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“He didn’t get me,” I say slowly, which in my head, is true—because I never fell for Miles, not for a second. Whereas some of these ladies eventually became (maybe still are) romantically infatuated. And I can see how. “As some of you might know, I worked with Albie Hart before all this and so, I’m pretty much immune to players because I had a front-row seat to like, the biggest wanker around.”
True, but also, not true. It’s better sometimes to let people believe what they want to, or what you need them to. I need to be the least of Miles’s worries right now. It has to be someone he doesn’t see coming who teaches him a lesson.
A couple of women whisper in each other’s ears but I ignore them.
“So, what I will say…” I pause for dramatic effect and that has some of them on the edge of their seat. “Having seen a few things when I worked in that world, you know, sort of being surrounded by all that, you know, promiscuity… I really can’t help but think Chrissy might be letting him get away with it because they have an arrangement of their own. You know what I mean?”
Gasps, shock, but mostly… they start nodding or shaking their heads. It makes sense of it all, doesn’t it?
“It’s a fucking travesty,” someone blurts, and when I and others turn to look at her, this particular lady—Claire, from HR, who is a bit mumsy looking—appears to have spontaneously spoken and covered her mouth, because she can’t hold it in. “Sorry, but… I’m here because one of our girls Alexia was so traumatised by what he did to her, she didn’t even give notice. I heard a few months later she’d been put on pills and all sorts, had to go back and live with her mum and dad, and the last I knew she was still unemployed and filling her days volunteering or something because he’d left her a shell of her former self.”
One girl bursts into tears while a couple of others sit staring into space, the kind of violent rage in their eyes that I’ve had to contend with plenty of times before as a bouncer—after catching their spouse or lover at it with someone else in a dark corner.
“Short of us all staging a mass walkout, I don’t know what any of us can do at the office,” I tell the room, sighing. “But I know what I can do outside of the office.”
I spot ears prick up and hands rub chins. Lila says, “What are you thinking, Mirabelle?”
“You have access to his calendar for work stuff?” I say to her, and she nods. “We need access to his personal calendar. Because I have a friend who can make sure he’s turned away from several bars and restaurants across the city.”
Well, no, I don’t have a friend. I have several friends. And those friends will do what I ask because I’m that “friend” that they know and trust. And if I tell them the guy’s a pervert, they will believe me. Anyway…
“You mean, we kind of, cut him off from his addiction,” says mumsy Claire.
I nod. “Exactly that. With Stacie gone, it’ll be Lila running their diaries and whatnot but he’ll be eager to find a replacement PA. Who normally recruits?”
“I do,” says Lila. “And Chrissy only spends about five minutes interviewing them, because she trusts me, and because the second PA is my responsibility, it’s me who has to be happy with them, never mind what they think.”
“So, we recruit this PA really early on?” says a woman in the back—whom I recognise to be Iris, one of our talented graphic designers. She looks red-eyed enough to be ready to fight the fucker, I decide.
“What about the other fellas in the building?” says another voice. “Not all of them are pricks like Miles. Can’t they help us, too? Make him think they’re encroaching on his patch, or something? I dunno.”
“I wouldn’t involve any of them,” says Iris, who as a designer works mostly with men. “They all despise Miles and can’t stand the twat. But most of them have families or mortgages. They won’t risk fucking themselves up for a vendetta they don’t really care about.”
“That’s worth a thought,” someone says, and everyone else nods.
“The point is, though… when you think about it…” I put to the room. “Miles has always picked girls that aren’t friends with any of the other women he’s screwed, right? He’s clever.” Most nod their heads. For instance, mumsy Claire is sitting there angry but composed, while the friend she’s holding the hand of next to her is in pieces, constantly rubbing her sleeve under her eyes.
Lila starts talking about how she’ll try and use the appointment of a new PA to teach Miles a lesson, and how she might also get into his phone to have a look at his personal calendar.
While she’s speaking it occurs to me that if Lila sees how he labels women in his phone, she might not be able to control herself as I have done—and what’s more, she’d also see my name in there. Though I never sexted him back, per se, he obviously sent me dirty texts that I responded to with filthy emojis or GIFs.
If he’s got any sense, he’ll have already changed the passcode for his phone and might be really possessive of it after I managed to get into it.
“One thing is for sure,” I tell the group, “we have to be as clever as possible or he’ll see us coming. I know he’s hurt loads of people badly and the fact he got married… yeah, well, we’ve fairly established he’s rotten through and through, but Lila is right… she can set the ball rolling. The rest of us need to hang fire and report if we see or hear anything. Agreed?”
A few people down their drinks and leave quietly without another word. For some of the women, this has been embarrassing, beyond mortifying, and just plain sad. Perhaps they only came today because they needed to know, once and for all, that it wasn’t anything they did—it was all him.
When it’s just Lila and me, she gestures at the bar and we take a tall stool each. The barwoman returns and Lila orders two beers.
Just us, she tips it to her lips and grins. “I saw you swigging that thing earlier and got jealous. Wanted me some of that.” She clinks her bottle to mine, giving a slight chuckle. “I started out as a festival promoter, you know? If you’d been born ten years earlier, we’d have probably become friends. We’d have definitely crossed paths.”
She’d have definitely been busy shagging Albie and not doing her job, I think.
Pouring some beer down my throat, I decide we probably would’ve been fake friends at best, because it’s obvious she has her own vested interests. She’s been with Chrissy for four years and must know a great deal she can’t tell us. There’s no way she didn’t sign an ironclad NDA.
“Is he why there’s an air in the office? Why people don’t work tight-knit.” I’d noticed a couple of weeks into working for the company, that people mainly focus on their own stuff and few actually talk outside of emails. I appreciated this when I first started actually; I was a bit broken and just needed something that allowed me to distance myself from what I’d done before. Being able to keep my head down and not have too much asked of me was a godsend at first. Yet as I’d got on with the task at hand, it’d obviously been detected I was very capable, hence the rapid promotion.
“I don’t know. You’ve met Chrissy, right? She can be scary,” Lila muses, one razor-sharp eyebrow flicking up. “Sometimes, that’s why it’s very quiet. She’ll have sent an email that might have eviscerated one of the teams. Wait and see, she’ll bide her time before she turns the spotlight on you.”
