1
I take a deep breath, trying to stay calm.
I am enough, I belong here, I deserve to be here.
I silently repeat the mantra I saw on Instagram to myself—the latest in the long line of attempts to overcome my sickening self-doubt.
I am enough, I belong here, I deserve—
A cough interrupts me and I look up from the table to seehimsmirking at me, as if he knows exactly what I’m doing in the privacy of my own head and knows it’s completely futile.
It’s taken me five years of hard work to get where I am now: Marketing Manager for one of the biggest start-ups in London. I wake up every day feeling as though the rug is about to be pulled out from under me, the mask of competency that I’ve been wearing about to melt away, revealing my true shitty self to the whole world. But Eric Bancroft breezes his way through.
My CV is overflowing with every minuscule marketing-based task I’ve ever done, reading like a pharmacy receipt; full of discount offers (will work for 30 percentoff!), campaigns for antidepressants and medical-grade hay fever tablets. Bancroft’s entire career history is engraved on the gold signet ring he spins around his finger when he’s bored.
Even now, he just sits there, across from me at the expansive wooden conference-room table, utterly relaxed. Never doubting for one second that he deserves to be here. The fractured London sun flows through the twelfth-floor conference room window over half of his face. It makes almost icy blue eyes so bright he looks as if he could shoot lasers through the frames of the tortoiseshell glasses I’m sure he only wears to make himself look smarter.
I glare at him.
“Grace?”
The sound of my name asked as a question bounces off the echoey white-brick walls. My boss, the legendary Susie Jopling, stares at me expectantly.
“Yes, sorry.” My laptop whirs softly as I pull up the presentation full of my performance and growth figures for the month to project onto the wall. My clammy fingers tap away at the keys as I silently will my heartbeat to calm. “Susie, would you mind just pushing the button to move it along for me? I’ll tell you when...”
I am enough, I belong here, I deserve to be here.
“Late night, Hastings?” Eric Bancroft’s villain-like smirk asks, holding the end of a Catch Group–branded pen between his perfect teeth.
He loves to call me by my last name, as though I’m one of his private school frenemies.
“Some of us actually work late, Bancroft,” I reply with a tight smile, eyes fixed on the screen. A light chuckle from his boss, Dharmash, fills the silence as my eyes adjust to my presentation slides projected on the wall. “Next slide, please.”
With feigned confidence, I clear my throat and smooth down the pink suede lapels of my lucky vintage suit. Not the most sensible choice for a sweltering summer in the city, but this, styled with a pair of expensive-looking secondhand trainers from eBay, tricks everyone into believing I am totally put-together.
I throw my hand out to the first upwardly tilting graph. “As you can see here: Fate has had a fantastic month of user growth. Our latest ‘True Love’ campaign hit the exact target demographic we wanted, our twenty-five-to-thirty-four-year-old user base has increased by seven percent month-on-month, which I’m incredibly pleased with.”
Bancroft leans back in his chair and crosses his arms over his navy shirt, no doubt designer. Apparently, a gladiator decides he’s defeated his opponent before they’ve even entered the ring, and Bancroft certainly acts as if he’s already won this month’s Battle of the Graphs.
“Can we see the campaign footage?” Dharmash asks me. “I’d love to see what you guys are doing on the other side of the fence.”
The fence being the metaphorical separation betweenthe infamously polar opposite companies of the Catch Group office: Fate and Ignite, carved into two distinct spaces separated by a floor in the CG high-rise. The remaining ten floors are inhabited by the tech company’s various other gaming apps, streaming services and social media platforms. When I started working at Fate, I didn’t understand why the company’s two premier dating apps were put on different floors, but now I thank the office-floorplan gods that I don’t have to run into Eric Bancroft on a daily basis.
“It’s on the next slide. Susie?” I look over at Susie, who is engrossed in her phone. Heat rising in my cheeks, I go over to the laptop and hit the play button, trying to refocus my attention as soft, twinkly music plays and footage focuses on two people on a garden porch. A stunning man and woman with clasped hands surrounded by blooming bushes of pink roses, to be precise.
“I never liked the idea of using a dating app to find true love, but I’m so glad I took a chance on Fate.” The handsome man in his late twenties is talking to someone behind the camera while taking brief glances at the beautiful woman clinging to his muscled arm with a massive rock sitting on her manicured finger.
“I tried other dating apps, but I never knew who was looking for a real relationship and who was just looking for a quick hook-up,” the woman adds. “Fate helped us find each other in a sea of unserious daters.”
She kisses the man on the cheek, and he smiles down at her. I try not to let the cringe show on my face.
I’ve watched this video a hundred times over, making sure every frame is a perfect depiction of a successful Fate-branded love story. A year ago, I would have been fooled by this, but now this sappy brand of “true love” makes me want to gag and rage and cry all at the same time.
Ever since William broke up with me, the idea of finding a true love match seems like a pipe dream, made up with the sole purpose of earning downloads and selling subscription packages. Fate is a monotonous machine of my own making, spitting out cookie-cutter promises through rose-tinted screens to trick users into hoping for their true love story. I spend most of my days curating new ways to package a concept I no longer believe in: breath-catching, life-altering, loneliness-ending romance.
The video concludes with one final musical flourish, and I resume my presentation.
“In addition to these results, starting this evening Susie is hosting a series of panel talks discussing various topics of life, love and careers to onboard high-profile, serious users to ensure Fate’s offering is, as always, the best in the city.”
