ I nodded, resigned, reluctant and terrified. ‘Might help me lose a couple of Christmas pounds.’

‘Hey Angela.’

I wouldn’t normally be so surprised to hear a man’s voice shouting my name but since I was hiding in the ladies’, trying to find the strength to put on a brave face after lunch with Delia, it was a bit of a shock.

‘Yes?’

‘Angela, you in there?’

‘I’ll be out in a second,’ I shouted back, stashing the second finger of a Twix back in its wrapper and down into the deepest, darkest depths of my handbag. Eating chocolate in the toilets really was a new low but then so was hiring Cici to be my assistant. ‘Give me a minute.’

‘Great, I’ll put the beauty pages on your desk.’

Another fun fact I had just found out about press day – I couldn’t even go to the toilets without Jesse, our managing editor, hunting me down like a dog. God help me if he found out I’d actually left the premises for lunch, let alone had a drink.

Most of the time I liked Jesse. He was the same age as me, lived in Williamsburg and knew all the words to Taylor Swift’s latest album, even though he played guitar in an indie band and looked like a super hipster. And because he worked on a women’s fashion magazine, he knew an awful lot more about nail varnish than your average bloke. If he’d been gay, he’d have been my gay best friend. Since he was sadly straight, he’d had to settle for the role of my work husband, meaning that it was his responsibility to bring me snacks whenever he left the office and make sure I was never without the latest Game of Thrones-inspired meme. Aside from his general, personal qualifications, it was hard to find a good managing editor and I was delighted when Mary had managed to lure him away from the low-paying but high-credibility music paper he’d been working on to come to Gloss. You really had to have a mental imbalance to love being a managing ed, all that time spent checking and correcting and making sure no one had snuck any dirty acrostic poems into the feature articles or teeny tiny penises into celebrity fashion spreads. Not that anyone in our team would do that. Except for maybe me. And Jesse genuinely loved it.

Back at my desk, surrounded by every Christmas card the office had received, some delightful fluffy reindeers I’d picked up at Target and several Alexander Skarsgård posters, I stared down at the beauty pages, willing myself to read every single word, to see each syllable and to start caring about what eyeliner Selena Gomez was wearing this week. It wasn’t Selena’s fault. Usually I’d be thrilled to know that she mostly used MAC but that I could achieve the same effect with Maybelline (even though I knew you couldn’t really) but I had a lot on my mind. Jenny and her baby banter seemed like something that had happened a million years ago and the new house in all its leafy Park Slope glory would be something I worried about when we actually had to move. In four days. Right now, I had enough on my plate. I had to work out how to work with Cici without either killing her or inciting her to kill me. Maybe if I sent back all my Christmas presents and just asked for one little miracle instead …

My office phone, appropriately wrapped in silver tinsel, rang quietly, as if afraid to interrupt my review of Jennifer Aniston’s best and worst hair days.

‘Hello?’

I hated not being able to see who was calling, I thought as I answered. There was something so threatening about answering the phone not knowing who it was. Of course, I could have just peeled the Twilight stickers off my phone so I could see the screen but that would have been too easy.

‘Angela, it’s your mother.’

Aah. Because so far, today had been far too easy.

‘Hello, Mum.’ I closed my eyes and pinched the bridge of my nose, hoping it would calm me. It didn’t. I had no idea why people did that. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Everything’s fine,’ she replied in a voice that implied that was, in fact, not the case. ‘I was just wondering if you’d heard from Louisa this week?’

‘No,’ I said, sitting up straight. ‘I’ve been trying to call her but she’s busy. Why? What’s wrong? Is she OK?’

‘Oh, I’m sure she’s fine,’ Mum said. ‘Not that I’d know, she never comes round with that baby.’

‘Well, she’s probably busy taking it to see her mother and not mine,’ I replied. ‘Or doing, you know, stuff.’

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