Chapter One
There was also a very large photo of Tess. She was lounging on her flatmate Saskia’s bed. Saskia owned their flat, so she had the biggest bedroom with much bigger windows, which had let in huge amounts of April sunshine. Quite unforgiving sunshine as it turned out.
Like most millennials, Tess knew how to take a good selfie.
Favouring her left side, phone arm as high as she could get it.
The wide-mouthed silent scream favoured by influencers the world over didn’t work for her.
Made her look very chinny. Instead, she angled her face down with a half smile playing on her lips and smized for all she was worth.
So she was dismayed that when snapped by an alleged professional photographer, she looked remarkably Shrek-like and hump-backed, her eyes squinting against the glare of the sun.
Famously, The Sentinel newsgroup never allowed women to be photographed for its pages wearing trousers or anything that was vaguely in fashion.
Tess had been forced into a fitted red dress and a come-hither expression. It was not her best work.
You might have remembered to suck your tummy in.
And why didn’t you wear those firm support knickers I bought you for your last birthday?
Also, would it have killed you to run a brush through your hair?
Do you even own a hairbrush?
I can’t believe that you wrote about oral sex in a national newspaper either, Tessa. You know I do Pilates with the vicar’s wife. I won’t be able to look Marion in the eye.
Not to mention having a pop at me. I didn’t tell you that you were too picky. I said that if you wanted to find someone, you were going to have to settle.
Sooner rather than later. You’re not getting any younger.
By the time, I was thirty-three, I was married with three children and Daddy and I were well on the property ladder.
And both your brothers, even though they’re younger than you, are in steady relationships.
Though both of them could do a lot better.
Anyway, less moaning about the men you meet and more making do and you’d be married by now.
And those books ARE leatherbound. Nothing faux about them.
I don’t think much of your paper’s fact-checking department, I must say.
Tess wished that when her mother had something to say, which she did frequently, that she’d save it all up for one very long, hectoring message.
But she preferred to split it into multiple telling-offs by text message (not even WhatsApp, which felt more benign) so that every time her phone chimed, Tess could feel her will to live slipping further and further away.
Alas, her mother had nothing on the readership of The Sunday Sentinel, who weren’t backwards in coming forwards in the comments section when Tess went to see how her article was faring online.
It had been shared 547 times. Been thumbs-upped 386 times but thumbs-downed 428 times. And the comments!
Savage.
Brutal.
They made her mum seem like Mother Teresa.
Clearly one of those feminazis who can only attract cucks.
Stop whinging and get back in the kitchen.
A six is generous. I’d give her four.
Verging on the morbidly obese. Should spend more time at the gym actually working out instead of moaning about men who are there to commit to their fitness.
Tess wished she had the willpower to stop reading the comments. In much the same way that she wished she had the willpower to quit after only one glass of Sauvignon Blanc when she was only meant to be having a quick one after work.
Then three hours and two bottles later, she was diving headfirst into a bucket of hot wings.
If only she was better at living a successful life instead of a life that was very much a work in progress.
A stalled work in progress. No wonder Tess had been in a decline ever since the invitation to the university reunion had arrived in her inbox.
That had been two weeks ago and it was still looming large, much like the iceberg that had hit the Titanic.
The reunion was an opportunity to take stock. Except Tess’s stock was very low. She wasn’t where she wanted to be, she wasn’t doing what she wanted to be doing, and she was very definitely not loving and being loved by someone else.
Then again, it was the end of April, and the reunion was at the end of August. A lot could happen in four months. Her entire life might change. Experience had taught Tess that it probably wouldn’t, but it could.
And she could start with one small baby step and stop reading the comments.
Instead, Tess took a picture of her piece in the paper and uploaded it to Instagram.
My latest piece for @TheSundaySentinel! Anyone else desperate for a Darcy? #adventuresindating #wherehaveallthegoodmengone #journosofinstagram
Tess felt a little stab of something that she didn’t want to dwell on as she typed in the last hashtag. She wasn’t a journo. Despite the large piece on pages ten and eleven staring up at her, she wasn’t really a proper writer. She was something adjacent to being a proper writer.
Like every other aspect of her life, Tess’s career had never really got off the starting blocks.
She was thirty-three, as her mother was constantly reminding her.
She’d been at The Sunday Sentinel for eight years.
She’d thought when she’d left The Elstree Observer, her first job after university, for the bright lights of London and the well-appointed Sentinel newsgroup offices on the South Bank, that her time had come.
Tess had not been cut out for local paper life.
Covering long council meetings had been excruciating.
She’d cried every time she had to do a death knock.
She was biding her time before she either got a job on a glossy magazine writing witty, incisive pieces about modern womanhood or became an intrepid, hard-hitting journalist who spoke truth to power.
A staff writer job on The Sunday Sentinel had seemed like the right next step, even though its readership were stuffy suburbanites who got really angry about everything from ‘benefit scroungers’ to veganism.
Tess had been so full of hope when she’d arrived on her first day, but she’d never even made it within sniffing distance of the features desks. She’d been shunted to Creative Solutions for two weeks to cover because they were short-staffed and had never left.
Creative Solutions wasn’t part of the advertising team or the editorial team but some shadowy space in between, and there was nothing creative about it. Tess spent her days writing advertorials, the bastard children of an advert and an article.
The sort of companies who paid for advertorials in The Sunday Sentinel were keen to capture the attention and the money of The Sunday Sentinel’s readership.
Tess knew more about conservatories, cruises and leisure slacks with elasticated waists than any vibrant young woman in her early thirties should know.
There weren’t even any perks. Tess had never got to experience, say, a delightful three-day excursion through the majestic fjords of Norway. Her boss, Claire, called first dibs on any freebies, when she wasn’t micromanaging Tess to within a metric centimetre of her life.
