
Chapter One
ERIN
They say it takes one moment to change your life. My moment will happen at twelve minutes past three this afternoon, but there’s no way of knowing that when I wake up.
Everything else about this Thursday is the same as any other except for one thing: the date. It’s in my mind before I even open my eyes. It’s heavy on my shoulders as I get dressed for a breakfast meeting, pulling on a long white skirt, light grey t-shirt and leather jacket, while considering every possible reason I could call my boss, Charlotte, and tell her I won’t be going to work today. It stands beside me as I step onto a rush hour tube from Brixton to Oxford Circus and it follows me all the way to The Ivy Brasserie, where I take a seat outside and prepare myself for one of those ridiculous meetings you’re forced to have in PR. The ones where neither of you are allowed to say it’s a meeting, and instead you spend an hour talking about anything but the reason you’re both there, then I pick up the bill, which confirms everything which has gone unsaid. You will feature our Traitor Fashion label in your magazine and say good things about it.
Martha isn’t even one of the worst editors, but lunch drags the way anything would drag today and I’m relieved when she picks up her hot pink Spring Summer Jacquemus bag to go.
‘You know, the first time I met you, I wasn’t sure if you were cut out for this industry,’ she says, smiling down at me, handbag already on her shoulder. It can’t hold much more than a lipstick. ‘But you’ve got it, Erin. A few more years and Charlotte better watch her back.’
Her eyes are warm as she turns away and I have to wait until she can’t see me anymore before I shudder.
‘Ewwwww,’ Cassie says, when I relay the story of being compared to Charlotte, once I’ve got to the Traitor Head Office on Oxford Street. It’s open plan, with over a hundred people sharing the room. Every day I’m grateful that, out of everyone, I was put next to Cassie. Today she’s dressed in rainbow dungarees that look super fashionable on her, but would make me look like a walking tote bag. She opens up her drawer and pulls out a mini bag of Haribo, throwing it at me. ‘Are you okay? Do you need a cold shower? Shall I start calling you Char?’ Her clear plastic rimmed glasses hang off the end of her nose.
‘I’ll just scratch all the skin off my body and then I think I’ll be okay.’ I put my new season Traitor handbag onto my chair, and open up the Haribo, turning to leave. I’ve got to tidy the whole showroom before my ten o’clock influencers arrive.
‘Fuck it, shall we just quit while we’re ahead? Set up our own thing, doing something worthwhile?’ Cassie throws it out there, stopping me in my tracks.
I lean my head back and breathe in, imagining it. ‘The dream. A job that doesn’t suck out your soul. What though?’
Cassie’s bright blue eyes light up, her curly hair dancing. ‘Okay, stay with me. We could make tiny little outfits for bees, and then—’
Charlotte appears beside me, her nails freshly painted a bright red, and her roots, which were dark yesterday, are blonde again. Lucky, given how busy she’s constantly reminding us we are, that she has the spare time for self care. Probably because she palms most of her work off on us.
‘Both of you, less of this chit-chat and into the showroom, now.’ She leaves, wafting a trail of expensive perfume in our direction as she spins away. Cassie raises her eyebrows as though it’s some exciting mystery, but I know exactly what’s about to happen. As we approach the glass room, I can see everyone else is already in there, waiting. She’s asked the whole team. We’ve got a meeting together in just a few hours’ time, it makes no sense to call another one now.
‘Who was the last person in here?’ Charlotte asks, her eyes landing on me for a second before scanning across the others. Of course this couldn’t wait.
I swallow. ‘I was. Alicia Gold could only do nine p.m. last night and I know how much you wanted her, so…’
‘And you thought this was an acceptable way to leave it afterwards?’
I look around. There are clothes all over the floor. Last night I made the executive decision that rather than work an extra hour overtime, I’d tidy it in my paid hours today, but that’s not exactly something I can say aloud.
‘No,’ I say, my cheeks turning red as I feel everyone’s eyes on me. They’ll all just be glad that it isn’t one of them. Only Cassie will really care. ‘I’m sorry. I’ll sort it now.’
