What Happened After Midnight

The worst part was not that Gregory Pemberton had stolen her campaign. Theft Poppy Whitlock could have survived. She had survived smaller thefts before: her yoghurt from the office fridge, her good umbrella, three consecutive Thursdays of credit on a spreadsheet that nobody else understood. The worst part was that he had done it beautifully.

He had stood at the head of the boardroom on the forty-first floor of Lumen & Crane, one hand in his trouser pocket and the other conducting an invisible orchestra, and he had clicked through her slides as if they had fallen out of his own head. Her slides. Her pale gold, the exact shade she had argued over with the printers for three entire days. Her line, the one she had written at her kitchen table at two in the morning with a cold cup of tea beside her: Hello, Tomorrow. We were hoping you’d be early. He had paused before it for effect, the way a magician pauses before a rabbit, and the board had actually murmured.

“I’ve been sitting on this idea for a while,” Gregory had said, and smiled the smile of a man who has never once been caught. Then, with a graceful wave toward the back wall where Poppy stood holding a water jug, because refilling the water jug was a junior’s job and she was the most junior person in the building: “And of course my team helped with the formatting. Penny, is it? Thank you, Penny.”

Her name was Poppy. She had been his direct report for fourteen months.

At the far end of the long glass table sat Theodore Ellison, the chief executive, thirty-four years old and the youngest person ever to run the company, a man the staff referred to in lowered voices as simply Theo, as though speaking his full name might summon him. He had said nothing during the entire presentation. He had clicked a pen. Click, click, click, a small steady sound that Poppy would later swear she could still hear in her sleep. And when Gregory said Penny, she thought, only for the length of a heartbeat, that the clicking stopped.

She decided she had imagined it. In Poppy’s experience, hope was the kind of thing that got you into trouble.

The board applauded. Gregory bowed, actually bowed, and Poppy refilled a glass that did not need refilling because her hands had to do something or she would have thrown the jug.

The rest of the day passed in a kind of grey underwater blur. She answered emails. She ate half a croissant standing up. Barbara from Accounts, a round and formidable woman in her sixties who had been at the company since before it had a logo, left a packet of Hobnobs on her desk without a word, which was Barbara’s way of saying I saw, and I am sorry, and I will not be discussing it. Poppy ate three of them at her keyboard and felt marginally less like a crumpled receipt.

By the time she got home to her small flat in Walthamstow it was after ten. The radiator, which she had named Kevin, was knocking out its usual desperate Morse code. She ate cereal for dinner out of a mixing bowl because the proper bowls were in the sink, changed into the oversized football shirt she wore to bed, and climbed under the duvet with her phone held above her face like a woman about to read her own sentencing.

There were four messages from Dee.

WELL???? How did the board thing go

Pops

Pops I can see you’ve read this

I will drive down from Manchester right now do not test me

Delilah Reyes had been Poppy’s best friend since the age of eleven, when she had defended Poppy from a boy named Colin who had put a worm in her pencil case. Dee was loud, loyal, a paediatric nurse who could shout down a consultant and then cry at a dog food advert, and she was the only person on earth who got the full, unedited, uncensored version of anything Poppy felt. That was the whole point of Dee. That was why Poppy pressed the little bubble to open their chat, a bubble that she had saved at the top of her list with a yellow heart beside the name.

Or rather, that was why she meant to.

What Poppy did not know, because she was too tired to look and too furious to think, was that at eleven-forty that night Barbara from Accounts had posted a dancing-cat birthday gif in the company-wide chat, wishing a happy birthday to someone in Facilities named Trevor. The chat was called LUMEN ALL HANDS 🌟. It had four hundred and twelve members. Poppy had muted it eleven months ago, after the third chain of messages about whose lunch had been taken from the fourth-floor fridge. But a muted chat that receives a message still jumps to the top of the list, and so, in the half-second that Poppy’s thumb came down, the little yellow heart had slid quietly one place downward and a cartoon star had taken its place.

She did not see the star. She was typing already.

Okay. I need to say this out loud or I will actually combust. Gregory Pemberton is the most confident man I have ever met who has never once had a thought. He talks like a LinkedIn post that has learned to walk. He says “let’s circle back” the way other people say “bless you”, completely automatically and with no intention of ever circling anywhere. Today, in front of the ENTIRE board, he presented MY campaign. The one I wrote at my kitchen table over three weekends. The one with the gold. The one with the line about tomorrow. And he called me PENNY. I have worked for him fourteen months and he has called me Penny, Polly, Pippa, and once, memorably, “the new girl”, which I was not, because I was new fourteen months ago. He has never read an email of mine past the first line. He uses the word synergy and does not even wink. He once asked me to make a logo “pop more” and when I asked what that meant he said “you know, more pop.” He schedules meetings at 5:45 on Fridays to “touch base.” He eats tuna at his desk with the confidence of a man who has never been told no by anyone, including the tuna.

