ONE NIGHT ONE BOSS

Chapter three

The rejection emails came in a particular order. First, the polite ones we will keep your application on file, which Sophie had learned meant nothing except that someone had pressed a button. Then the automated ones that didn’t bother pretending. Then, occasionally, silence was its own answer.

She had applied for fourteen positions in two weeks. Marketing assistant. Administrative coordinator. Junior content writer. A receptionist role at a law firm that had been listed must have five years of experience for a receptionist position, which she had found both absurd and, depressingly, representative.

The pile of bills on the counter had developed its own ecosystem. Her mother moved them from the counter to the table and back to the counter again, as though relocating them was a form of management. There was an overdue electricity bill that needed to be paid; the internet will be restored by the end of the week. Lily had borrowed forty pounds, which she hadn’t mentioned returning and probably hadn’t thought about since.

Sophie sat at the kitchen table with her laptop and a coffee that had gone cold and read the same job listing three times before Dara’s name appeared on her screen.

She answered in the second ring.

“Tell me something good,” Sophie said.

Define good. Dara’s voice was warm and slightly chaotic in the way it always was, like she was in the middle of three things at once and none of them were slowing her down. “I’m sending you something. Don’t say no until you’ve read the whole thing.”

That’s not a reassuring way to start.

You just need to read it.

The email came through while they were still on the phone. Sophie opened it. Executive Secretary. Thomas & Co. Immediate start. The salary was listed at the bottom and Sophie read it twice because the first time she thought she had added a digit.

“Dara.”

“I know.”

“This salary—”

“I know.”

“This is—”

“Sophie. Apply.”

She looked around the kitchen. The bills on the counter and the chair that wobbled. The city outside is pressing against the window with its indifferent wickedness.

“They’ll want someone with more experience,” Proper explained. Years of it.

” she said.

“Apply anyway. The worst they can say is no, and you’re already very comfortable with no, you’ve received fourteen of them.”

“That was unnecessarily accurate.”

“Apply.”

She applied.

The first interview was with a woman named Ms. Pryce, who had the bearing of someone who had conducted ten thousand interviews and found all of them mildly disappointing. She asked questions in a clipped, efficient manner and wrote things down that Sophie could not read upside down. Sophie answered everything clearly and did not fidget, which she considered a personal achievement.

She was called back two days later.

The second interview, Ms. Pryce informed her over the phone, would be with the CEO directly.

Sophie said that was fine. She put the phone down. She sat very still for approximately thirty seconds. Then she called Dara.

“Second interview,” she said. “With the CEO.”

“Oh that’s amazing—”

“With the CEO personally, Dara.”

A pause. “Okay that’s a little intimidating, you’ll be—”

“I need to prepare.”

“You’ll be great. You’re always great under pressure. Remember that presentation in the second year when the projector broke and you just—”

“I’m going to go prepare now.”

“You’re going to be great!”

Sophie hung up and spent the next two days preparing with the focused intensity of someone who could not afford to fail at this.

She dressed carefully on the morning of the interview. The navy blouse she saved for important things. Her best trousers. Shoes that were professional and not painful, because she had learned the hard way that pain was a distraction you couldn’t afford.

Thomas & Co. occupied the top twelve floors of a building that made the sky look smaller. She went through security and rode the elevator up and down, followed a PA to a waiting area that was quiet and expensive in the way of places that she didn’t need to try.

She waited eleven minutes. She counted.

Then the door opened, and the PA said her name and she stood up and walked into the office.

He was behind the desk with his head down, finishing something, and she had two full seconds to see him before he looked up.

Two seconds.