Akila looks at Harri with sadness, as though Harri is a child, and needs to have bad news broken to her with great gentleness. ‘No, Harri. I tried. I tried everything. I’m so sorry. I’ve loved,’ past tense, bad sign, ‘working for you, but I can’t work for Mackenzie and her team. It’s just not possible. It’s so frustrating. There’s so much talent and potential in our little office, and it’s just stuck in a bottleneck. We’ve missed out on more than one major revenue stream, because management won’t meet with me, they won’t sign anything off, they won’t get back to me in a timely way. The syndication thing was the last straw. They won’t listen to me, or to you. Katie and Lily are downright hostile. Mackenzie…well, you know. You’ve seen. I’ve met Will several times now. More than once, he’s called me Rachel.’

‘Rachel?’

‘I asked around. Rachel Adamson. She left Hudson in 2017. She was in internal comms. We had very little in common professionally—but she’s another black woman.’

‘God, Akila, that’s fucking horrendous, I’m so sorry. That’s outrageous. We can make a formal complaint, I’m sure there’s a…’

Akila opens her mouth to speak, closes it, pauses, waits, thinks. Opens it again. ‘Harri, it’s not—how do I put this? You know I love you, you know I think you’re brilliant, but I don’t have the energy for your outrage. Of course you’re appalled, but I live this. Not just at Hudson. I really believed in The Know, but I came here because I thought there would be opportunities for me to put my mark on the project. And it doesn’t make any sense for me to sacrifice money, structure, the perks I could get elsewhere when I can’t flourish here.’

‘I understand. I really do. Do you know what you’ll do next?’ Harri’s mouth is going off on its own again, on autopilot now, while her soul screams ‘NO! There must be some way to change your mind!’ All this time, Harri has wanted to believe she was driving The Little Engine That Could. But she can no longer ignore the fact that she’s the captain of the Titanic.