The Passengers(109)
‘That’s because marriage won’t be “a thing” either,’ Deepak retorted. ‘It’ll become an outdated institution, you mark my words. You won’t need to prove anything to anyone because everyone will be partnered with who they’re destined to be with.’
‘You’re really not helping me here,’ Nick said, and dug his fork into the crumbly remains of Sally’s raspberry cheesecake.
‘Sorry, mate, you’re right. Let’s have a toast. To the certainty of chance.’
‘To the certainty of chance,’ the others replied and clinked their glasses against Nick’s.
All but Sally’s glass reached his.
Chapter 5
ELLIE
Ellie swiped the screen of her tablet and begrudged the extensive list of tasks she needed to complete before her working day was over.
Her assistant, Ula, was ferociously efficient and updated and prioritised the list five times daily, even though Ellie never asked her to. Instead of finding this useful, Ellie often felt animosity for both the tablet and Ula for their constant reminders of her failing in reaching the bottom of the list. Sometimes she felt the urge to shove the device down Ula’s throat.
Ellie had hoped that by now, being her own boss, she’d have hired enough reliable staff to whom she could delegate a large proportion of her workload. But as time marched on, she gradually began to accept the label of ‘bloody control freak’ that an ex-boyfriend had once thrown at her.
Ellie glanced at the clock. It was 10.10pm, and she realised she’d already missed the celebratory drinks for her chairman of operations, who’d recently welcomed his son into the world. She doubted anyone had believed her promise to attend – she rarely found the time to fraternise – and while she encouraged it among her staff and even subsidised the company’s social club, when it came to her own participation, time had a habit of getting away from her, despite her best intentions.
Ellie let out a long yawn and glanced out of the floor-to-ceiling glass windows. Her ostentatiously unostentatious office was on the seventy-first floor of London’s Shard building, and the panoramic view allowed her to see way beyond the Thames below, out towards the colourful lights illuminating the night sky as far as the eye could see.
She slipped out of her Miu Miu heels and walked barefoot across the thick white rugs, which adorned the floor, towards the drinks cabinet in the corner of the room. She ignored the stock of champagne, wine, whisky and vodka and chose one of a dozen chilled cans of an energy drink instead. She poured it into a glass with a handful of ice cubes and took a sip. The decor of her office was as sparse as her home, she realised. It said nothing about her. But when you didn’t care enough about your own decisions it was far more convenient to pay interior designers to make them for you.
Ellie’s business was her priority, not the thread count of the Egyptian cotton covering her bed, how many David Hockney paintings hung from her picture rails or the number of Swarovski crystals used in her hallway chandelier.
She made her way back to her desk and reluctantly glanced at the next day’s to-do list, which Ula had already compiled. She waited for her driver and head of security Andrei to take her home, where she planned to read her PR department’s suggestions on her upcoming speech to the media about a new update to her app. This update would revolutionise her industry so she had to get it right.
Then, at 5.30am the next morning, a hair stylist and a make-up artist would meet her at her Belgravia home ahead of the pre-recorded television interviews with CNN, BBC News 24, Fox News and Al Jazeera. Afterwards, she would sit down with a journalist from the Economist, pose for some photographs for the Press Association and hopefully be back home no later than 10am. It wasn’t the best way to begin her Saturday, she thought.
Ellie’s publicist had forewarned the news agencies that she was only prepared to discuss her work, with strictly no questions to be asked about her personal life. It was why she’d recently turned down a profile feature with Vogue complete with a shoot with legendary photographer Annie Leibovitz. The column inches could have been vast and picked up by publications across the globe, but it wasn’t worth the expense of her privacy. That had already suffered enough over the years.
Along with being notoriously aloof about her life outside of work, Ellie also didn’t want to publicly address the level of criticism her business received – she trusted her PR team to deal with any negativity on her behalf. She’d learned from mistakes of the late Steve Jobs concerning the handling of the iPhone 4 antenna issue, and how much damage it had, at the time, caused to the reputation of both the brand and the figurehead.
Her personal mobile phone lit up on her desk. Few people had the privilege of that number or her private email address: in fact, just a dozen of her 4,000 employees worldwide and family members who she barely had time to see. It wasn’t that she didn’t think about her relatives often – she’d thrown enough money at them over the years to compensate for her lack of presence – but it all came down to there not being enough hours in the day and a lack of mutual understanding. Ellie didn’t have children; they did. They didn’t have a multibillion-pound global company to run; Ellie did.
She lifted the phone and recognised the email address on the screen. Curious, she opened it. ‘Match Your DNA Match confirmed’ it revealed. She frowned. Even though she had registered for the site a long time ago, her immediate reaction was still mistrust that one of her staff was playing a joke on her.