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three-page article illustrated with pictures of £500-a-night spa suites. None of which she could afford to visit …
    Chelsea picked up the pad and pencil that had been thoughtfully provided by the hotel and began to write a wish list of all the things she hoped to achieve this year. A promotion would be a great start. She definitely deserved one. A move to the fashion department would be even better.
    Lately, Chelsea felt like she’d been living at the Society building, covering for one colleague after another as pretty much the whole office went on maternity leave. Not only was she having to work crazy hours, Chelsea was practically bankrupt from all the baby showers. She was sick of cooing at flat-headed newborns, while listening to the patronising prattle of the new mothers who insisted that it wasn’t fully possible to be a woman until you’d forced something the size of a grapefruit out through your nether regions. Something, Chelsea observed, the average battery hen did several times a day without complaint or expectation of beatification. Chelsea was especially sensitive to being patronised by parents, having received the ‘you just can’t understand’ speech for the first time when she was only fifteen and a half from her seventeen-year-old sister. Trust Ronnie to spin having been too stupid to take the Pill properly into a vaulting achievement.
    Anyway, it was time that Davina and the Mothers’ Union at Society magazine recognised Chelsea’s contribution to keeping the magazine going while they spent six months decorating paint-your-own-pottery plates with baby footprints. Once she got the promotion, she’d move out of her poky little flat into something that fit better with her image as someone who wrote for such a glossy mag. At the same time, she’d start taking better care of herself physically. She needed to get fitter. She’d sign up for Pilates again. She’d go out more, with people other than Serena and Carola, who were as toxically single as she was. She needed to widen her social circle. The only events she got invited to outside work these days were sodding baby showers.
    So … Get a promotion. Get fit. Get some new friends. Chelsea wrote out her ambitions and outlined small steps for achieving them, just as she’d encouraged her readers in that three-page article. She could do it. In a year’s time, she could be a different woman. A happy woman. And all in time for her thirty-first birthday.
    For about an hour, Chelsea kept herself reasonably optimistic with the thought of everything she could do over the next twelve months or so, but when it came down to it, her wish list was not so very different from the wish lists she had been writing for the past five years. And realistically, she knew she would probably write the exact same list again in another year’s time. One thing she knew for certain was that her wish list would not contain the words ‘holiday in Lanzarote with my parents’.
    It wasn’t that Chelsea didn’t love her family; it was just that she found it increasingly difficult to be around them for any length of time. The unease she felt when she was with them had been growing in tiny increments since she first left Coventry to go to university in London. When she came back home for Christmas, after her first term there, her parents had made fun of her ‘new posh accent’. Ronnie had commented meanly about her new look. It had continued in the same vein for years, so that now whenever she saw any of the Bensons, Chelsea would count the minutes until they made a comment along the lines of ‘I bet they don’t do things like that in London.’ Chelsea just wished she could believe that the teasing was good-natured and not some sort of rebuke. She wished she thought her family was proud of her.
    She looked at her watch. Her sister would have landed by now. She could imagine the scene of jubilation at the cheap hotel their mother had probably found on Teletext. She could