Paddy, with the contacts of a life membership of the old girls’ network, had managed to persuade the features editor of Perspective to commission a piece from Lindsay about a fund-raising program about to be launched by the school with a Gala Day. At that point, Lindsay was hungry for the cash and the prestige, so she couldn’t afford the luxury of stopping to consider if it was the sort of project she’d actually choose to take on. Three months ago she’d reluctantly accepted redundancy when the Daily Nation discovered it needed fewer journalists so that it could pay its print workers their “pound of flesh.” Since then, she had been applying for unlikely jobs and frenetically trying to make a living as a freelance. That made the call from Paddy all the more welcome because it meant a relatively quiet weekend away from the demands of the telephone—which would soon stop disrupting her life altogether if she didn’t earn enough to pay the last quarter’s bill.