I wore the Deliveroo jacket because I'd taken the run on the way over.
Our morning rider had called in sick at half-five, and the platform doesn't care that the bakery owner is also the bakery owner — if a Marylebone hotel is expecting a tray of breakfast pastries by seven, somebody puts on the helmet. I had a four-hour cake in a hot box on my back. Hand-piped white peach and Earl Grey, finished at four in the morning. It was Hugo's birthday.
Everyone in his office knew the story. He was the new vice-president on the up at Meridian Crest. I was the girl from his postgrad years who delivered things on a bike.
The two associates at the tenant turnstile didn't even let me reach the desk.
"Riders use the loading bay," one of them said, smiling at the other. "Floor 14's got a Deliveroo problem lately. Someone's chatting them up."
The receptionist looked at the flour smear under my jacket sleeve and said, very brightly, that I'd need an appointment to go up.
Hugo finally came down. He didn't take the cake. He took my arm and pulled me into the fire-stair.
"Wren," he said, "for God's sake. Don't come here dressed like that again. It's embarrassing."
He carried the box out himself. He dropped it in the bin by the lift. Then he put his hand on the small of Tatiana Ffoulkes-Gray's back and walked her into the lift and the doors shut.
I stood in the lobby and rang Mr Pemberton.
"Miss Ashcombe."
"Pemberton," I said, "the next rent review on 22 Bishop's Yard. Bring it forward. All commercial tenants. Fifty per cent uplift."
There was a small pause.
"All of them, Miss Ashcombe?"
"All of them."
He didn't ask why. He never does.
Hugo didn't know.
The whole of 22 Bishop's Yard, EC2 — the freehold — was in my name.
I'd been up since four.
I'd whisked the buttercream by hand because the stand mixer makes the texture sit wrong on a Victoria sponge. The white peach was fresh, halved into the curd that morning; the Earl Grey was steeped into the cream the night before. I'd hand-piped the rosettes in the dim above the bakery counter, wearing my whites and a clean apron, with a glass of water and the radio low.
I didn't drive in. I didn't want a Mercedes turning up at Bishopsgate on the morning of his birthday.
So I put on the bakery whites, then the Deliveroo jacket over them — the rider had cancelled and I'd taken the run on the way down to surprise him — and clipped the cake into the insulated bag and got on the bike.
The two men in suits were standing inside the turnstile when I came through, like they'd been called. They weren't security. They were his people.
"Riders," the taller one said, "loading bay."
"I'm not delivering," I said. "I'm here to see Hugo Carrington."
The shorter one took half a step closer. He was smiling at his colleague, not at me.
"Carrington? You're here to see Hugo Carrington? What — has he been tipping well?"
The receptionist looked up from her screen. Her eyes went to the flour on the cuff of my jacket and stayed there a beat too long.
"You'll need an appointment," she said.
I put the box down between my feet and rang him.
It rang three times.
"You're here." His voice was low.
"I'm in the lobby."
There was a two-second silence. Then: "Why are you dressed like that?"
I tightened my grip on the carry handle and felt my knuckles go white.
"I came straight off a delivery. I haven't been home."
I heard a woman laugh on his end of the line. Bright, unbothered, the laugh of someone who'd been in the room a while.
"Who is it, Hugo? Don't tell me it's the Deliveroo girlfriend."
He muttered, "Don't," and hung up.
Five minutes later the lift opened.
He was wearing the dark grey suit I'd had altered for him last winter, and the Art Deco onyx-and-platinum cufflinks I'd bought him at the Bonhams sale on Bond Street the year before that.
He saw me.
His first reaction wasn't relief.
It was the frown.
He didn't reach for the cake. He took my elbow and walked me past reception and through the unmarked door to the fire-stair. Concrete walls. The sound of the door clicking shut behind us was loud.
"Wren. What are you doing?"
"It's your birthday."
"And you couldn't change?" His voice had a sharp little edge on it I hadn't heard before. "This is the Square Mile, Wren. It's not your poky little bakery."
I stopped breathing for a second.
I'd opened that bakery because I liked making puddings. He knew that. He'd sat outside it on a wet evening five years ago and eaten half of a sponge I'd written off as a failure, and he'd said, "Wren, you smell of butter and warm sugar. I love it."
So when he was broke, the smell of bakery on me was warmth.
After the promotion, it was an embarrassment.
I held the box out to him.
"Eat the cake first. I made it from four."
He glanced at the door behind me, like someone might come through.
"Don't."
Then he took it.
He carried it the four steps to the bin by the fire-door, lifted the lid, and dropped it in.
The cardboard hit the side of the bin liner with a soft, dull sound.
White peach and buttercream slid down the inside of a black bag.
Something in my chest did the same thing.
The fire-stair door opened.