‘I should hope so. You think anyone’s going to post about us if they see our showroom like this? It’s an embarrassment.’ She looks at me with this expression at least once a day. Like I’m something her creepy looking bald cat, Boris, dragged in. I wait for her to dismiss everyone.
‘Cassie,’ she says, instead. ‘What do you see that’s wrong with this room?’
I can’t look at Cassie. She has to answer, and I don’t want to make her feel bad. Especially because Charlotte knows we’re friends. She’s chosen her on purpose.
‘The erm… the clothes aren’t hung up.’
‘Dominique?’
‘Bin is full of cans.’
‘Sara?’
‘The colours of the clothes are all mixed up.’
My whole body’s shaking with rage. Charlotte knows how late I worked last night. I thought she might finally compliment me on something.
‘Francesca?’
‘There’s smears on the glass.’
For fucks sake, now I’ll have to clear the windows too and because of this meeting, I now have seven minutes until DIY Duo arrive. Two girls who started filming each other doing their make-up before school and became so successful, they left after their GCSEs to do it full time. Obviously they’re now millionaires, aged twenty.
In my head I scream that if it’s that bad, everyone should help tidy it, given we all use it, but I wait until they’re gone, and then I bend down and start picking up clothes, desperately fighting back tears at the unfairness of it all.
Suddenly all I want is to get home and see my best friend Bonnie. She’ll make me feel better. She’ll help me to laugh about all this. She’ll have the wise words no one else will. Frustrated, I pull a lime green t-shirt towards me, and allow myself to sob into it once, before throwing it into the bin bag, where it belongs.
By lunch I’m already behind and have just minutes to bite my way through a chicken wrap, while staring at my diary. There’s a launch for a new energy drink in there for tonight which wasn’t there this morning, and when I see it I choke on a chunk of wrap. Tonight’s the only night I have to make my fancy dress costume for the fundraiser back home in Frome this weekend. Everyone has to go dressed as something beginning with ‘b’. I’d purposefully kept my evening clear and only one person would have put an event in there. As if humiliating me in front of the whole team wasn’t enough. I throw away my wrap, appetite gone.
I don’t know what I’ve done to make Charlotte treat me like this. I’m good at my job. I work hard. I do everything she’s ever asked of me and it’s never good enough.
I just want to walk out of the office after this meeting and go home to my best friend, drink a bottle of wine or two while I cobble together the world’s worst fancy dress outfit. Instead I have to get home, change, and be at the event by seven. I stare at the bin. How quickly can chicken give you food poisoning? The fact that eating off chicken is preferable to doing my job ignites something in my brain. Nothing about this is right.
I’m so full of anger towards Charlotte, I can’t even look at her as I take my seat in the meeting. As she talks about figures and plans for the next quarter, I’ve created a whole rap in my head, made up entirely of the words ‘shut’ and ‘up’.
At ten past three, everyone turns to stare at me because it’s my turn to list my ‘biggest learning’ and my ‘biggest win’ of the week. They’re all wondering if I’ll mention the showroom.
Beside me, Cassie has the bell. It’s passed around the room so that someone can ring it if anything exciting is announced.
I stand up, clearing the rap from my mind. I’m going to have to say aloud what happened with DIY Duo. I haven’t prepared anything else.
‘My biggest learning,’ I begin, my voice shaking because I always hate this bit, but especially now. ‘Is we need to change the way we allow people to browse our showroom. The girls from Duo tried to take extra free stuff today and I, erm…’ I cough and stare down at the table and back up. Everyone’s looking at me. ‘I told them to put some back, but in future we should probably—’
‘What did they do?’ cuts in Charlotte, her long red fingernails drumming against the notepad in front of her as she leans back in her chair.
‘They… They…’ Out of the corner of my eye, I see Cassie shake her head ever so slightly. She knows what happened. She’s telling me to do anything but tell the truth and I know that’s the right thing to do, but my mind’s completely blank. I can’t come up with a lie fast enough, and Charlotte created the “five-item limit” rule. Maybe she’ll actually be proud of me for enforcing it. ‘They got really cross and they left with nothing,’ I say, forcing the words out as fast as I can.
