Meanwhile she could sense Mia moving towards the table. As if on cue, she pulled out the seat next to Harry and sat down. Rage bubbled inside Laura. Misplaced maybe, for how could she explain to anyone why she was so disproportionately angry that this woman had taken a seat at their boss’s side, for what did it really matter? But Laura realised it mattered a lot – because Mia was there, and she shouldn’t be.

As Harry called them all in, Laura dropped her notepad onto the table and took the seat nearest the door. Inside the pad were her copious notes on how she was planning to develop the Coopers campaign, a now-futile exercise that had taken up many hours of her last two weeks of maternity leave, which she could have spent with her son. It both surprised and annoyed her that this was another thought that brought her to the edge of tears; never before had her emotions teetered so precariously close to breaking point. She inhaled deeply, focusing on Harry’s words as he ran through last week’s top-line figures.

To everyone who worked at Morris & Wood, Harry was some kind of hero. Back in London, before he’d set up another arm of the agency in Lymington, Harry had turned the company into a multimillion-pound, award-winning agency, after taking over from his father and buying out the other partner.

He rarely made decisions that anyone on the board disagreed with, which was why this latest one was so unsettling. Laura scanned the men around the table and wondered what they had thought when Harry told them Mia would be staying on. Did they agree with him? Had they seen her in action and understood that she was too brilliant to lose? Had one of them even suggested it? Laura clutched her hands together under the table – she had never in all her time at Morris & Wood felt so peripheral.

Suddenly Harry’s patter was broken by the vibration of Mia’s phone, and Mia told Harry she was going to have to take the call. Laura glanced at her boss, who looked bemused, but nodded regardless and picked up again seamlessly as Mia left the room. Out of the corner of Laura’s eye, she could see Mia pacing back and forth outside the window and even though it was only a matter of minutes before she re-entered, apologising profusely, Laura wondered what was so important that it took her out of the Monday exec meeting.

And then, just as it seemed the meeting couldn’t get any worse, Harry announced that Mia was back in time to present her update.

‘Well, we’re meeting with the Coopers health-drink marketing team a week on Friday,’ Mia began. ‘I’m going to be taking them through the concepts for TV, and we hope to start shooting the ad as soon as June.’