Page 73 of Alice Carver Manifests Her Perfect Life
Yes, the whole night.
Because it’s a good place to see the moon.
No, not on my own.
With friends.
Alice.
No, not Astrid.
Just Alice.
Okay. Friend. Singular.
Yes.
What exactly do you want me to say?
Hello?
‘Who was that?’ I asked nonchalantly, turning round to him.
‘You know it was Ebba.’
‘Ebba, your girlfriend?’
Matthew sighed. ‘Again. Ebba is not my girlfriend.’
‘She clearly thinks she is,’ I said, my face breaking out into a grin. ‘And she totally freaked out about last night, didn’t she? Admit it.’
‘You’re really annoying, Alice,’ he said. ‘But yes. She was not happy about last night.’ He looked straight at me. ‘Specifically, you.’
‘Well, I’m sure you set her straight.’ I stared right back, hoping he couldn’t hear the sound of my heart pounding. ‘I’m just Astrid’s younger sister. Right?’
‘Astrid’s interminably annoying younger sister,’ said Matthew Lloyd, looking at me with an expression I couldn’t quite fathom, before answering another call.
Even when we were back at Astrid’s, there was still that feeling of possibility, of adventure, like Matthew and I had shared something. I was half worried about Astrid being weird about the fact we’d been off on our own together, but she didn’t even ask; she was curled up on the sofa, next to Aziz, with a hangover from hell, but a look of contentment on her face that I hadn’t seen in weeks. Months. Longer, maybe. She was faux pissed-off with Matthew for bailing last night, and for paying for everyone’s meals in advance (imagine being at the point where you’re rich enough to tell people off for paying for you), but essentially she was too tired and sick to be her usual acerbic self.
‘It paid off,’ I said to Matthew quietly, when we ended up in the kitchen together, and we both looked over at Aziz and Astrid, entwined and dozing on the sofa. ‘Your ten-course tasting menu romantic evening worked.’
‘I definitely paid over the odds to get your sister laid,’ said Matthew.
I sniggered. ‘She obviously needed it. You’ve solved everything.’
‘Yeah. I doubt that.’
Whilst they were sleeping, Matthew and I went for a walk and he asked why I was worried people didn’t value me at work, and he was so genuinely interested I found myself opening upto him. I told him it was difficult to be motivated with Harry Piles as Deputy MD, and how much it annoyed me that he has such shit ideas, doesn’t understand the market, and was only employed because of his family connections and that any good ideas he had were in fact stolen from other people, viz., largely, me.
He raised an eyebrow when I told him that the whole company, in fact, was founded on a bunch of old family connections. (Guy went to Eton with half the shareholders; Edward Puesdon’s brother runs a TV channel that is effectively owned by the same parent company; Harry Piles’ father is second cousin twice removed to the CEO.)
Matthew said, ‘Because of course you’ve never used your family connections to get ahead.’
I said he sounded like Drunk Stephen and Matthew said Stephen was patently ‘a highly perceptive and intelligent individual’. So I explained that Drunk Stephen was also pissed off at work because he’d been overlooked for a promotion at least once and he’d basically done all the covers for our bestselling books as well as the new logo for the company AND the new non-fiction list, which wasn’t even his job.
I even took him through a few of my own ideas and why I thought they would work, including the one for a series of light non-fiction books for teens about mindfulness and mental health and consent and so on, authored by popular TikTok creators, which luckily I hadn’t mentioned in front of Harry Piles and thus he had not yet been able to steal.
Matthew said that for someone who claimed not to care about my job, I’d certainly put a lot of thought into it. He suggested I work up some of my ideas into a document, ratherthan wait for manifesting to deliver, and that my publishing company sounded like it had a fairly toxic work environment and a culture shift evidently needed to happen. His phone rang and I saw it was Ebba again before he muted it and returned it to his pocket. He explained he had a tough week ahead, work-wise, and he needed a bit of head space. I said, ‘I guess your job is often challenging,’hoping he might remind me of what he actually did without me having to admit I’d never really listened to him before, but we passed a wine shop and Matthew decided to buy a bottle for supper.