Cassie visibly shrivels up until she’s nothing but a heap of clothes beside me.
The finger tapping stops.
Even Charlotte can’t believe I’ve admitted it after what happened this morning. I can tell by the way her head shrinks back, her white neck disappearing under her fake-tanned chin. She’s holding her hand out flat in front of her, fingers in mid-air. She doesn’t know whether to start tapping again.
‘They’ve got over a million subscribers to their channel. The last post they did increased our traffic by two hundred and fifty per cent.’
I nod. I was hoping she wouldn’t have all the stats. ‘But Alicia Gold took some stuff, so…’
‘Alicia will get us nothing.’ This is the opposite of what she told me yesterday, when she insisted I stay three hours late to let Alicia in. ‘Whereas the DIY girls…’ She turns her hand into a fist, displaying huge diamonds on most fingers. ‘That wasn’t a lesson, Erin. That was a huge fucking mistake.’
Swallowing, I go to sit back down. Cassie tries to replace the bell and somehow it lets out a ring as it hits the table, so she has to jump on top of it to stop it from further celebrating my huge fucking mistake.
I bite my top lip, shoulders shaking.
‘I’d still like to hear your win, if you have one?’ Charlotte says once I’m back in my seat, her voice quiet. For a second I think it’s because she feels sorry for how she’s treated me today, but one look at her face says the opposite. She doesn’t know about the result of my meeting this morning, which secured me a double-page spread in a Sunday supplement, boosting our sales by way more than the DIY Duo ever could. She doesn’t think I have a win and she wants to watch me fail one more time in front of everyone. One more time before I have to dash off to an event she put in my diary because she can’t be bothered to go herself.
I stand back up, my jaw clenched.
‘My win would be…’ I pause, debating whether to tell her about this morning’s successful meeting or let her see it for herself in all its full-colour, double-page glory.
‘Of course, if you haven’t got one . . .’ Charlotte sighs over the top of me. I’m about to do what I always do. Ignore the way she treats me and just try, even harder, to impress her with my win. But something about that over-exaggerated sigh cuts through the final thread holding me together.
‘I’m meant to be back home in Frome today, climbing to the top of Cley Hill where the ashes of the person I love most in the world were scattered, before going home to cry my way through re-runs of Gilmore Girls,’ I say before she’s finished speaking. ‘I should be with my loved ones, but I’m not, because you wouldn’t give me the day off work. You didn’t even give me a chance to explain why I needed it, you just said we were too busy.’
The smirk falls from her face, but the fact it was even there at all confirms she really doesn’t have a heart. All my fear of Charlotte evaporates. I lower my voice to keep it steady. Everything that’s been building all day is coming out and I don’t know how to stop it. ‘I’ve stayed in this job for seven years, hoping it’ll get better. Maybe one day live up to the image I had when I started, but it just keeps getting worse.’ A flash of my sister Georgia appears in my head, rolling her eyes at me as I complain, once again about work. ‘I sacrificed everything, waiting for things to change. But now I think staying here might only turn me into you, and that’s not someone I want to be. Someone who makes everyone’s life a misery and then fucks off home to their bald cat.’
There’s a gasp. I don’t know who it comes from. Looking around, my eyes land on the bell, which is sitting in front of Cassie shining as though it’s about to fulfil all its potential. I’m shaking. ‘I did have a win. I got a double page spread in Hello Sunday, but I don’t think that’s my win anymore.’ Cassie’s eyes are bulging as the others stare at me, mouths open so wide I can count at least ten fillings in the room. ‘I quit.’ The words feel so good I smile and pick up the bell, ringing it as I repeat the words. ‘I. Fucking. Quit.’
Throwing the bell down, I pick up my laptop and march past Charlotte towards the door. It’s only when I catch sight of her expression that I know that really was my win, because on her face, amongst all of the anger and shock, there is finally something else. The tiniest glint of respect.