The Long Way Home

The first thing I do every morning, before coffee, before checking my phone, before acknowledging that the world exists and has opinions about it, is choose a song.

Not shuffle. Never shuffle. Shuffle is how you end up on the Tube at half seven with Adele in your ears and feelings you haven’t budgeted for. I learned that lesson on a Monday in February three years ago and I have not repeated it since. The woman sitting opposite me that morning clearly thought I was having some sort of episode. I probably was.

The song sets the colour of the day. I know how that sounds. I know it sounds like something you’d find embroidered on a cushion in a shop that sells crystals and oat milk. But I’ve tested the theory extensively and the data is consistent: wrong song, wrong day. It’s not superstition. It’s pattern recognition. I’m a project manager. It’s what I do.

That particular Monday in March, I chose something with a decent tempo and no emotional subtext whatsoever, pulled on my coat, and walked to the office feeling entirely prepared for whatever the week intended to throw at me.

I was not, as it turned out, prepared for Milan.

The Apex Logic offices occupy the third and fourth floors of a converted warehouse on Rivington Street, which means exposed brick, very good coffee, and the particular brand of open-plan optimism that involves a lot of standing desks that nobody actually stands at. I’d been here four years. Long enough to know which of the meeting rooms had a broken blind that let in a stripe of morning sun directly into your eyes during presentations, and long enough to have quietly moved every important presentation into a different room without explaining why.

Patrick was already at his desk when I arrived, which was unusual. Patrick was our Head of Delivery and a man of many excellent qualities, chief among them the ability to make a client feel heard even when what he was actually doing was very gently redirecting them away from an idea that would take eighteen months and achieve nothing. He was also, as a rule, not in the office before nine.

It was eight forty-three.

’There she is,’he said, in the tone of a man who had been waiting and was pleased he no longer had to.

’You’re early,’I said.

‘You’re late.’

‘I’m seventeen minutes early.’

’There’s a briefing at nine. You’ll want coffee first.’He pushed a cup across the desk without looking up from his screen.’Already made it.’

I looked at the cup. I looked at him.’What have you done?’

’Nothing,’he said.’Sit down, Nora.’

There were six of us in the meeting room at nine o’clock: Patrick, me, two senior developers whose names I will not embarrass by admitting I sometimes mixed up in the first year, our Head of Client Relations - Helena, who had the posture of someone who had once been told they had excellent posture and had never forgotten it - and a projector screen showing the logo of a company I didn’t recognise.

“Visconti Gruppo.”

’Italian,’Helena said, by way of introduction, which I felt was doing a lot of heavy lifting for two words.’Construction and engineering. Sustainable development, specifically. They’re based in Milan - Porta Nuova district. Family-owned, third generation. The founder’s grandson runs it now.’She clicked to the next slide. Revenue figures. They were, I will admit, impressive.’They’ve expanded significantly in the last eight years and their internal systems haven’t kept pace. Legacy infrastructure, siloed data, the usual story. They need someone to come in and sort it out.’

’Digital transformation,’I said.

’Full scope. Systems audit, process mapping, implementation roadmap, change management.’She paused.’It’s a significant project.’

‘How significant?’

Patrick cleared his throat.’Approximately a year.’

The room was quiet for a moment.

’In Milan,’I said.

’In Milan,’Patrick confirmed.’Porta Nuova. We’d arrange the relocation - accommodation, travel, the works. You’d be embedded with the client team.’He had the careful expression of a man delivering news he wasn’t sure how it would land.’We want you to lead it, Nora. You’d be working closely with their CIO - a Beatrice Visconti, the founder’s daughter. By all accounts, extremely capable.’

I looked at the screen. The Visconti Gruppo logo was clean and considered - the kind of design that suggested the people behind it knew exactly who they were and saw no need to shout about it. I thought about the project scope. A year of embedded work, systems in disarray, a family business with all the complexity that implied. I thought about the fact that I had three active projects on the go, a flat in Bethnal Green that I genuinely liked, and a best friend in London who would, upon hearing the word Milan, immediately begin listing things I was obligated to bring her back.

I thought about all of this for approximately forty-five seconds.

’When do they need an answer?’I asked.

Patrick blinked.’We thought we’d give you a few days to -’

‘I’ll do it.’

Helena looked up from her notes. One of the developers - Marcus, I was fairly sure it was Marcus - made a small sound of surprise.

