Harri nods. ‘She’s made it clear that we have to. It’s weird, you’d think she’d be throwing parties for us, but she’s throwing around phrases like “if you continue to fail to meet new targets” and “inevitable consequences”.’

Akila frowns. ‘I wanted to ask you about something, actually. I don’t want to be whiny, but I’m really confused. Every time I try to meet with senior management to give them a progress update, they either never get back to me, or they fob me off and say something about doing it later. There have been a few big things that we really needed to respond to quite urgently—and you know that with stuff around ads and money, we usually need their sign off, we can’t authorise it alone.’

She looks up at the ceiling, down at the floor, and takes a breath. ‘I wasn’t sure whether to mention this, but Lily actually scheduled a meeting with me on February the thirty-first. I felt like such a dick, I wasn’t really concentrating until I went to put it in my diary. She was all “Ooooh, sorry, is it not a leap year?” which doesn’t make any sense! It’s breaking my brain. Our stats, our analytics, our uniques—everything is way, way, way over target. I was under the impression that I would have to beg and plead for ads, but big brands are coming to us proposing partnerships. And upstairs, they don’t want to know!’

Now Harri is looking at the floor. She has worked at Hudson long enough to know that the company cogs move in a manner so protracted and convoluted that the business might as well have been founded by Heath Robinson. It would be senior management’s style to wait until The Girl was well into her eighties before they were ready to declare the new venture a success. Even so, they have been unusually obstructive.

‘Do we think it’s maybe Mackenzie’s old company culture? The American way?’

Akila shakes her head. ‘Nah, I’m not sure that makes any sense. You know I’ve worked in the States, and certain stuff, when you get really granular, is a bit slow—everything has to be signed off twelve times—but nothing like this. In the grand scheme of things, Hudson isn’t even that big. It’s making me anxious. And we shouldn’t be anxious. We should be giddy.’

Harri feels her optimism vanishing, her soul slumping. If she’s a human soufflé, the oven door has been opened, and the dinner party is ruined. ‘But, I think we can be a bit giddy, you know? If you take Imogen’s threesome out of the equation, we’ve got a good, strong, steady amount of growth, definitely better than I would have predicted for the first month.’