I Heart Christmas. Lindsey Kelk

to lure him away from the low-paying but high-credibility music paper he’d been working on to come to Gloss. You really had to have a mental imbalance to love being a managing ed, all that time spent checking and correcting and making sure no one had snuck any dirty acrostic poems into the feature articles or teeny tiny penises into celebrity fashion spreads. Not that anyone in our team would do that. Except for maybe me. And Jesse genuinely loved it.

      Back at my desk, surrounded by every Christmas card the office had received, some delightful fluffy reindeers I’d picked up at Target and several Alexander Skarsgård posters, I stared down at the beauty pages, willing myself to read every single word, to see each syllable and to start caring about what eyeliner Selena Gomez was wearing this week. It wasn’t Selena’s fault. Usually I’d be thrilled to know that she mostly used MAC but that I could achieve the same effect with Maybelline (even though I knew you couldn’t really) but I had a lot on my mind. Jenny and her baby banter seemed like something that had happened a million years ago and the new house in all its leafy Park Slope glory would be something I worried about when we actually had to move. In four days. Right now, I had enough on my plate. I had to work out how to work with Cici without either killing her or inciting her to kill me. Maybe if I sent back all my Christmas presents and just asked for one little miracle instead …

      My office phone, appropriately wrapped in silver tinsel, rang quietly, as if afraid to interrupt my review of Jennifer Aniston’s best and worst hair days.

      ‘Hello?’

      I hated not being able to see who was calling, I thought as I answered. There was something so threatening about answering the phone not knowing who it was. Of course, I could have just peeled the Twilight stickers off my phone so I could see the screen but that would have been too easy.

      ‘Angela, it’s your mother.’

      Aah. Because so far, today had been far too easy.

      ‘Hello, Mum.’ I closed my eyes and pinched the bridge of my nose, hoping it would calm me. It didn’t. I had no idea why people did that. ‘Are you all right?’

      ‘Everything’s fine,’ she replied in a voice that implied that was, in fact, not the case. ‘I was just wondering if you’d heard from Louisa this week?’

      ‘No,’ I said, sitting up straight. ‘I’ve been trying to call her but she’s busy. Why? What’s wrong? Is she OK?’

      ‘Oh, I’m sure she’s fine,’ Mum said. ‘Not that I’d know, she never comes round with that baby.’

      ‘Well, she’s probably busy taking it to see her mother and not mine,’ I replied. ‘Or doing, you know, stuff.’