’You don’t want to think about it?’Patrick asked.

‘I’ve thought about it.’

He studied me for a moment with the expression he reserved for clients who agreed to things faster than he’d expected, which was a mixture of pleasure and mild concern.’Right,’he said.’Good. Brilliant, actually.’

I picked up the briefing document from the centre of the table and opened it to the first page. The project timeline. The organisational structure. A photograph of the Visconti Gruppo headquarters building - all glass and clean lines, the kind of architecture that took itself seriously without being aggressive about it.

I turned the page.

I called Jade from the Tube on the way home, which I was aware was against the unwritten rules of London public transport, but Jade had moved to London from Melbourne six years ago and had never fully internalised the unwritten rules of anything, and her influence on me had been, in this respect, quietly corrosive.

’Milan,’she said.

‘Milan.’

‘Italy Milan.’

‘That is the only Milan, Jade.’

There was a pause during which I could hear her thinking.’For how long?’

‘About a year.’

Another pause, longer. Then:’I need you to bring me back approximately one thousand euros’worth of leather goods.’

‘I’m not bringing you back -’

‘Nora. “Milan.”’

I looked out the window at the underground dark rushing past.’It’s a good project,’I said.’Really good, actually. Complex enough to be interesting, big enough to matter. The CIO sounds sharp.’

‘And the city?’

I thought about the briefing document. The photograph of Porta Nuova at dusk, the skyline punctuated by two extraordinary towers wrapped entirely in trees - the Bosco Verticale, Patrick had mentioned them, some kind of vertical forest, which had sounded like an affectation when I read it and looked, in the photograph, like something a city might grow if it decided to take architecture personally.

’I haven’t been,’I said.

‘But?’

‘But it looks like a city that insists on being looked at.’

Jade made a noise of approval. She had strong opinions about cities, and strong opinions about people who paid attention to them.’When do you leave?’

‘Three weeks.’

’Okay.’I heard her shift, settle, recalibrate.’I’m going to need a detailed packing list from you by the end of the week, a video tour of the apartment when you arrive, and a solemn promise that you will actually eat the food and not spend a year surviving on sad desk sandwiches like some kind of -’

‘I don’t eat sad desk sandwiches.’

‘You absolutely eat sad desk sandwiches.’

‘They’re efficient.’

’They’re a cry for help.’A beat.’Are you excited?’

I considered the question. Outside the window the dark gave way briefly to a lit platform - people waiting, people leaving, the perpetual motion of the city doing what cities do. The carriage smelled of rain and other people’s days.

Was I excited? I ran a quick internal audit, the way I ran audits on everything, looking for the honest answer underneath the professional one. There was the project - genuinely compelling, the kind of scope I hadn’t had in two years. There was the city, which I knew almost nothing about and which had already, in a single photograph, made me want to know more. There was the particular feeling of a door opening that you hadn’t known was there.

’Yes,’I said.’I think I am.’

’Good,’said Jade.’You needed this.’

I didn’t ask her what she meant by that. I had a feeling she would tell me eventually, and I had a feeling she would be right, and sometimes that’s enough to be going on with.

That night I sat on my bedroom floor with the briefing document and a glass of wine I kept forgetting to drink and read every page twice. The project scope. The stakeholder map. The preliminary systems assessment, which made for genuinely alarming reading in the way that all preliminary systems assessments do - the gap between where a company thinks it is and where it actually is, presented in the neutral language of consultancy, which somehow made it worse.

I read about Beatrice Visconti: CIO, thirty-one, MBA from Bocconi, credited internally with pushing the company’s sustainability agenda forward. There was no photograph in the briefing document, which I found I didn’t mind. I’d meet her soon enough.

I read about the company history. Three generations. The grandfather who started it, the father who expanded it, the son who was currently running it - Alessandro Visconti, CEO, whose entry in the document was three lines long and told me very little except that he’d been with the company for eight years and had overseen its most significant period of growth.

I turned the page.

The last section was a map of Porta Nuova. I found the Visconti Gruppo building, found the address of the apartment Apex had arranged, traced the route between them with my finger. Twelve minutes on foot, according to the map. Past a piazza I couldn’t pronounce yet. Past the towers in the photograph.

I closed the document, finished the wine I’d been forgetting to drink, and went to choose tomorrow morning’s song with more care than usual.

It felt like the kind of morning that deserved something good.