The Last Time I Saw You by Eleanor Moran Page A

explain, but it feels too hard to marshal everything that’s churning around inside me, the unanswered questions that yesterday threw up. Besides, she doesn’t know about me and Sally’s murky history—she thinks she’s no more than an old pal I lost touch with—I can’t face peeling back the flesh of it and revealing the bone and sinew that lie beneath.
    “Black, definitely.” She smiles kindly, relieved I’ve submitted to the most British form of comfort, splashing boiling water into our cups. I can feel the crackle of it, loud and scalding. “How’s Alfie?” I ask, determinedly steering a path back toward normality.
    “He’s furious the babysitter’s got a new little girl coming. He tried to ram an ochre Crayola up her bottom yesterday.”
    Just then Honey, Mary’s rail-thin, Alexa Chung–like assistant, arrives.
    “There you are!” she says admonishingly, casting a disapproving look at the spare layer of flesh that Rosie carelessly failed to shed post Alfie. “Mary’s called a flash meeting. You need to be in the board room ASAP.”
    We grab our mugs and run like the wind, schoolgirls summoned by the headmistress. Mary’s at the top of the boardroom table, entirely focused on her iPhone despite the six servants who are sitting around her, poised and ready to do her bidding. She’s wearing a loud, pink jumpsuit with ostentatious silver snaps running up her toned tummy. It’s garish, particularly combined with the cascading gold hoop earrings she’s wearing, but it’s a statement of intent, and a very expensive one at that—it reminds us that she’s forceful enough to carry an ensemble like that off and somehow make it work.
    Charlotte, a viperous senior creative who’s recently been parachuted in from another firm, has positioned herself at Mary’s right-hand side. She’s as groomed and glossy as a show pony, utterly focused on the pursuit of success. I’m not sure that she’s the artistic genius she’s been painted, but that level of self-belief ensures results. I admire it, in a way, but it doesn’t stop Rosie and me calling her Robot Girl behind her back. I think Mary knows how ruthless she is, but she’s a firm believer in healthy competition: my worry is that there is no such thing.
    Eventually Mary deigns to look up.
    “All present and correct,” she says, then looks to me. “Hello, Livvy, I hope yesterday went as well as something so awful can go.”
    “Thank you,” I reply, smiling gratefully, but she’s already moved her attention. That’s the thing about Mary, she can be incredibly human when she wants to be. Shortly after I broke up with Marco she found me crying in the loos midmorning—I braced myself for a reprimanding, but instead she canceled her meeting and marched me around the corner for a cup of tea. “There’s a saying,”she told me, pushing a calorific treat in my direction. “Make sure when the clock goes off you’re not sitting next to a St. Bernard. And you’re just too savvy for that.” I loved her for it—loved her for caring, loved her for perceiving something that I knew to be true of myself. My loyalty to her is pretty unshakeable, despite the fact that work often feels like an assault course.
    “Today is a very exciting day for this firm,” she’s saying, “and let me tell you why. It’s not because new business is down fifteen percent.” Oh God, maybe this is a Mary-style segue into a downsizing announcement. Everyone looks stricken, even though the downturn is across the board, and she takes a moment to savor our discomfort. “No one could blame the people around this table for that,” she concedes eventually. “No, we need to think differently in a climate like this. We will survive on our excellence, and one of the best ways to demonstrate it is with pro bono work. Last night I had dinner with Flynn Gerrard.” Gerrard’s a gorgeous Irish actor who made it big in Hollywood, but, truth be told, hasn’t had a box office smash in