Chapter 2
2
My whole body aches as I drag myself and an oversize duffel bag of Fate merchandise up the creaky stairs of the old town house to my flat, as quietly as I can, trying to avoid summoning Bertie, the anecdote-prone elderly man who lives downstairs. Usually, I’d quite happily sit on our steps and listen to his often thirty-minute-long stories about when he ran around the city with a group of punk activists, but tonight I need to hold on to the little brainpower I have remaining to create the expenses spreadsheet Susie emailed me about five minutes before I arrived at the panel talk. My eyes can barely stay open in the blue glow of my phone screen.
She wants me to sort through over forty images of receipts into a comprehensive spreadsheet by tomorrow. Of course, she couldn’t have told me the finance team needed it any earlier than the night before the deadline.
Finally up the three flights of stairs, I throw the bag and my jacket to the ground and immediately flop onto the pink squishy sofa we found on Facebook Marketplace, its miscellaneous stains strategically covered by a yellow cable-knit throw and baby-blue-striped cushions. I start looking through the images Susie has sent, and my heart sinks. There is a blurry receipt for a plethora of espresso martinis at a Soho members’ club (I guess I’ll mark that under “client meeting”), a month’s worth of lunch receipts and at least fifteen separate receipts from Wilfred’s, the fancy coffee shop that Bancroft also frequents. I stop at an invoice for two tickets to an exclusive European music festival with the words “client gift” scrawled at the top. Furrowing my brow, I zoom in to the price: ￡1,935 for two VIP tickets.
I google the date of the festival and cross reference it against Susie’s calendar: she was away for four days including the two festival days and I find them marked as a vague and unhelpful “business trip.” I make a mental note to ask her about it in the morning.
My flatmate, Yemi, walks in and sits beside me, nudging the bag out of her way with her foot. She is the Director of Analytics at Fate and my idol. The day she told me she loved nothing more than finding a hidden gem thrift shop and buying a wardrobe’s worth of clothes for fifty pounds I suspected that I’d met a friend for life. I confirmed this when, the morning I walked in with pale skin, greasy hair and puffy eyes from a weekend of crying over William, she left the office with me at lunch and helped me pack up my things, insisting I stay on her sofa for as long as I wanted. When her lease was up, we found both our flat and Alice, our other flatmate, on an online listing and lived happily ever after.
“How did it go?” Yemi asks as I curl up into the sofa cushions. I instinctively lean against her and she puts an arm around me.
“The panel?” I say, then shrug. “I stumbled my way through without any major mishaps. It would have been a lot better if it were Susie though.”
I caught Yemi up via text when I couldn’t get the tube home with her as usual; the messages hadn’t reached her until she was already home.
“You should have told me earlier—I would have come and helped.”
I sigh. “It’s OK. We didn’t both need to suffer.”
“Are you doing her expenses now too?”
I’m used to the never-ending last-minute tasks from Susie, but Yemi looks so pained as she strokes my heavy head that Bancroft’s words from earlier echo through my head until they reach my lips.
“I should just tell her I’m not doing bullshit like this for her anymore.”
I have this thought every few weeks, when the feelings of ineptitude and exacerbation spill over the edges of my willpower. I start tapping out an email to Susie. As I’m typing the third long-winded, groveling sentence about being “on the verge of professional burnout,” Yemi bats the phone out of my hand onto the thick patterned rug below us.
“You’re not going to blow up your career because you’re tired. You know the house rule...” She raises an eyebrow at me and points toward the wall at a portrait of a gremlin dressed as a Tudor king we bought from Etsy.
Sinking my face into the sofa, I let the cushions envelop me whole. “Don’t send emails after ten p.m.,” I mumble through layers of cotton, polyester and padding.
It’s a rule we both set so we don’t go absolutely insane or lose our jobs.
Yemi’s head tilts. “I know you think she’s the be-all and end-all of your career, but you need to look for opportunities to get out from under Susie. Don’t do anything rash like sending late-night ultimatum emails for a few more months, and I guarantee you something good will come your way.”
Over the years I’ve pitched ideas for expanding the Fate brand; Susie would feign interest at first, but her interest in long-term projects waned as more quick, flashy projects with a celebrity sponsorship came up. The one concept that’s nearest to my heart is one I’m too scared to pitch again. Ever After—an in-app feature that helps Fate couples retain the magic through online relationship therapy and daily love prompts. I’ve been working on it during any spare time for a while now and, with massive help from Yemi, developed a bare-bones beta version. But the idea of it being shot down again gives me stress hives.