But here is what actually makes me want to scream into a cushion. The company is GOOD. The work is good. The people are brilliant. Barbara from Accounts has kept me alive on Hobnobs. And nobody, NOBODY, in that boardroom with the nice water and the nicer chairs, will ever know that the person with the idea was the one holding the jug. Somebody should tell the CEO to look up from his pen and see what is happening on his own floor. Honestly I think he would be horrified. I think he is just very busy and very lonely up there and nobody tells him anything true. Anyway. I need a drink and a new job and possibly a personality transplant. Dee, tell me I’m not insane. I love you. I’m not insane. Call me.

She pressed send, flopped back against the pillow, and exhaled for what felt like the first time since four o’clock.

The little whoosh of the sent message was the most satisfying sound she had heard all week.

She waited for Dee’s reply. She watched the screen. Under her message a small grey line appeared: Seen by 3.

Poppy frowned. Dee was in Manchester, and Dee was one person. She tapped the screen to pull the chat window up properly, and the top of it glowed at her in a cheerful, cruel, unmistakable font.

LUMEN ALL HANDS 🌟. 412 members.

The cereal, which had been sitting in her stomach in a peaceful slush, turned to concrete.

Seen by 3 became Seen by 11. Then Seen by 29. Poppy sat bolt upright, the duvet sliding off her like a defeated flag. She stabbed at the message with her thumb. A menu popped up. Delete for me. Delete for everyone. She pressed everyone so hard she nearly cracked the screen, and the app thought for an agonising second before it answered in polite, grey, bureaucratic text: Only group admins can delete messages after sending. Contact an admin.

The admin, she knew, was the Chief Executive’s office.

She made a noise she had not known her body could make, a kind of strangled kettle. She tried to leave the group, and then realised that leaving the group would look like confession. She tried to type Sorry, wrong chat, please ignore, and then thought that this was the single most pointless sentence in the history of the English language, because the thing about a four-hundred-word furious essay on your boss is that it cannot be ignored. It is physically impossible. A message that long has weight. It arrives with its own gravity.

Seen by 74.

The reactions began to come in. A small heart from someone in Procurement she had never even spoken to. A skull emoji from a person in Design. Then, one by one, like a slow standing ovation in a very strange theatre, a crowd of tiny thumbs-up and laughing faces blossomed under her words. Someone from IT typed I need this printed on a mug. Someone else typed PENNY 😭😭😭 Someone typed nothing, and simply sent a single, solemn, perfect clapping-hands emoji.

Barbara from Accounts reacted with a heart. A big red one. Poppy would have wept if she had not been so busy dying.

Then, at the bottom of the screen, three small dots appeared and began to pulse.

The name beside them was Gregory Pemberton.

Poppy watched them for what felt like a decade. Typing… typing… typing… The dots stopped. They started again. They stopped. She understood, with the perfect calm of the condemned, that a man who had never in his life written a sentence without a thesaurus was now composing a reply in real time, and that it was going to be catastrophic.

The dots vanished. No message came.

She threw the phone across the room, where it landed with a soft thump in the laundry basket, and lay down flat on the floor of her bedroom like a person who has been told by a doctor to prepare herself.

She thought about her mother, who had always said never put in writing what you would not say to someone’s face. She thought about the rent. She thought about the enormous, ridiculous fact that her first real job, the one she had cried happy tears over in a Pret toilet fourteen months earlier, was over. Over, in a single swipe, because of a cartoon star.

At eleven fifty-two, she dragged her laptop onto her knees and began drafting her resignation, because she had decided that if she was going to be fired she would at least leave on her own terms and in her own font. Dear Mr Ellison, It is with great regret. She deleted it. Dear Theodore. Worse. To whom it may concern, I regret to inform you that I have accidentally ended my own career. Closer, but she was not sure it would pass legal.

She wrote and rewrote for an hour. At some point she began to cry quietly, the way you do when you are too tired for it to be dramatic. At some point she stopped. At some point it was one in the morning and the radiator went silent, and in that terrible stillness she heard it: a thin, muffled buzzing coming from somewhere near the laundry.

Poppy crawled across the carpet on her hands and knees, dug through a mountain of socks, and lifted her phone with two trembling fingers.

There was a single new notification. It was not from Dee.

It was a private message, and the name at the top of it made every drop of blood in her body go very still.

Theodore Ellison.