Page 28 of Sincerely Yours, Anna Sherwood

He doesn’t need to know it was very much originally aLegally Blondething – or that I decided to retire this dress after taking stock of what everybody else wore to work during my first week here. It hadn’t taken me long to notice that the bubblegum-pink dress I initially loved so much was …

Well. It wasloud.

Everyone else is always in blues and browns, beiges and whites, blacks and greys. There’s the occasional splash of colour in a floral blouse. I saw someone in olive green, once, and it felt like they might as well have been in neon.

So, I decided not to wear the pink dress again – until today, when everything else was in the wash, and this was a last resort.

But at Lloyd’s ‘Barbie’ comment, my bright pink dress suddenly feels like a blinding beacon. Immature, like a kid playing dress-up – and not in the cool Margot RobbieBarbie-movie kind of way.

I fidget with the sleeve, readjusting it on my shoulder. ‘Was there something you needed, or are you just here to make a nuisance of yourself?’

He clasps both hands to his chest. ‘Annalise, youwoundme. To think I would be trying to misuse your precious time by simply being a pest, rather than having a worthwhile reason to be here …’

I give him a flat look.

And, as he’s done several times over the last couple of weeks, he drags a spare chair over, plonks himself into it, scoots it so close that the wheels of our chairs get caught, and leans over my desk before asking me about one of the ongoing projects.

‘How’s the budget looking on the Vane engine?’ he asks.

With a sigh, I close Chrome and pull up the documents for Vane, pointing out the places it’s over budget right now. I’m all too aware that my tone is clipped and irritated, but I can’t help it.

The rest of my team are usually so busy that they ask me to help Lloyd out, and I can hardly refuse – but I hate that they all expect me to immediately drop whatever I’m doing because whatever Lloyd Fletcher wantsmustbe more urgent and more important than anything else I’m doing. It grates on me – and while I can’t take it out on my team, I don’t mind letting Lloyd know just how much of a pain in the arse he’s being.

So,okay, he had a point about something being missed in the Phoebus IV reports – some rounds of testing were overlooked, so while everything looked pretty good on paper, it was actually behind schedule.

Trust Lloyd to be heralded as a hero for catching it.

For the next half hour, I go through the updates on the Vane engine, and although I like to make itabundantlyclear to Lloyd that whenever he does this to me, it’s a great inconvenience – it actuallyisquite helpful today. I get to treat it as a little practice run for when I actually present this on Monday, which is a pretty big deal. It’s my first timegivinga presentation, not just compiling it or sharing with the rest of the team.

‘What happened here?’ he asks, pointing at the screen, the red bar signifying ‘cost of component materials’ that is way higher than its accompanying grey line for ‘projected costs’.

‘Thatwas your experimental coolant.’

Lloyd gives me a funny look, and not just because I sound like I’m accusing him personally. ‘That’s accounted for under Phoebus IV.’

‘It’ssupposedto be. But when I tried to bring that up, it didn’t go down very well.’

‘Who’d you talk to?’

‘Well, Fiona in R&D wouldn’t reply to my emails, so Dylan said he’d speak to her, butshesaid it was one for Finance to deal with, andtheytold me it was down to the project manager in the labs, who told me it would have to be handled by R&D if it needed to be re-allocated somewhere else, so …’

Lloyd’s mouth twists downward and his eyebrows scrunch up, an expression full of sympathy.Been there, it says, just like when I told him about my battle with Excel a couple of weeks ago.

And I pounce, turning sharply towards him and lifting my index finger to him in warning. He’s leaning so close that I almost poke him in the nose. ‘No. I know what you’re thinking, andno. Don’t you dare.’

‘But if you’d just –’

‘No.’

‘Listen, I’ll just drop by Fiona’s desk before I go back upstairs, and –’

‘Well, I could do that!’

‘So why don’t you?’

‘Because – because …’ Because it seemsrude. Because she might be busy and have more urgent things to deal with, and I don’t want to ‘stop by’ with something so important. She’ll want facts and figures, all the things I put in my original email to back up what I was trying to explain, which she alreadyignored…

I get embarrassed just thinking about it, squirming in my seat.

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