“What if nothing good ever comes my way again though?”
Yemi holds up her hands in a meditative gesture. “Let’s just take all this negative, anxious energy and put it toward something truly loathsome.”
Before I can respond, she jumps up and skips off to her bedroom. Our flat is a hotchpotch of charity-shop lamps, discounted-on-eBay decor and repurposed furniture; I like the feeling of being surrounded by things with past lives. From the worn and frayed rugs found in a house clearance to the piles of second-hand art books used as a side table to the contrasting decorative restaurant plates stuck to cover cracks in the kitchen wall, this flat is totally unique and totally ours. The perfect combination of Yemi’s bold and bright taste, Alice’s Scandi cool-girl vibe and my more traditional tendencies. It’s cramped but I wouldn’t change it for the world.
Yemi reappears, and reveals the latest issue of Societeur Magazine . There’s a party-coverage article featuring a picture of Bancroft with his arm around a stunning woman, a model by the looks of her impossibly sharp cheekbones and perfectly coiffed chestnut bob.
Sexy, social and seriously available, Societeur ’s Bachelor of the Year stays true to his moniker, spotted leaving trendy nightclub Weston’s with three different women in a week! Son of architectural magnate and notorious party boy, Malon Bancroft, it seems the apple doesn’t fall far from the multi-million-pound tree...
“They still do these articles?” I laugh, staring at the devil horns Yemi has already drawn on Bancroft’s head in black Sharpie. “Why do you even have this?”
“The first rule of war: know thy enemy.” She taps the page with a lilac fingernail. “I also thought we could find you a dartboard and make a collage of his face, so you can de-stress after monthly report meetings.”
She shoots me a megawatt smile, which never fails to cheer me up.
“Maybe we can add Susie’s headshot to it too?” I laugh.
Yemi nods in agreement, rubbing my arm in silent support.
Alice pads frantically into the living room, sporting a green clay face mask.
“Babe, can I borrow this dress for my date tomorrow?” She’s spinning around in a sequin dress that stops in the middle of her thighs and fits her perfectly.
I cock my head to the side, taking in the familiar glimmering garment, recalling throwing it into the large trash bag of clothing I took to the Cats Protection League charity shop over a month ago.
“Yes, OK, you threw it out, but”—Alice guiltily picks at her fingers—“when the bags were in the hallway I saw it sticking out and may have rescued it because I absolutely adore it and I saw this girl on Instagram wearing something similar recently and—”
I interrupt her one-breath monologue with a forgiving laugh. “Keep it—it looks amazing on you!”
“Really?” she squeals, running her hands down the sequins. “Thank you so much, babe. My date is very, very cool and I feel like a literal potato standing next to her.”
Yemi and I scoff at the idea that Alice—an absolute goddess; a you’d-be-shocked-that-she-isn’t-Swedish, tanned, tall, blonde bombshell—could ever look like a potato.
I smile at Alice. “You look like a beautiful disco ball and frankly whoever she is, she would be lucky to get within five yards of you, let alone in your pants.”
Yemi slaps my arm. “Robert and I say the same thing to you, all the time, and you never believe us.”
Yemi met her boyfriend, Robert, while working at a coding class that encouraged young women and girls to get into coding and STEM. It was love at first variable. Alice has never been without a date. My eyebrows jump to my forehead in self-defence.
“That’s because, unlike both of you, I am practically undatable. I work ridiculous hours and have absolutely no social life outside of this flat!”
“You work for one of the biggest dating apps in the country, for Christ’s sake. If you can’t find someone, is there any hope for the rest of us?”
Alice has a point.
Catch Group has its fingers in many tech-based pies, including health and fitness apps, content-management systems and online-booking software. I had noticed good-looking guys working on the other floors of the office. Maybe I should start making more of an effort to get to know the people in my building.
Alice gasps. “I have the best idea. Let’s update your Fate profile!”
My stomach sinks but I fake an enthusiastic smile, having learned the hard way with Alice it’s sometimes better to just go along with her spur-of-the-moment ideas.
Refreshing my personal dating experience would probably make me better at my job, but when your date discovers you work for a dating app, one of two questions always arise.
Number One: Can you help me improve my profile?
Translation: The date has not been the explosive “love at first sight” experience Fate promises it will be.
Number Two: Can you see the messages I send other people?
Translation: they are either a creep or have plans to be in the near future.
The only date I’ve been on since William started with both questions and ended with me bursting into tears and leaving before dessert. Not exactly the palate-cleansing, passion-inducing rebound I had imagined.