‘Ah, Tess, hard at work or hardly working?’ asked a grating voice from behind her. ‘Your phone’s meant to be locked away during business hours.’
Talk of the devil. In Claire’s case the devil wore Karen Millen rather than Prada.
Tess shoved her phone in her desk drawer. There was nothing in the vast Sentinel company handbook about phones needing to be locked away. It was just one of Claire’s pointless edicts designed solely to make her direct reports’ working lives an endless misery.
‘HR says we’re allowed a ten-minute screen break for every two hours worked,’ Tess countered, daring to look Claire in her muddy-brown eyes.
‘It’s hardly a screen break if you’re on your phone,’ Claire countered back. ‘Why do you have a newspaper making a mess everywhere? You know we have a clean desk policy in this department.’
‘It’s The Sunday Sentinel,’ Tess countered back Claire’s countering back. ‘The newspaper that employs us.’
Claire glanced down at the paper still open on Tess’s article. ‘Don’t be getting ideas, Tess,’ she said coldly. ‘You’ve worked here, what? Ten years?’
‘Eight,’ Tess said with a sigh.
‘This is your first editorial piece in eight years and only because you nagged and nagged poor Sarah until you wore her down.’
Sarah was the features editor, newly arrived and keen to invigorate the features content so it appealed to the kind of readers who weren’t quite ready for leisure slacks with elasticated waists.
She’d put a call-out on the company Slack for features ideas. Eight years in Creative Solutions had bludgeoned Tess’s self-confidence, which was even lower than her self-esteem. If it hadn’t been for her Romance Girlies book club she probably wouldn’t have submitted her piece at all.
After Frankenstein, no one had wanted to read any more classic novels.
Even Tess had found it a struggle, but Pride and Prejudice wasn’t a struggle.
It was a delight. A blueprint for every other romance novel they’d read and loved.
And when she was with her friends, she was the sassy, self-esteemy, spirited Tess that appeared in her writing, so she’d had no problem in standing up in the middle of the pub where they were meant to be discussing the latest Ali Hazelwood and successfully pitching Pride and Prejudice.
While she’d touched briefly on her own bad dates, which they’d already heard about in great detail, there was also a lot of talk of grumpy/sunshine, enemies to lovers ‘and, oh my God, guys he falls first then he gives such good grovel.’
So when Tess had mentioned the Slack call-out to her book group, the Romance Girlies had pitched her right back. By now they’d all read and loved Pride and Prejudice and the verdict was unanimous. Tess needed to ask herself what would Elizabeth Bennet, the heroine, do?
Elizabeth Bennet wouldn’t do sweet FA and blame it on her low self-esteem. She was a creature of action. Not afraid to call a spade a spade or Darcy a prideful prick who needed to humble himself to earn her love.
Elizabeth Bennet would pitch her feature proposal on the agonies of modern dating versus the ecstasy of a classic romantic hero.
So, that was exactly what Tess had done too.
She hadn’t thought she was nagging when she and Sarah had a perfectly pleasant and polite exchange of emails workshopping the idea until Sarah liked it enough to commission it.
But if Sarah had experienced it differently and complained to Claire …
Tess’s face flushed at the thought and Claire smiled thinly in triumph.
‘There’s no shame in not being cut out for editorial,’ she told Tess in a more conciliatory voice. ‘If you could toe the company line a little better and without moaning so much, then there’s no reason why you couldn’t step into my shoes when I retire.’
Claire favoured court shoes with a medium heel in a neutral shade.
She was coy about her age, and with her carefully streaked, ash-blonde hair and very few lines on her face because she never, ever laughed, it was quite hard to tell how old she was.
She had to be at least ten years from retirement.
If Tess was still there ten years from now, still writing about pensions and solar panels, still waiting to step up and assume the reins of power, then … God, she’d rather be dead.
‘Well, let’s see,’ she muttered because arguing with Claire … She’d get more sense and satisfaction from howling at the moon.
‘Now, get back to work. That piece on ergonomic hiking shoes isn’t going to write itself,’ Claire said.
She turned to walk away and Tess turned back to her screen, despair etched into her slumped posture.
‘Please tidy away that water bottle. You know I hate a cluttered desk. A messy workspace makes for messy work.’
Once she was sure that Claire was safely back in her gleaming glass box of an office – thankfully Tess’s desk in the open plan office wasn’t in her direct line of vision – Tess rested her chin in her hands and allowed herself one heartfelt, ‘Fuck my actual life.’
Jovan sitting opposite her smiled sympathetically and also with relief that he hadn’t been told off by Claire. But as Jovan’s desk was always spotlessly bare and he never argued back, he rarely got a bollocking.
Tess’s computer had gone to sleep. She jiggled her mouse to wake it up.
Then she made a note of Claire’s latest attack against her person on the advice of Saskia, who was a lawyer, just in case Tess one day had enough balls to report her to HR.
That done, she pulled up her emails to retrieve the four-page brief from the ergonomic hiking boot people.
But there at the top of her inbox, among the boring client briefs, was an email with an intriguing subject line:
Are you still holding out for a hero, Tess? If yes, then we have a tempting proposition for you!
It was sent from an organisation called The Love Library. Was it spam? Was it meant for someone on the features team?
But was Tess still holding out for a hero?
Yes. Yes, she was. Very much still holding out for him, thanks for asking.
A message popped up on the department Slack.
Claire Proudfoot: I need that hiking boot copy by 3.05 p.m.
Once again, Tess was forced to ask herself, What would Elizabeth Bennet do?
The answer was obvious. Instead of replying to Claire immediately, as was expected, Tess opened the email.