Chapter 3
“Chloe, how many times need I remind you?” Mr. McKenzie said, looming over her desk and waving a yellow script at her. “These brass fasteners are only to be used on scripts going to clients. Anything else gets a hole punch and string.”
“Sorry,” Chloe said, switching to mouth-breathing to avoid the dense cloud of her boss’s body odor.
On Chloe’s first day at McKenzie and Sons, she had learned that the “sons” in the company name were fictitious.
Stuart McKenzie had no sons, only a daughter, Lydia.
But he thought “and sons” better conveyed “wholesome family values.” To Chloe it conveyed he was an idiot.
And yet, even though she had concluded this on her very first day, two years later, she was still, inexplicably, working there.
“And why is your desk covered in foliage?” McKenzie asked, jabbing a stubby finger at the two plants on her desk.
Chloe kept her eyes fixed on the lower part of his face.
If she looked at his hairline—the angry red mess of his not-quite-healed transplant—she would only wince, and her boss hated it when people winced.
“Plants are proven to reduce stress and boost productivity,” she said brightly. “I could get you one, if you’d like?”
McKenzie scowled, his monobrow knotting into a V. “And why do they have…googly eyes?”
“They’re my desk buddies.” She pointed. “That one’s Keanu Leaves, and this one is Morgan Treeman.
” McKenzie’s scowl deepened, which probably wasn’t good for his infected hairline.
“No?” she said, plucking the googly eyes off one by one.
As he turned to walk away, she saw her chance.
“While I have you here, Mr. McKenzie, do you remember we talked about me getting some experience on set?”
“Chloe.” He stopped, then pivoted back with a dramatic weariness. “Have you seen my inbox? Have you seen the state of the stationery cupboard? You are my personal assistant. In what world do you think you would be assisting me by not being here?”
“Right, I know, it’s just when I took this job, it was with a view to—”
McKenzie’s phone rang. He held up a finger to silence her, then stalked back toward his office, shoulders hunched around his ears. Chloe returned to her plants and carefully reapplied their googly eyes.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she told Keanu.
“I did try.” Then she sniffed and got a whiff of chip fat.
Lifting an arm to smell her blouse, she realized it was coming from her.
The office sat on the third floor of a narrow brick building in Southwark, Central London.
On the ground floor was a chip shop, and on certain days, the smell of triple-cooked fries seeped through the building’s ventilation system.
It wasn’t an unpleasant smell, but it was not exactly what you’d choose for your eau de toilette.
She glanced at her screen. Twelve thirty.
Early lunch territory. She could nip out and get a sandwich, maybe even splash out on a proper coffee.
But if she had lunch now, she would have nothing to look forward to.
As she was mulling this bleak sentiment, her phone buzzed.
Akiko. McKenzie disliked her taking personal calls at her desk, so she scurried over to the stationery cupboard.
The light was broken, but she didn’t mind, the darkness a sweet reprieve from the unrelenting glare of strip lighting in the open-plan office.
“Have you seen the reunion email?” Akiko asked before Chloe could even say hello.
“No,” she said, pulling the cupboard door mostly shut behind her. “Hang on.”
She opened her personal email, scrolling through her junk folder.
There it was, an email from Oxford entitled Ten Year Reunion.
She scanned the text: Lincoln College cordially invites you to a reunion weekend…
Welcome to bring a guest…We look forward to celebrating this significant milestone with you.
“Are you going to go?” Akiko asked, her voice animated.
“I think I would rather stab paper clips into my thigh,” Chloe said, picking up a paper clip from the shelf beside her.
“Oh come on,” Akiko said. “Aren’t you curious what everyone’s up to?”
“Yes, I am curious, and that curiosity has been satiated by social media,” Chloe said, hearing the faint wail of baby Elodie in the background.
“You know that’s not real. Plus, loads of our college crowd aren’t even on social media.” Akiko’s voice shifted to her Calming Mum voice as she said, “Shh, Elodie, Mummy’s talking to her friend.”
“Well, I know the headlines—who got married, who got rich, who got arrested.”
“Oooh, who got arrested?” Akiko dropped her voice to a gleeful whisper.
“Larry Fellas. Tax evasion. He lives in Monaco now.” Chloe shook her head.
Was it normal to know this much about the lives of people you hadn’t seen in over a decade?
Why did she know what color Lorna Childs’s new kitchen was and how many bridesmaids Harriet Townsend had had at her wedding, when she had no desire to see either of these people in real life?
“Maybe Sean will be there,” Akiko said. “I know John will. He’s on the alumni committee. Oh, I would love to see everyone again.”
“Sean’s not going to go. He’s a big-shot film director. He’s not flying back from LA for a college reunion,” Chloe said, feeling a prickle of longing at the mention of his name.
“Ugh, Elodie!” Akiko said, groaning. “Chlo, can you give me two secs? Nappy situation.”
This is what phone calls with Akiko were like now—stolen moments amidst the relentless rhythm of motherhood.
Chloe waited, leaning against the cupboard wall and rereading the email.
Would she want to go if her contemporaries hadn’t all turned out to be such ridiculously high achievers?
Or if her own life weren’t such a catalog of disappointments?
A distant wail from Elodie bled through the line.
Chloe picked up a stapler from the shelf and idly opened and closed it like a mouth.
“To go or not to go,” she whispered, “that is the question.”