A woman in a champagne silk dress was standing there with an armful of red roses.
She was beautiful. Her voice was not.
"Hugo, everyone's waiting to cut the cake. Why are you down here this long?"
He let go of my arm before she'd finished the sentence.
When he turned to her, his face changed. Softened. "Tati. One minute."
Tatiana Ffoulkes-Gray.
Roger Ffoulkes-Gray's only daughter. Roger ran EMEA at Meridian Crest. I knew her name because Hugo had said it twice in five years — once to tell me her father liked him, and once to tell me she was just a colleague and I shouldn't read into it.
She did not look like a colleague. She slid her hand around the inside of his elbow with the absent confidence of someone who had done it before.
She looked at the bin.
"Did the girlfriend make this? That's sweet. The packaging's a bit cheap."
Hugo's face did something complicated. "Wren, just go home."
"You're spending your birthday with her, then."
Tati answered before he did. "Well, of course. Hugo's leading the carve-out team. You'd have nothing to talk about up there. You're a courier."
I looked at Hugo.
He didn't disagree.
He just lowered his voice. "Wren. Don't make this awkward."
I laughed. Just the once. "I'm making it awkward?"
He flinched, and then his voice dropped a degree colder. "Are you going to do this here? I'm not the same person, Wren. I'm running point on a four-hundred-million-pound carve-out. I can't be sitting in a bakery with you anymore."
Tati gave his arm a small, satisfied shake.
"Come up. People are watching."
He looked at me one more time before he went.
There was no apology in the look. Only impatience.
He put his hand on her back and they walked through the door into the corridor.
Before the lift doors closed I saw a half-circle of his colleagues standing inside it with their phones up, filming. Someone said, low and clear: "Carrington's having a rough one, isn't he. Got a Deliveroo girlfriend chasing him down the stairs."
Someone else said: "Tati's far more his shape, isn't she."
I stood in the fire-stair with the cake in the bin and the door shutting and the laughter cutting out.
I took my phone out.
Pemberton answered on the second ring.
"Miss Ashcombe."
I looked at the bin.
"Pemberton. The next rent review on 22 Bishop's Yard. Bring it forward. All commercial tenants. Fifty per cent uplift, next quarter."
He paused. "All of them."
"All of them."
"Meridian Crest are on a head-lease, fourteen through twenty-one."
"I know."
By five that afternoon Meridian Crest's internal channels had gone off.
I hadn't even got back to the bakery when Hugo started ringing.
I let it go.
He rang six times.
The seventh call came up Tati Ffoulkes-Gray.
I picked up.
"Wren," she said, "are you out of your mind."
I was untying my apron with one hand. "Miss Ffoulkes-Gray. Did you need something."
"Don't be cute." Her voice was at the top of its register. "The rent's just been revised on 22 Bishop's Yard. That's you, isn't it."
I laughed, very quietly. "Me. I'm a courier, Miss Ffoulkes-Gray. How would I do that."
She was quiet for a beat, and then her tone went dry. "Don't insult me. I heard you on the phone earlier to a Pemberton. Are you sleeping with someone in the managing agents? Is this how you get back at us?"
I looked at the bowl of unused buttercream sitting on the counter where I'd left it that morning. I made my voice perfectly level.
"Miss Ffoulkes-Gray. I'd suggest you ask your father whether the head-lease has a five-yearly rent-review clause."
There was a silence so complete I could hear the air-conditioning at her end.
"Are you threatening me."
"It's a reminder."
She hung up. The last thing she said was: "You wait."
Ten minutes later Hugo came in.
He didn't sneer at the bakery this time.
He came in with his suit jacket over one arm, his shirt creased under the armpit, his forehead damp. There were three regulars in. Mrs Patel was reading the Standard at the window table with a slice of Victoria sponge on her plate.
He saw me and dropped his voice. "Wren. Out the back. Now."
I kept smoothing buttercream onto the side of a cake. "Whatever you have to say, you can say it here."
He spoke through his teeth. "Who did you ring."
I didn't look up.
"Ring."
"The rent review at Bishop's Yard. Don't tell me it's not you."
I put the palette knife down.
"Hugo. Weren't you the one this morning who said I just run a poky little bakery."
His face went still.
"I didn't mean it like that."
"You binned a four-hour cake. Did you mean that, then."
Mrs Patel raised her head over the paper. "Oh, Hugo. You binned my Wren's cake?"
He turned on her, voice climbing. "This is between us. Stay out of it."
Mrs Patel put the paper down very slowly. "When you couldn't afford supper, my love left you a brioche on this counter every night. Was I out of it then?"
His mouth moved.
I waited for shame to come into his face.
What came in instead was something harder. He looked at me and his voice went flat.
"Wren. Don't push me."