Tess had been thrilled for her. ‘Maybe she’ll meet someone really nice now,’ she’d said to Will. ‘Now she’s got more confidence.’

It seemed that Felicity had met someone really nice. Will. The nicest man Tess knew. That took a lot of confidence, to steal your cousin’s husband.

‘I’m so sorry I just want to die,’ wept Felicity.

Tess pulled back her hand. Felicity – snarky, sarcastic, funny, clever, fat Felicity – sounded like an American cheerleader.

Will tipped his head back and stared at the ceiling with a clenched jaw. He was trying not to cry too. The last time Tess had seen him cry was when Liam was born.

Tess’s eyes were dry. Her heart hammered as if she was terrified, as if her life was in danger. The phone rang.

‘Leave it,’ said Will. ‘It’s after hours.’

Tess stood, went over to her desk and picked up the phone.

‘TWF Advertising,’ she said.

‘Tess, my love, I know it’s late, but we’ve got us a little problem.’

It was Dirk Freeman, Marketing Director of Petra Pharmaceuticals, their most important and lucrative client. It was Tess’s job to make Dirk feel important, to reassure him that although he was fifty-six and was never going to climb any higher in the ranks of senior management, he was the big kahuna, and Tess was his servant, his maid, his lowly chambermaid in fact, and he could tell her what to do, and be flirty, or grumpy, or stern, and she’d pretend to give him a bit of lip, but when it came down to it, she had to do what he said. It had occurred to her recently that the service she was providing Dirk Freeman bordered on sexual.

‘The colour of the dragon on the Cough Stop packaging is all wrong,’ said Dirk. ‘It’s too purple. Much too purple. Have we gone to print?’

Yes, they’d gone to print. Fifty thousand little cardboard boxes had rolled off the presses that day. Fifty thousand perfectly purple, toothily grinning dragons.

The work that had gone into those dragons. The emails, the discussions. And while Tess had been talking about dragons, Will and Felicity had been falling in love.

‘No,’ said Tess, her eyes on her husband and cousin who were both still sitting at the meeting table in the centre of the room, their heads bowed, examining their fingertips, like teenagers on detention. ‘It’s your lucky day, Dirk.’

‘Oh, I thought it would have – well, good.’ He could barely hide his disappointment. He’d wanted Tess all breathless and worried. He’d wanted to hear the tremor of panic in her voice.

His voiced deepened, became as abrupt and authoritative as if he was about to lead his troops onto the battlefield. ‘I need you to hold everything on Cough Stop, right? The lot. Got it?’

‘Got it. Hold everything on Cough Stop.’

‘I’ll get back to you.’

He hung up. There was nothing wrong with the colour. He’d call back the next day and say it was fine. He’d just needed to feel powerful for a few moments. One of the younger hot shots had probably made him feel inferior in a meeting.

‘The Cough Stop boxes went to print today,’ Felicity turned in her seat and looked worriedly at Tess.

‘It’s fine,’ said Tess.

‘But if he’s going to change –’ said Will.

‘I said it’s fine.’

She didn’t feel angry yet. Not really. But she could feel the possibility of a fury worse than anything she’d ever experienced, a simmering vat of anger that could explode like a fireball, destroying everything in its vicinity.

She didn’t sit down again. Instead she turned and examined the whiteboard where they recorded all their work in progress.

Cough Stop packaging!

Feathermart press ad!!

Bedstuff website :)

It was humiliating to see her own scrawly, carefree, confident handwriting with its flippant exclamation marks. The smiley face next to the Bedstuff website, because they’d worked so hard to get that job, pitching against bigger companies, and then, yes! They’d won it. She’d drawn that smiley face yesterday, when she had been ignorant of the secret that Will and Felicity were sharing. Had they exchanged rueful looks behind her back when she’d drawn the smiley face? She won’t be so smiley-faced once we confess our little secret, will she?

The phone rang again.

This time Tess let it go to the answering service.

TWF Advertising. Their names entwined together to form their little dream business. The idle ‘what if’ conversation they’d actually made happen.

The Christmas before last they’d been in Sydney for the holiday. As was traditional, they’d spent Christmas Eve at Felicity’s parents’ house. Tess’s Auntie Mary and Uncle Phil. Felicity was still fat. Pretty and pink and perspiring in a size 22 dress. They’d had the traditional sausages on the barbecue, the traditional creamy pasta salad, the traditional pavlova. Felicity and Will had both been whingeing about their jobs. Incompetent management. Stupid colleagues. Draughty offices. And so on and so forth.

‘Jeez, you’re a miserable bunch, aren’t you,’ said Uncle Phil, who didn’t have anything to whinge about now he was retired.

‘Why don’t you go into business together?’ said Tess’s mother.

It was true that they were all in similar fields. Tess was the marketing communications manager for a but-this-is-the-way-we’ve-always-done-it legal publishing company. Will was the creative director of a large, prestigious extremely-pleased-with-themselves advertising agency. (That’s how they’d met; Tess had been Will’s client.) Felicity was a graphic designer working for a tyrant.

Once they started talking about it, the ideas fell into place so fast. Click, click, click! By the time they were eating the last mouthfuls of pavlova, it was all set. Will would be the creative director! Obviously! Felicity would be the art director! Of course! Tess would be the business manager! That one wasn’t quite so obvious. She’d never held a role like that. She’d always been on the client side, and she considered herself something of a social introvert.

In fact, a few weeks ago she’d done a Reader’s Digest quiz in a doctor’s waiting room called ‘Do you suffer from Social Anxiety?’ and her answers (all ‘C’s) confirmed that she did, in fact, suffer from social anxiety and should seek professional help or ‘join a support group’. Everybody who did that quiz probably got the same result. If you didn’t suspect you had social anxiety, you wouldn’t bother doing the quiz; you’d be too busy chatting with the receptionist.

She certainly did not seek professional help, or tell a single soul. Not Will. Not even Felicity. If she talked about it, then it would make it real. The two of them would watch her in social situations and be kindly empathetic when they saw the humiliating evidence of her shyness. The important thing was to cover it up. When she was a child her mother had once told her shyness was almost a form of selfishness. ‘You see, when you hang your head like that, darling, people think you don’t like them!’ Tess had taken that to heart. She grew up and learned how to make small talk with a thumping heart. She forced herself to make eye contact, even when her nerves were screaming at her to look away, look away! ‘Bit of a cold,’ she’d say, to explain away the dryness of her throat. She learned to live with it, the way other people learned to live with lactose intolerance or sensitive skin.

Anyway, Tess hadn’t been overly concerned that Christmas Eve two years ago. It was all just talk and they’d been drinking a lot of Auntie Mary’s punch. They weren’t really going to start a business together. She wouldn’t really have to be the account director.

But then, in the New Year, when they got back to Melbourne, Will and Felicity kept going on about it. Will and Tess’s house had a huge downstairs area that the previous owners had used as a ‘teenagers’ retreat’. It had its own separate entrance. What did they have to lose? The start-up costs would be negligible. Will and Tess had been putting extra money on their mortgage. Felicity was sharing a flat. If they failed, they could all go back out and get jobs.