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Chapter 1 chapter 1
I am going to vomit. I’m going to have a heart attack right here, on a scratchy office chair and in Boardroom Two, which, for some reason, always smells faintly of Pecorino cheese. Perhaps I’ll even—die? I mean, that’s surely possible given the circumstances and that my poor heart is thumping so hard, so quickly, my body must be convinced I’m running a marathon completely untrained. Deaths happen all the time at marathons, don’t they? It’s why I don’t run. (That, and the fact that sweating always turns my face to the color of a shiny, embarrassing, prize red cabbage.)
But now—now I’m seriously considering running. Running and not stopping. Running until this stuffy boardroom is nothing but a tiny, unidentifiable speck in the distance. Running until I get to the border, until I meet a nameless man in dark sunglasses who’ll shove a fake passport into my hand, along with a false beard and a one-way ticket to a tiny, hidden-away desert town in the Outback somewhere.
Because—God, this is awful. My worst, worst, worst possible nightmare. Probably anyone’s worst nightmare, for that matter, but most definitely, beyond a doubt, mine—and it’s happening. Right now. To me. Actual me. Millie Chandler. Live, and in stereo.
Nobody’s even said it out loud yet either; why on a totally normal-seeming, run-of-the-mill Thursday morning at nine fifteen I find myself summoned here, in a boardroom of people mere receptionists like me only ever see when redundancies are announced (or when they’re drunkenly tightrope-walking the sexual harassment borderline at after-work drinks). But I already know. Without anyone uttering a single word, I know why I’m sitting here in front of three of my bosses, plus Ann-Christin, our incompetent but sweet HR manager whose blank face stares through a laptop screen like a Star Trek villain. I knew almost the second I walked into the room a few moments ago, trailing behind Petra, my boss (and, I hope, still my friend), and saw my name projected from a computer onto the screen on the wall. A uniformed stack of them. Millie Chandler. Millie Chandler. Millie Chandler. Millie Chandler.
Because it seems, somehow, emails that shouldn’t have been sent, have been sent.
Lots of them.
So, so, so many of them.
Emails I wrote, but never sent. And “never sent” was how they should have always, always stayed.
Oh my God, I really am going to be sick. Or pass out. Or both. (But then—passing out would definitely get me out of this, wouldn’t it? And I want, so much, to get out of this.)
“We’re just waiting for Paul to arrive,” sighs Michael Waterstreet, more hard-hearted cop than managing director, and although I manage to nod, let out a shaky little whimper of an “OK,” I’m so rigid in this chair, it’s hard to tell if I actually moved at all or if I’ve perhaps, due to all the shame and terror and utter embarrassment, turned to stone like a petrified fossil.
How has this even happened? How? Five years I’ve worked here at Flye TV, a small, slightly disorganized (but mostly successful) TV sports broadcasting company. Five whole years I’ve given it my all, like an agreeable robot, a considerate, smiley yes-woman, full of nothing but “Sure!” and “Oh, absolutely!” and “Of course I’ll send your parcel overseas and pretend I totally believe you when you say it’s for the company, and not for your auntie in New Zealand again, who collects what looks and feels like monster truck tires.” Yet here I am. Here I am, at what I can only imagine is about to be a disciplinary and perhaps what will go down as one of the worst moments of my entire twenty-nine-year-long life.
“Could you, um, please t-tell me what this... this is about?” I ask wobblily, even though I am, of course, 99.9999 percent certain what this is indeed about. “Is it about emails? Is it about... my emails?”
But Michael holds up a large, corn-beefy hand. “We’ll discuss it once everyone’s arrived.”
Oh, it’s bad, isn’t it? This feels really, really, really, undeniably bad.
I should have known today was going to have a shade of disaster to it too. The signs were all there, and I’m so skilled at looking for signs these days; little whiffs of bad things approaching on the horizon that I might need to dodge. Today, though, I missed them. Completely. The traffic that was unusually horrendous this morning (a tiny hint). My favorite work mug—enormous, sloth-shaped, so amusingly funny-faced—that wasn’t in the office kitchen cupboard (a bigger hint). And the fact that when I’d asked Chatty Martin in Finance if he’d seen it, he blanked me. Yep. Chatty Martin, the man who during a bad bout of tonsilitis carried around his laptop, open on a text-to-speech website through which he spoke to us like an expressionless AI robot, ignored me. (The very biggest omen of them all.)
And now, I’m here. Staring at this screen on the wall.
At my drafts.
My email drafts that are no longer just ‘drafts.’
All those things I want to say but I’m too afraid to. All those things I type instead, to get them off my chest, to release them, without anyone knowing, without any... well, collateral.
Oh, God, this really is like a terrible dream. One of those dark “what if” situations you dream up at 2 a.m. when you’re feeling sad and alone in the world. Except this is not a “what if” or a dream. This is happening. This is real life—my real life.
The boardroom door clicks shut behind me, and my heart drops to my feet. Paul Foot, our director, stands in front of it in a pin-striped suit two sizes too big. He slowly looks at me, to everyone else, and then to the screen on the wall—to that shameful, shameful Jenga tower of “From: Millie Chandlers,” each a little window into who I really am. Rants, complaints, my stupid inside jokes, my truths, my... secrets.
“Righty-o, folks,” he says, and—ah. There it is. The sloth, smiling judgmentally, in his chubby hand. My favorite mug, now symbolic in its own right.
Because this is it.
This is “The Moment.” And how do I even get out of this? The damage is already done. The worst has already happened.
All my email drafts have somehow been sent.
Every single last one.
From: Millie Chandler
To: Michael.Waterstreet@Flyetv.com
Subject: Re: millie, set up meeting room asap
Ummmm, an empty email and an instruction in the subject without a single please or thank you?????? Not that I expected anything else of course, because I hear how you speak to other people who work here. YOU ARE THE RUDEST MAN ALIVE!!!!
Kind Regards,
Millie Chandler
Reception
Flye TV, Progress Road, Essex
From: Millie Chandler
To: Alexis.Lee@TTMedTech.com
Subject: re: sorry, can’t make dinner, clients over from Sweden, can’t go home until I’ve closed the sale!!!
Good. I’m sort of relieved to be honest, Lex. The cinema last week was hard-going. I wish it hadn’t been but it was and I felt like you were mad at me the whole time. You were so contrary and argumentative!? It was like you had a problem with everything I said. And lately, it really feels like we’re drifting apart, and I hate saying this, but sometimes I think that’s a good thing.
From: Millie Chandler
To: Owen.Kalimeris@Flyetv.com
Cc: All Office
Subject: re: Update from Team India, week 16!
It’s been four months since we broke up, and I still miss you so much, Owen. So much sometimes that it physically aches. I just don’t know how to forget you.