Alice swipes through my photos, a gallery of a woman I think I should be and scrunches her face at the screen.
“Oh God, they are all awful pictures, right?”
“No, you look beautiful, but...” She trails off and I laugh nervously.
Yemi takes the phone from Alice and peers at the screen. “This kind of reads like a CV, not a dating profile. Aren’t you meant to be good at this kind of thing?”
I furrow my brow and peer toward the screen. I take the phone from her hand and check my profile. Photos of me smiling in a bar, with a group of university friends on a camping trip, and the rest are pictures of me at work events.
“I am! In fact, I pride myself on that skill. When I am doing it for other people,” I exclaim. “It’s like how you can see someone who has a similar body type to you and think they are stunning but then look at yourself and think: I am a blob. I can see other people’s skills, interests and fun facts and package them into something sellable—but I can never do that for myself.”
“‘Grace, twenty-nine, originally from Wiltshire so obviously a nature lover,’” Yemi reads.
Alice snorts. “Babe, you hate being outside! You like staying in with a book, and if you ever go out it’s to a, like, a museum or an art gallery or something boring.”
That point is hard to deny; growing up in the countryside had left me with an intense anti-nostalgia for the great outdoors. Instinctively, I look around the room at all the posters and art prints from those excursions, one of the few things I actually brought to our flat from William’s.
“Kind of ironic for the Marketing Manager of a dating app to have the most misleading profile ever,” adds Yemi. I glare at her despite deep down completely agreeing.
“You just got a calendar invite.” Alice puts the phone in front of my face, the bright screen making me squint.
The meeting invitation is from Catch Group CEO Martin Catcher’s personal assistant. I press the notification and the ominous title of “Meeting” at 9 a.m. tomorrow is revealed with no other context. My eyes move down to the invitation list, and my stomach throbs with anxiety as I read off the names:
Martin Catcher has accepted the meeting.
Susie Jopling has accepted the meeting.
Dharmash Khatri has accepted the meeting.
Before I have time to process what this might mean, another message pops up:
Eric Bancroft has accepted the meeting.
Shit. I press accept a heartbeat later, not wanting to seem too slow compared to him. As Alice continues to prep for her date, Yemi offers to sit and watch the Keira Knightley version of Pride and Prejudice , sensing that I’m in no place to talk about this recent development. It’s one of the few pieces of love-centric media I can still actually enjoy without my evolved cynicism leaking through, but I can’t focus on it; instead, I find myself refreshing my emails every two minutes, hoping for some indication of what this meeting is about. And whether it means I’m getting fired.
Yemi sighs and pauses on a frame of Mr. Darcy’s perfect mutton-chopped face.
“Hey!” I reach my arm out toward the screen. “We were just getting to the hand-flexy part!”
She shoots me a stern look. “Grace, do you think he is freaking out right now?”
“Probably—he’s in love with someone who thinks he’s an arsehole!”
“Not Mr. Darcy, Eric Bancroft!”
I roll my eyes at both the mention of him and the pep talk I know is coming.
“I have no doubt that this is the absolute last thing on Bancroft’s mind right now. He’s probably out having paparazzi-worthy fun.” I pick up the magazine and drop it on the sofa between me and Yemi, not adding that this isn’t the first time I have imagined what Eric Bancroft does with his free time.
“Exactly, so you need to just chill and accept that whatever comes tomorrow, you will get through it.” Yemi looks me dead in the eyes. “You are amazing at your job, they are lucky to have you and I promise you the sky is not falling, OK?”
I think of the panel, the room adorned with pink-hued floral displays with winding green stems, the guests eagerly gathered to hear the three women talk about their contemporary fairy tales. Jessie Fig, a lifestyle influencer and social media star who focuses on body positivity and self-love; Sonia Armington, sex coach and CEO of an ecofriendly sex toy brand; and Dr. Bernadette Reid, a popular relationship therapist and podcast host. All incredibly successful and inspiring. I remember the laugh I got as I introduced myself as “not Susie Jopling” and how quickly that glow faded once I saw Eric Bancroft slip into the room and stand at the back. His presence is usually noted by the occupiers of any room he walks into, but this time, with a room full of women looking for love, his quiet entrance felt as if someone had set off a testosterone bomb. All eyes were on him, but his eyes were fixed on me. They taunted me, his eyebrow raised slightly as if to gloat that he didn’t need crappy jokes on a cue card to command attention.
As Keira Knightley sobs tragically on screen, I wonder how much of the meeting tomorrow I will spend feeling completely inferior.