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Michael downstairs and he called the ambulance but by the time the men come to get her, Mia had already waked up. She was sitting up and crying so I make her some tea. But then she was sick.’
    ‘Oh.’
    ‘She said she was very sorry for me to find her that way and that Callum was with Susanna and that I should call you at work. So after they take her away on the … little bed on the wheels?’
    ‘The stretcher.’
    ‘Yeah, the stretcher, I ask Michael and he give me your number.’
    ‘Oh.’ I should have been rushing off to Mount Sinai, but instead kept spouting banalities. Maybe I was in shock. ‘Did Mia give you your money?’
    Bill could tell by my tone that no one had actually died. He gave me a hopeful little wave and closed the door on his way out.
    ‘Oh yes,’ Esmeralda almost sounded normal again.
    ‘She leaved it under the vase on the table for me.’
    I just kept sitting there in the boardroom. I knew I should leap into action and rush over to the hospital but I’d fallen into a kind of turbid, morbid trance.
    It wasn’t the first time. Mia had actually made a half-hearted suicide attempt in her youth: there’d been a broken romance on top of her father’s death. A packet full of pills seemed like the only logical salve to her teenage angst.
    She’d told me she ‘felt like dying’ after her dog Sky had died, too.
    But this time, Mia had experienced what I supposed the doctors were going to tell us was a ‘severe, delayed post-natal reaction’ to Bubby’s death.
    Eventually I buzzed Anthony and briefly explained what had happened and that I had to get over to Mount Sinai immediately. I ducked into our office to grab my keys and briefcase.
    Bill was inserting a Joy Division CD. ‘Everything OK?’
    ‘Not really,’ I said. ‘Mia’s in hospital. She’s … not feeling well.’
    ‘Oh.’ He could tell that I didn’t want to give any more away. ‘Anything I can do?’ He followed me back down the hall towards reception, holding a sheet of paper in his hand.
    ‘No. But thanks for asking.’
    I paused outside the boardroom and indicated the layouts on the table we’d been working on. ‘Let’s go through those when I get back. I’m not sure when that will be.’
    ‘OK, Bro.’
    Out of habit, I flicked up the edge of the paper he was holding to see what he’d been working on. On it he’d scrawled an evolving positioning statement for our new client:
    coolcams: just do it
    coolcams: just see it
    coolcams: see it
    coolcams: you’ll see it
    coolcams: you’ll see
    The last line had been circled for consideration.
    ‘Waddya think?’ Bill twirled his marker through his fingers like a drum majorette.
    I sighed.
You’ll see
. The phrase was indeed perfect for our new client, both literally and metaphorically. And yet there was something about it that tied another nasty knot in my gut.

North Fucked
    ‘You are
not
working this week.’ Anthony handed me my second Bud. ‘We’ll call it “Compassionate Leave” or some such shit so you won’t lose any of your vacation time. Fair enough, Girly?’
    They’d let Mia out of the hospital Saturday evening. It was now 11.30 Tuesday morning. We were in some dank, dark dive on 8th Avenue whose only virtue was that it was open at that hour. It was hardly Anthony’s typical milieu, but he had a meeting nearby at 12 in the Garment District. There were tawdry peep show joints either side of the bar, which were also already open – or maybe they never closed.
    I heard a cough and looked up at the owner: fat, blotchy-faced and wheezing on his cigarette as he spit-polished glasses with a dirty towel. He looked just like I felt.
    ‘What about coolcams?’ I asked. Though work, advertising and coolcams were in reality the furthest things from my mind.
    ‘Fuck fucking coolcams,’ Anthony growled. ‘Bill knows every fucking creative in New York. We can get someone to fill in for you for the rest of this week. And next week too – if you need it. Or