“You give great kickback,” Trudy often told her following an intense negotiation or fiery confrontation. “They respect you for it. It makes them listen, and provided you don’t go wrong, you could be heading up the entire legal team by the time you’re thirty.” Trudy didn’t have a problem with this, because she had no such ambitions for herself. She was happy to stay at the level she’d already attained, since it allowed her time to be an at-home-most-evenings wife to Bruno and available-for-school-runs mum to Nick and Dean.

The other important thing about today was the fact that it was Vivi’s twenty-seventh birthday, another reason the GaLs—all graduates of the London School of Economics law school—had decided that this should be the marathon reunion day. Combining occasions was something they often did; being so busy with their careers it was the only way to make sure nothing got overlooked.

Throwing back the pale blue striped duvet, Vivi stood as tall as her willowy five feet nine inches allowed, arched her long back, and gave a lazy side-to-side twist to stretch out her waist. Since ending her intense pre-marathon training, her body had softened slightly, making it, according to Greg, more feminine and curvier, and way sexier. He had a thing about large women, which made his attraction to her a bit of a mystery, given how slender she was. However, they’d been seeing each other for several months, nonexclusively, so their friends weren’t living in daily expectation of some significant news. A baby. A wedding. Or perhaps something as simple as moving in together.

Despite their casual relationship, Vivi had to admit that he was a bit of a dreamboat in his way, sporty, witty, fiercely intelligent, and very well connected in the financial world, thanks to his gentrified family and their historic ties to the City. When he spoke, it was immediately evident that he came from privileged pastures; however, Vivienne strongly doubted that he gave a single thought to the relative ordinariness of her own. He wasn’t a snob, or if he was, she’d never noticed. Nonetheless, she’d never taken him to meet her family, who still lived in the hopelessly unsophisticated coastal town that Vivi had called home for the first eighteen years of her life.