That’s not fair, Harri thinks, catching herself. For the most part, her team are really trying—even though they can be really trying. And Harri likes to stay late, and work, and go home, and do some more. She likes finding solutions to pressing problems. It’s a form of insulation. It stops the loneliness from seeping up from under the skirting boards, through the gap in the door jamb.

Today, she’s up early, in order to ambush March. March has got to be better than February. She’s going to make March her bitch. She’s got her excellent new trousers on, wide legged and high waisted, the brightest colour she can countenance. ‘French denim’, they said in the shop, but her brain prefers ‘funereal cobalt’. She has a venti black Americano, in a cup slightly longer than the length between her forehead and her chin. She’s eating a small plasticky poached egg, with a scrap of smoked salmon, and a Trivial Pursuit pie sized slice of avocado, and she’s making up for her miniature first course with what Giles calls ‘a fuck-off croissant’ for pudding.

Once Harri turns on all of the neon, she is queen of all she surveys. She sits and takes her ease. The smooth hush and whirr of her computer fan coming to life is as soothing as the sound of the sea. She’s doing something small, but significant. She’s a farmer. Soon she will be surrounded by her chickens, clucking, fussing, scattering seed. She must gently but firmly encourage them to lay.

Harri is attempting to remove a flake of croissant from the crease between her thigh and her crotch when her second-in-command arrives. ‘Akila! You always cheer me up! How was your evening?’

‘It was pretty good. My mate just had a baby, so I popped over to see her…cute as all get out, but her sister, who I’d never met before, was asking me about when I was going to have kids! I’m laughing and saying “Oh, you know, soon!” not “Are you kidding me? Why do you need to know? Shall I get knocked up and bring them to yours for Christmas?” Anyway, I felt so free and single and pathetically rebellious that I went out afterwards. I’ve had Red Coke and three Nurofen for breakfast.’

‘I know that feeling,’ says Harri, even though Akila looks radiant, and she has a suspicion that her hangovers are cheery Beatrix Potter stories, when compared with Harri’s own worsening thousand-page Gothic tragedies. ‘Anyway, can I grab you for a bit of planning? We need to think of something huge. I’ve just been going over Mackenzie’s targets for us. Because of Imogen’s bloody threesome—I shouldn’t complain, I know—but the traffic spike has actually thrown our figures out, we need to do something enormous to beat it.’

Akila looks nervous. ‘Do you think we can?’