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Kindle Notes & Highlights
The next twenty-four hours will swing between absolute boredom and horrendous stress in luxurious settings that cannot be enjoyed.
‘Make sure you look a little more put together for dinner.’ She waves the hand she is holding her room key in at me, motioning not to something specifically wrong with the way I look, but that all of me needs some attention.
Freya pulls on a black baseball cap as she hurries down the alleyway, looking behind her as if to check she isn’t being followed. What the actual fuck is she up to?
I’m very much team ‘small and exclusive friendship group’, not the kind of person who collects acquaintances and hangers-on.
What do I say? Oh, sorry Freya is a little late this evening. I just watched her climbing up the side of the hotel using the lovely wrought iron balconies like a ladder. But I’m sure it was nothing and she’ll be with us any moment.
‘Freya,’ I start, ‘where were you this evening?’ ‘I was with you, finalising a deal that I have the authority to negotiate, while you kept notes of the conversation. Notes that I’m expecting on my desk by close of play tomorrow. I suggest you spend the Eurostar journey home writing them up.’
The newsreader is impossibly perky given this went out at 5 a.m., but her co-host is almost comatose. I’ll try not to see it as an indictment of just how much harder women have to work to be considered equal to their male counterparts.
But under that artificially whitened smile is a hint of something else, something wrong, something wicked. I can sense it in his eyes, in the way the photos show him resting his hand on the base of whichever woman he is entertaining’s spine. This man is a predator.
‘I’m doing you a favour here, Camille. You understand what the Board’s position would be if they knew you’d given away such a huge margin, don’t you?’
Nah she gaslighting and trying to save her own butt so she doesnt have to explain her abscence to her bosses
The gunman left no prints, no DNA, no clue as to their identity. They were never found. Although the file remains open, the working hypothesis is that it was a professional job. No leads. The trail cold.
I will put up with anything, do anything, go anywhere for this job. I will bitch and moan and scream in frustration, yes. But I’ll do it. Nothing matters except clawing my way up the hierarchy at Serendipity and making it to the Los Angeles headquarters.
I hate her and I admire her and there are times when I want to be exactly like her and then I hate myself even more than I could ever hate her.
All that girl power my generation was promised and it all turned out to be a fucking lie. A fallacy as other women smashed the glass ceiling and immediately boarded it up again to ensure no one could follow.
I laugh a little – out loud so a few people turn to look at me like I’m a lunatic, which is nice – and start walking to meet her.
I think that’s why there’s a part of me – probably too big a part if we’re honest – that wants to be like Freya. Women like her – ruthless egotists with zero compassion – get the promotions.
They have that unique swagger of a pack of boys who think they’re men, who think respect is
I feel bad for judging him so harshly just a few minutes ago.
I call her bluff. I put down the phone, disconnecting the call. She rings back ten seconds later. ‘I think we got cut off.’ ‘No, I hung up on you. I’m not playing.’
‘It’s a shopping list.’ ‘For me?’ She rolls her eyes. ‘No, for Taylor Swift.’
Lmao
I’m an alibi. Or more accurately, I’m creating an alibi for Freya. If – and I’m going to keep thinking if until my horrendous suspicions are confirmed, just in case I am being ridiculous – another body turns up, Freya was at Trinity Bespoke.
a roll of kitchen paper
?? That U.K. Slang for paper towels?
This man wasn’t just ‘attractive’, he looks like a model. ‘What did he do?’ I ask, unable to drag my eyes away from the picture. ‘Plastic surgeon.’ She raises an eyebrow as she says it. ‘I think he might have been availing himself of the company discount. Let’s just say that ten years ago he was slightly less Ken-doll.’
My boss might be a killer and I’m powerless to do anything about it.
She didn’t use Facebook – we’re not in our 40s
Haha
‘Are you OK? I’m worried about you, Sam,’ I repeat the words as I type them and hit send. The reply comes quickly. I’m OK. But now I have to burn this phone
As women we spend so much time looking behind us. Holding our keys between our fingers. Praying the guy across the street with the leer on his face is just a little creepy and not a killer.
Maybe if we all went and snuffed out some lousy little man we’d all feel so much better. We could treat it like therapy.
But I’m being honest and sometimes I do hate her. I hate the burden she creates. I hate the guilt she fosters. She is the embodiment of my failure.
Isn’t it funny, the things we do to make ourselves feel safe, even though they’re ultimately completely ineffectual in reality.
‘Verity woke up,’ I whisper. ‘She’s awake?’ ‘Yes. You should have been paying more attention.’ His shoulders slump slightly as he begins to collapse in on himself. He knows what Verity’s consciousness means. What will happen next. There is only one way this chapter of the story ends.
Gregory Fuller. Gregory will be last. The pièce de résistance. The most important one of them all and the one I will enjoy the most.
I need a team that works hard and works fast and will push themselves to the edge for the chance to gain my approval. Is it manipulative? Yes. Do I care? What do you think.
You can’t kill a man in a place his children might find him. I’m not a monster. I have standards, limits. Moral boundaries. You might laugh, but it’s true. I have a code. No collateral damage.
No witnesses. I don’t mean this in the literal sense that no one can see me. That’s not a code, that’s just
No mercy. When I come for them it is too late for clemency. There will be no point in them begging for their lives.
‘You think I should find a husband and stay at home to raise some babies?’ I said as if it was a joke. ‘I think you are an aberration,’ she said with the righteous conviction of the brainwashed. ‘Good to know,’ I replied. ‘And an abomination. You will be punished in the next life.’
it’ll provide a decent level of cover for the next month. This is the final element of my code: always have an alibi. By which I’m not meaning a reason that places you nowhere near the scene of the crime. But a reason that means you were in the vicinity for a legitimate and entirely valid reason.
It was a breach of the rules, a sign of affection that I refused to tolerate in our purely physical relationship.
But, as I close the book, she suddenly looks at me, eyes like daggers piercing mine. I brace for the scream. But she remains silent. A shiver runs down my spine at the look on her face. Comprehension. She sees me. She knows me.
He changes me in a way I cannot articulate. And I hate it. But I cannot help myself.
I want to tell him I could love him. But I don’t.
‘I don’t think the potential IRR is sufficiently attractive to justify the risk,’ she says. Did she just try to out-jargon me?
LOL
Lawrence Delaney is stalking his wife. And I am stalking Lawrence Delaney. It’s almost ridiculous. But I’m a lot better at this than Lawrence is.
