Evelyn
Evelyn had never understood the phrase “bone tired” until she slumped into the back of the company town car and let her head thunk against the chilled window. The city was all taillights and glass, the traffic crawling up the Thames like a mechanical artery. The car radio, too polite to break the silence but too timid to play anything interesting, murmured barely above the idle. She rolled her temple against the glass, willing herself not to close her eyes. The city always felt different afterhours, like it belonged to someone else—a version of London for the insomniacs, the shift workers, the ones who were always just a little bit out of sync.
She recognised a stretch of illuminated office blocks on the other side of the river. There: the Crawford building, the one she’d finally left for the night, its logo a backlit badge of familial expectation. The lights on the top floor burned brightest. Evelyn pictured herself, slouching over spreadsheets, bickering with Maggie, trying to ignore the yawning chasm of her inbox. Her name, in a sense, floated twenty stories over the city, a daily dare to not fuck things up.
The driver dropped her in front of the glass lobby of her apartment tower. She could have walked the last few blocks, as usual, because Evelyn was conscious she had to fit some sort of exercise into her daily routine, but her feet still ached from yesterday’s shoes, and she was already dreading the ascent to her apartment. There was something obscene about the speed of these lifts, how they whipped you from lobby to penthouse before you’d even formed a thought. Sometimes, on the way up, she counted the seconds. Tonight she just let her head loll, wishing briefly that the elevator would stall so she’d have an excuse not to keep going. Evelyn knew that even though she was home, she would still work if given the opportunity.
When the doors pinged open, the silence of the penthouse swallowed her whole. It was an architectural marvel—glass everywhere, sharp lines, the distant hum of the city faint as tinnitus. There was no evidence of Mindy now, no makeup smeared on the master bath counter, no abandoned trainers in the hall. Evelyn wasn’t sure if she preferred it that way.
She didn’t bother with the lights, just dropped her bag near the entrance and padded barefoot across the hardwood. The city’s glow spilled in from the full wall of windows, all blue and orange and white, making the apartment look like a showroom.She went straight to the kitchen, opened the fridge, and stared inside as if waiting for a message from God to appear between the almond milk and a half-empty jar of Polish pickles.
There was an unopened bottle of Sauvignon Blanc on the top shelf. She took it out, found a glass, and filled it higher than she normally would. Only then did she notice her hands were shaking.
Evelyn was not the type to wallow. She’d been taught, by genetics or by parental example, to process emotions at a dead sprint and leave them panting in the dust. The trick was to stay in motion, to always have something new in front of you—another task, another problem, another reason to keep your hands busy. But now, with no emails and no Maggie and no Bug (God, Bug), the apartment pressed down on her, a suffocating bubble.
She sipped her wine, wandered over to the windows, and stared out at the city. From this height, it was impossible to distinguish individuals, let alone lives. The London Eye rotated with measured grace in the distance, a useless clock for tourists. She pressed her forehead against the glass, letting the cold bite her skin.
She should have been thinking about the next day’s staff meeting, or the interminable board conference, or the half-done Christmas campaign plan on her laptop. Instead, her mind kept drifting sideways, snagging on the day’s oddest moments. The dog, for starters. Bug. He’d just sat there in the centre of her office like he owned it, like he’d been waiting for her his entire life. He hadn’t barked or whined, just looked at her as if he knew exactly what she needed and was prepared to wait forever.
Then, of course, there was Alyssa Fox. The woman had walked into Evelyn’s office like a summer storm—sudden, warm, impossible to ignore. And sure, Evelyn was attracted to women; she’d never hidden that, even from her father,who’d simply shrugged and asked if she needed help finding a date for the annual charity ball. But this was different. She couldn’t stop thinking about Alyssa’s smile, the way she’d called Evelyn out—“condescending arsehole”—without flinching. She’d apologised later, but the words had stuck, vibrating in Evelyn’s skull for hours. No one talked to her like that. Maybe that was why she couldn’t let it go.
Evelyn drained her glass and poured another. She imagined what Maggie would say if she could see her now: “You’re supposed to be out living, not marinating in white wine.” But the idea of another empty restaurant meal or a night at a bar, surrounded by strangers and their faux intimacy, made her want to crawl out of her own skin.
