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‘Tony isn’t here, Barnaby,’ Sienna said calmly as she scraped. ‘And the only ice in the place is getting defrosted as we speak.’

Barnaby let out a loud squawk. ‘Flush it! Flush it!’

Sienna gave up arguing with him. ‘Will do,’ she muttered, carefully prying loose a satisfyingly large chunk of ice and tossing it into the sink.

She was tired. But not tired enough. Her brain still whirred over yesterday’s calamity.

She hadn’t meant to insult Robin. Not really. When Sienna had sat down to record the debrief, her intentions had been pure. Even when she lost the vote.

But watching Robin sit across from her, looking so maddeningly, smugly confident in her correctness, Sienna had lost it. And couldn’t really say she’d found it since. She was half ashamed of herself, and half still believed she had every right to challenge Robin’s bullshit.

That was the worst part of it all. Sienna had spent her entire adult life believing her self-regulation skills were impeccable. Yet around Robin Croft, thirty seconds of eye contact was all it took to reduce Sienna to a toddler chucking her toys out of her pram.

She simply couldn’t understand what it was about Robin that got under her skin so ferociously. She had worked with difficult colleagues and shitty bosses, but none of them had ever made her lose her marbles like this. It was like Robin possessed a master key to her fuse box and flipped every breaker just by existing.

‘Spark,’ Sienna whispered bitterly into the cavernous freezer.

‘That bag is light!’ Barnaby shrieked, flapping his wings.

‘Hey, maybe listen for once,’ Sienna said, pausing her work. ‘I’d also settle for you repeating some of The Complete Jane Austen. I only play it for you every bloody day.’

Barnaby had nothing to say to that.

Sienna looked at the dense layer of ice coating the metal coils of the freezer and wondered if she was clinically insane to keep at it. She had to chip away at the damn thing every single month just to keep it functional. Anyone else would have bought a new freezer. But Sienna would die on the hill of, ‘If it ain’t broke…’

Sienna jammed the wooden spatula into the ice again with fury. With a sharp crack, a massive slab of ice broke away, exposing bare metal beneath.

‘Beat you,’ Sienna murmured, dropping the dishwashing gloves onto the floor and rubbing her temples.

Barnaby swooped down from his perch, landing heavily on the back of a kitchen chair. He cocked his head. ‘Just lie down. It’ll pass,’ he said gently.

Sienna stared at the bird, a bitter smile touching her lips. ‘When, though?’

Barnaby didn’t answer, just clicked his beak softly and preened his wing.

Sienna leaned back against the cold linoleum, staring up at the white ceiling. Date Two was tomorrow. The panic that ensued didn’t really come from the fact that Robin was winning. It was that Sienna genuinely didn’t know what version of herself was going to show up on that date.

And she was terrified to find out.

Sixteen

Robin sat slouched on a chair in Dora Jenks’ office—if you could call a room buried under towers of loose scripts and empty coffee cups an office. Robin was drinking something from Costa that she was pretty sure contained her entire day’s calorie limit. She knew why she was drinking it. She hoped the sugar would give her some bloody dopamine for this meeting.

Sitting in a room with Sienna Vance was starting to stress her the fuck out. She never knew what either of them might say. She was all for a bit of spontaneity. But she was beginning to learn that there was a dark side to not knowing what lunacy was coming at her next.

Sienna was perched on a chair next to her, wearing a dark grey suit so sharp it could cut diamond, looking like she was trying not to touch anything in the hectic office.

‘Thanks for coming in, both. I just thought you’d want to hear the good news,’ Dora said without looking up, her short messy black hair sticking up at odd angles as she aggressively tapped away on her phone with one hand and scrolled a laptop with the other. ‘A thirty-second clip of you two ‘debating’ during that debrief is currently sitting at just under a million views. It’s driving…’ She checked the laptop screen quickly, her thumb never stopping on her phone. ‘I can’t even keep up with the streams; the numbers keep jumping.’

Robin winced. ‘Dora, look. This was fun for a second but…’ She sighed, glancing at Sienna. ‘I don’t know if it’s working.’

‘Working?’ Dora interrupted, her eyes flashing up from her screens for a fraction of a second.

‘In the, er, broader sense.’

‘What broader sense?’ Dora asked, baffled.

‘I guess I feel like maybe all this hostility isn’t good for my soul,’ Robin said weakly.