‘I hope so. I’ve been feeling so…nervous, about work, at the moment. As though I need to prove myself all over again. I don’t know, maybe it’s all in my head.’

Louise nods. ‘I don’t think you have anything to worry about, this is excellent.’

Cheered up by Louise’s encouragement, I read my piece again, and—quaking slightly—I email it to Harri. It is good. It’s a bit long, she might want me to cut the Carlotta stuff, but I think it’s funny and relatable. I’m convinced that The Girl will love it. So I’m not prepared for the icy chill that descends in the office when Harri returns after lunch and stops by my desk, frowning. ‘Imogen? Quick word?’

This is definitely not a woman who is about to congratulate her star writer and tell her she’s done it again. She’s so cross she looks like a cartoon. I can detect the invisible, squiggly anger lines, furious epaulettes hovering above her shoulders. Wordlessly, she sits down in her ergonomic chair. (Harri, I note resentfully, never, ever has to gingerly lower herself into her office chair because there’s a chance it will collapse from under her and throw her to the floor.) ‘Your piece,’ she says, staring straight ahead at her screen. ‘What happened?’

What happened? I went to an orgy, because you made me, it was awful, I wrote about it, now I’m worried about how long it’s going to take Accounts to put the expenses through and whether they’ll make a fuss about paying for the Uber.

‘Um,’ I stare at my toes. How do my shoes always get so scuffed? Anyone would think I spent hours a day running around playing Red Rover.

‘Imogen, I’m concerned that you have spent a lot of time working on something that just falls short of our standards. We can’t run this. You know what The Know is. This isn’t for The Girl.’

Harri, who is The Girl? I want to scream. Because the women, the typical readers who message all day long, are just like me—over their overdraft limits, at the beginning of a kidney infection, with bosses who are somehow able to define and dictate their entire emotional state.

‘I thought it was funny,’ I tell my toes. ‘And it’s what happened.’

Harri frowns. ‘There’s the title, for starters. No one is going to get that Nora Ephron reference—and if they do, they’ll be, well, startled, to say the least, that a twenty-seven-year-old sex writer has taken it upon herself to compare herself with one of the greatest journalistic talents of all time.’