The line cracked, then Akiko’s voice returned. “Okay, I’m back. Sorry.”
“So, are you thinking of going?” Chloe asked.
“I can’t leave Elodie yet, it’s too far from Edinburgh,” Akiko said. “Which is why you need to go and get all the gossip.”
“If you’re not going, and Emma is in Canada, there is no way I’m rocking up there friendless and alone, and being all, ‘Hey, look at me and my sad-sack life.’ ”
“You don’t have a sad-sack life,” Akiko said, her voice softening.
“In the yearbook, they voted me most likely to succeed and most likely to be famous. I am currently single, living at home with my parents, and I have the crappiest job imaginable.”
“Being famous isn’t a reasonable marker of success. You have high standards when it comes to men, and you’re only doing the PA thing as a stepping stone until the writing takes off. And, Chloe, you are an amazing writer.”
“Who hasn’t written anything in three years.”
“You’re biding your time because you have creative integrity.” Chloe smiled faintly at the praise, but her chest felt tight. “I wish you’d come visit us,” Akiko went on, “especially if you’re feeling so down on yourself. You haven’t even met your goddaughter yet. She’s growing so fast—”
“I’m not down on myself, I just…sometimes I miss what we were back then, when everything felt so full of possibility.”
“Everything still is! We’re thirty-one, not seventy-one,” Akiko said, sternly now. “This is not the Chloe I know.”
Chloe closed her eyes, feeling an unwelcome surge of emotion.
She knew Kiko was only trying to help, but she could never truly understand.
Kiko loved her job managing three festival theaters, sat on numerous panels about women in the arts, had married her soulmate at twenty-eight, and now had a beautiful baby to boot.
“I know, I need to come visit. I will, I promise, I’ll find a weekend.”
“You’d better,” Akiko said, then groaned impatiently as Elodie shrieked again.
“Look, you don’t think I miss being young and carefree, running around Oxford snogging boys, pretending we’re living in a John Betjeman poem?
Of course I do, but none of us get to be students forever.
And if you soak too long in nostalgia, you’ll drown in it. ”
Chloe bit her lip, duly chastised.
“The invite does say I get a plus-one,” she said, switching gears. “Maybe I could take my dad to hype me up—‘My daughter might not have hit her career goals, but she does an excellent job refilling the bird feeder.’ ”
“That’s it!” Akiko cried.
“Akiko, I’m not taking my dad.”
“Not your dad, you should take a date. Nothing says ‘I’ve made it in life’ like walking in there with a hot guy on your arm.”
Chloe’s mind jumped to Wendy, to the high-end dating agency. If she was going to find a decent date anywhere, it would be there. But would having a plus-one really make her more inclined to go?
“Chloe?” A deep voice bellowed from outside the door. “Are you hiding in the stationery cupboard again?”
Shit.
“Gotta go,” Chloe whispered, hanging up.
The door creaked open and McKenzie stood in the doorway, eyes narrowed in disapproval.
“Just looking for a stapler,” she said, holding the stapler aloft like a trophy. “Light’s broken.”
“Have you chased Eddie Redmayne’s agent about the Aardvark script?” he asked.
“I chased first thing,” she told him. “I’ve chased every day this week.”
“Well, make sure you chase again before the end of the day,” he said, then cleared his throat. “And when you get a minute, could you pop out and get me a sticky bun? There’s a good girl.”
Chloe gave him a tight smile. She wanted to tell him that she thought there was more chance of her getting Oscar-winner Eddie Redmayne to marry her than there was of getting him signed up to star in a limited series about a vigilante aardvark who tackled knife crime in Scotland.
Aardvarks weren’t even indigenous to the UK.
It made absolutely no sense. She also wanted to say that no, she did not have time to “pop out and get him a sticky bun,” because she’d already popped out twice today to fetch him baked snacks, and she had a huge list of jobs to do before she could leave tonight, and that it was no longer appropriate to call a female colleague “a good girl.” But she didn’t say any of this.
She just said, “Yes, Mr. McKenzie. Of course.”
On her walk to the bakery, Chloe felt the tingling hum of an existential crisis coming on.
If she was too ashamed of her life to face her old university friends, what did that tell her?
It told her she needed to change something.
Maybe she should go backpacking. Maybe she should sign up for a marathon.
Should she get a pixie cut? No, no, a haircut wasn’t going to be enough this time.
She reached into her bag for the card. If Wendy was anything to go by, then Perfect Partners had to be worth a try.
She dialed the number, and a woman answered. She spoke in a crisp, clipped accent and immediately asked for a referral code. Chloe gave Wendy’s name, hoping that would be enough.
“Thank you,” the woman said without inflection. “You are eligible for a consultation. We have an opening next week. If you give me your email address, I will send over an application form.”
“But what is it?” Chloe asked. “And how much does it cost? I was just calling to find out—”
“Please complete the questionnaire and psychometric profile in full before you come to the appointment. I’m afraid I can’t give you any more information until then.”
Chloe gave the woman her email address, and the line promptly went dead.
While she might have been mildly curious before, now Chloe was intrigued.
This air of secrecy around Perfect Partners, the lack of information online, it all felt delightfully mysterious.
And given that the current highlight of her day was hiding in a dark stationery cupboard, maybe this was exactly what she needed in her life: a little mystery.