She made a half-hearted attempt to open her laptop, stared at the login screen for a solid minute, and then snapped it shut again. Instead, she roamed the apartment, glass in hand, flicking on lights as she went. The master bedroom was as pristine as she’d left it. She passed the guest room—formerly Mindy’s “office,” now just a clean space with a dead plant and a pile of unopened letters on the desk.
The bathroom was clinical, all stone and glass and luxury fittings. Evelyn took a perverse comfort in the fact that even her toothbrush looked military-precise in its placement. She studied herself in the mirror: the flawless hair, the subtle makeup, the suit jacket that still looked sharp despite the hour. But there were circles under her eyes, and the tension in her jaw was starting to look permanent.
She thought of her mother, as she often did when the hour was late and the apartment quiet. Roslyn had always been the strong one, the genius who’d built an empire out of a few shopfronts and a dream. Evelyn remembered her mother’s laugh—loud, undignified, full-bodied. She wished she could conjureit now, just for a second, but her memory only served up a few ragged snippets, faded like old Polaroids.
Sometimes she wondered what her mother would say if she saw her now. Probably something like, “You work too hard, Evie. You have to let yourself be loved.” But that had never come easy, not for any of the Crawfords.
After removing her makeup and climbing into comfortable pyjamas, Evelyn retreated to the sofa, tucking her knees up beneath her. She switched on the television, scrolled through the endless menu, and settled on a cooking show hosted by a man with a suspiciously orange tan. She watched as he flambéed a stack of bananas, narrated with a theatrical cadence that made Evelyn roll her eyes.
The day kept replaying: her confrontation with Alyssa, her own embarrassing inability to act normal in the face of an attractive, competent woman. What would she have said if she could do it again? Would she have been less defensive, more open? Was it possible, even now, to backtrack and try again?
The thought made her stomach flutter, which was ridiculous. She barely knew the woman. Still, something about Alyssa had set off a quiet alarm in her head—equal parts caution and curiosity.
And then there was Bug, the improbable Cocker Spaniel who had clearly decided, in his dog wisdom, that Evelyn was his new project. He had an aura about him, a kind of steady-eyed patience she found both alien and soothing. It was almost funny, the idea of Evelyn—Ice Queen of the Executive Floor—getting attached to a dog, especially one with a name like Bug. She could already hear the jokes from the board members. But the truth was, the dog made her office feel less like a cell and more like a place where something real could happen.
Maybe she would bring him up again tomorrow. Just for an hour, to see what it was like. It couldn’t hurt.
She finished her wine and set the glass on the table. Her phone buzzed, a notification from her email. She ignored it.
Instead, she padded over to the window, leaned her cheek against the glass, and looked out at the city—her city, her company, her life. A thousand windows, each hiding its own story. She wondered, for a moment, what it would be like to belong to someone again. Not just in a superficial, two-people-sharing-space kind of way, but really belong.
The thought scared her more than she cared to admit.
She wandered back to the kitchen, put the bottle away. As she flicked off the lights and headed for bed, she allowed herself, just for a second, to imagine Alyssa’s warm hand in hers, the pressure of Bug’s sleepy head on her lap.
Evelyn did not sleep easily, not these days. The doctor had offered her a prescription—small white pills in an orange bottle that sat untouched in her medicine cabinet, a kind of threat. Evelyn preferred her own method: lie as still as possible, ignore the distractions, let her mind spiral into exhaustion and finally cave. Most nights she managed it.
Tonight, the city’s noise was a comfort rather than a curse. She lay in bed, duvet pulled up to her chin, and watched the ambient glow from the skyline crawl across her ceiling. For a while, she listened to the distant sirens, the low drone of a night bus rounding the corner.
But sleep, ever evasive, only sharpened her thoughts. And so her mind drifted back, as it often did, to her mother.
Roslyn Crawford had been the kind of woman who could walk into a room and immediately absorb all the chaos, harness it, and whip it into purpose. She’d always seemed to know what everyone needed—her clients, her family, the staff at Crawford’s Pet Supplies, and, most of all, Evelyn. After the cancer diagnosis, Evelyn had expected her mother to shrink, to become a shadow of the force she’d always been. But no: if anything, Roslyn grewsharper, more deliberate, as if her remaining time on earth was something she had to deploy with surgical precision.
Evelyn remembered the Christmas before Roslyn died. She’d come home from work—exhausted, trying to balance her new role at Crawford’s—and found her mother on the floor, knee-deep in tinsel, untangling a mess of lights with a patience that bordered on religious.
