She could hear Alexa and Ben talking in low voices to one another. She rolled her eyes. While she was delighted for Alexa that her date with Ben had gone so well, she was still furious that he had imprisoned them in an attic on a Saturday morning, and she was not yet quite certain that he had paid his penance for doing so. A sigh. She glanced behind her left shoulder to see Jack, who was leaning on the skylight, his face still gormless in this (almost) profile. She returned to the wall and closed her eyes, steeling herself. She sensed a tailspin coming on.

Even on a good day, her hangovers usually involved shame and anxiety, as her misdeeds and mishaps returned in a torrent. This was not a good day. And right now, an alarm bell was ringing. A Felicia-shaped alarm bell. Ellen had a very bad feeling about her boss. Specifically, she had a very bad feeling about a conversation with her boss that had taken place over Friday-evening drinks in the small kitchen of the office building they shared with Two Wheels Good.

Of course. There Ellen was, holding court, swilling the wine in her tumbler, necking satisfied slugs in between pronouncements. ‘Thing is’ – she was saying to her boss, eyes trained, as they always were, on one of her impossibly dark, manicured eyebrows – ‘honestly, I’ve never even used one.’ Another satisfied slug. ‘A Flowdown tampon, I mean.’ At this point she had laughed – for far, far too long – while her boss had stared at her, impassive. Eventually, after what was surely an eternity, Ellen had stopped laughing.

‘I see.’ And there was the face – Felicia looked like she’d been poisoned. A sniff. ‘Please excuse me for a second.’

Ellen remembered the sound of her spiky heels retreating and felt sick with horror.

Granted, discussing female hygiene products at Friday night drinks rather came with the territory when you worked at a CBD tampon start-up. But Ellen had to wonder what had possessed her to make such a damning admission to the company’s CEO, a former Goldman Sachs banker, who had started the company from her kitchen table while on maternity leave with her second child, and who was a woman unburdened by anything approaching a sense of humour. Ellen and Kayleigh had nicknamed Felicia the Grand High Witch, partly because she had dark hair and wore pointy patent boots and fitted black dresses with full skirts that fell to just below the knee; but partly because she was wicked. She was rude and demanding and unforgiving. She would also send incoherent emails at all hours: sentences that finished halfway through a word; references to conversations she’d had in her mind, rather than in her office, as stated; messages setting expectations that were excessive, considering the meagre sums she paid her staff.