Julianne Kingsley. Just hearing her name made me want to crawl under my duvet and never come out. I’d never met her, but her reputation preceded her like a royal procession. She wasn’t just a journalist—she was the journalist. Tall, blonde, posh, and with degrees from Oxford and Cambridge, Julianne was the kind of woman who probably woke up looking effortlessly polished and spent her weekends writing groundbreaking exposés while drinking tea out of bone china. She made the rest of us look like amateurs fumbling in the dark with a Bic pen and a sticky note.
I paced my tiny flat, phone pressed to my ear as Darcy explained the situation.
“Princess Anna is… particular,” Darcy said in that clipped, professional tone of his. “She wants to make sure the person she speaks to is someone she can trust. You’ll need to prove that to her.”
“No pressure, then,” I muttered, glancing at the mountain of laundry I’d been ignoring for weeks. “Just going head-to-head with the Beyoncé of journalism. Totally fine.”
“You can do this, Miss Hollis,” Darcy said, and for the first time, his voice softened ever so slightly.
I stopped pacing. “And what exactly gives you that impression?”
There was a fraction of a pause before he replied, “You’ve got an edge Julianne doesn’t.”
My brow furrowed. “And what’s that?”
Darcy hesitated for just a second before answering, “You’re genuine.”
I blinked, completely thrown. Genuine? From Darcy? Was that a compliment? Or a backhanded way of saying I was too much of a mess to be anything else?
Before I could figure out how to respond, something else popped into my mind. “Anyway,” I said, trying to sound casual, “about Sunday dinner…”
There was silence on the other end of the line. “What Sunday dinner?”
“Oh, uh, nothing,” I stammered, my cheeks heating. “Forget it.”
Before Darcy could press further, my phone buzzed with another incoming call. It was Mum.
“Don’t forget to bring someone to dinner!” Mum chirped as soon as I answered. “I don’t want to spend the entire night listening to your father brag about Melanie.”
“Sure, Mum,” I said through gritted teeth, hanging up before she could launch into another lecture about my non-existent love life.
As I tossed my phone onto the couch, Darcy’s rare compliment lingered in my mind, right alongside Mum’s latest reminder of my personal failures.