‘Always going where they are not needed.’ Giles has never forgiven Lily and Katie for recommending that disciplinary action be taken when he tried to call in a free Louis Vuitton case, after his original got lost on the way back from a press trip to Marrakesh.

‘It’s very weird though, it’s a lot of negative energy to have in the office. It unsettles my girls. It makes me think Hudson wants to see this fail—so why bother to launch?’

Giles steals a chip. ‘I suppose you’re much cheaper to fire, if you fuck this up. If they’d just made you redundant when Rosa left, it would have cost them loads.’

‘GILES! Why would you say that? What’s wrong with you?’

‘Come on, you know that if you’re going, I’m going.’

‘You’re so loyal.’

‘No, I mean that if you’re getting fired, everyone is getting fired eventually. There will be no Panache, none of the weeklies, nothing but mags for people who want gossip about bricks and building regulations. Will can cement—ha! See what I did there?—his empire of magazines for people who hate reading.’ Harri shakes her head. Today she has even less tolerance than usual for Giles’ Nostradamus impression. She reads the time upside down on his phone. ‘I’d better get back.’

‘But you barely touched your chips!’ says Giles, reaching for another handful. ‘Off you go, back to your young girls. I’ll get this. Say it with me now, while you can. Oooof, old woman! OOOOF!’

Chapter Fourteen

Kitchen Confidential

Harri

As a child, Harri would sometimes be taken, for a treat, to a model village in which everything was scaled down by half. A kid could climb into a tiny house, and sit behind a tiny table, and feel like a giant. The first time Harri felt ashamed of her body, aged eleven, was when her widening hips trapped her behind the tiny table and the model village man had to be called to winch her out. (‘You’re a big girl, aren’t you?’)

Harri does not like this memory, but when she sees Mackenzie in the kitchen, it’s all she can think about.

Miraculously, Mackenzie has folded herself behind the tiny table, and is somehow wedged between the cushions of the cheap, scratchy blue sofa. Her thoroughbred-puppy glossiness is tempered by her expression. If there was space for subtitles between her forehead and the sloping ceiling, they would read ‘I can’t wait for this to be over, so that I can go and shower in hand sanitiser.’ Her white cashmere sweater has the freshness of a frozen lake, and as Harri follows her furious eyes, she sees that it’s contrasting sharply with the dull, brown, flaky stain beside her. The stain has been at Hudson Media for longer than Harri has. It’s possibly on a final salary pension. Harri had always assumed—hoped—it was soup.