Epilogue
Olivia Greenwood is looking at the sky. It’s been threatening to rain all day, the weather on this late-autumn afternoon in Manchester typically northern, and Olivia thinks it would be a shame if the clouds were to open on to the twenty-two young men running around the pitch in front of them.
Not that Olivia has to worry, sheltered in the comfort of the directors’ box at the Etihad stadium.
She’s just finished a two-course champagne lunch, and later, at half-time, there will be dessert.
Saskia can’t believe the heated seats, the royal-blue blankets that they have been given to put over their legs should the temperature feel too cool.
Jack is still banging on about the butter, embossed with the emblem of Manchester City, while Nick is merely impressed by the fact that Noel Gallagher is sitting two rows behind them, not in front.
Tina doesn’t much care for football, but she supposes that if she has to go to a game, it might as well be here in a directors’ box, where she has every chance of meeting a handsome young man.
It’s just a shame that, currently, the man sitting next to her is her ex-husband, who is neither handsome nor young.
She comforts herself with the fact that he is at least sober.
Olivia negotiated a six-figure pay-off from The Morning.
She says ‘negotiated’; it was offered willingly to her by the paper’s mortified HR executives, keen to do whatever she wanted in order to make the whole thing go away.
Olivia was almost disappointed by the speed at which they capitulated to her demands and met her needs.
She had hoped for a bit of a fight, another chance to show them her grit.
But Clare, her lawyer, had been realistic about what taking them to court would entail, and Olivia couldn’t face having any more of her precious time and energy wasted.
She’d done what she needed to: found her voice, helped other women find theirs, and then held Stephen to account.
Nina has left The Morning too, moving to edit a glossy magazine with offices on Bond Street.
Deepti has been made a permanent research assistant on the news desk, and even got a byline recently.
The last Olivia heard, Stephen was the subject of a widespread internal investigation at The Morning, sacked and unemployable, and his wife had walked out and taken what was left of his assets in the process.
Olivia looks out over the stadium and thinks life is good.
She still stays in touch with Rose. They meet for coffee from time to time, and the younger woman updates Olivia on the ins and outs of the newspaper industry, all the big projects they are working on at Stop the Press.
Olivia is barely interested in journalism any more, planning to spend the next year footloose and fancy-free, focusing on her family and herself.
She’s signed up to a local choir, having begged for a place when she discovered they were currently working on a medley of Celine Dion’s greatest hits.
She just needs a bit of time to work out what it is she wants to do with her life, as opposed to what she thinks she should do.
The package Clare secured for her has made that possible, and she and Nick can just about make ends meet for a while.
She looks over at him, and he’s already looking at her, beaming.
Erling Haaland is running down the centre of the pitch below her, the ball at his mercy, the defenders from Manchester United powerless in his wake. He skips by them and boots the ball past the goalkeeper’s head and into the back of the net.
As everyone around her jumps for joy, Olivia looks up at the blue sky, at the white wisps scudding across the face of the sun, and her vision.
She feels a warmth rise inside her. She lets the clouds be.