The note lived on her phone, and it was the only thing on her phone that was not work, which she would have said proved it was not personal.
She had done it before. That was the part she never explained to anybody, because it made her sound like a woman with a cork board and red string, and she was not that; she was a woman who had, at twenty-nine, spent eleven months being systematically outmanoeuvred by a man named Gareth Pike, and had realised at the end of it that she could not name a single specific thing he had done.
That was the trick. That was the whole trick. None of it was ever one thing. It was a hundred things the size of a grain of rice, and each one on its own sounded like nothing, and if you complained about any single one of them you sounded mad — and at the end of eleven months you were somehow the person who was not quite ready.
So after Gareth Pike she had started writing things down.
It worked. That was the other thing nobody knew. In 2019 she had gone into a room with fourteen dated lines about a partner named Alan and had come out of it with an apology, because fourteen dated lines is not a feeling. It is a document.
9 Jan. T asked me to lunch. Said "I'd like to pick your brain about the department." Declined — said I had a thing. He said "next week then" as a statement.
12 Jan. Second ask. This time in front of Priya, so that declining twice is now a thing two people know about.
14 Jan. Lunch. He paid, over my objection, quickly, in a way designed to be over before it was a discussion.
He asked about the Marchmont carve-out for forty minutes. Actual questions. Good ones. He'd read the schedules — not the summary, the schedules. Nobody reads the schedules.
She stopped typing and looked at that last line for a while, on a bus, on the Embankment, in the rain.
Then she deleted Nobody reads the schedules, because it was not evidence of anything, and put instead:
Flattery by attention is the expensive kind. Anyone can say they admire your work. He spent four hours reading it so that the admiring would land.
That is not a man being nice to you. That is a man doing prep.