Chapter 1 - The Partnership
POV: SYLVIE
The lift opens directly onto the top floor of Harwick Holdings, the sort of architectural detail meant to communicate power — if Sylvie hadn’t been using it for seven years. Now it just means she doesn’t have to sign in at reception.
She already has the deck open on her tablet: thirty-two slides, a campaign architecture for the Harwick Holdings rebrand, three weeks of work distilled into something presentable.
She knows it’s good.
She also knows which slide Hugh is going to push back on.
His assistant, Priya, looks up as Sylvie crosses the open floor.
‘He’s on a call. Two minutes.’
‘He’s always on a call.’
Priya’s expression does not change, which is its own form of agreement. She has worked for Hugh for four years and has developed, in that time, an economy of response that Sylvie finds both professional and quietly impressive.
‘Coffee?’ Priya asks.
‘Please.’
‘He’ll want to see slide four first,’ Priya adds, without inflection, already turning back to her screen. ‘He always goes to slide four.’
Sylvie looks at her.
‘He hasn’t seen this deck.’
‘No,’ Priya agrees pleasantly. ‘He hasn’t.’
She offers nothing further. Sylvie files this exchange away without examining it and sets her bag down at the long table by the window.
The Manchester skyline sits grey and textured behind the glass, the old brick of the Northern Quarter just visible between newer buildings.
She knows this view well enough to stop seeing it.
That’s what ten years does.
Hugh’s door opens before the two minutes are up. He’s still talking, phone held loosely to his ear, jacket off, with the kind of ease in his own space that only reads as confidence because it is.
He gestures to Sylvie — acknowledgement, apology, one more minute — and she answers with the expression she has perfected for exactly this situation: unbothered, patient, mildly amused.
She watches him finish the call.
The honest version of what she’s doing — the version she avoids looking at too closely — is cataloguing him.
The way he leans against the doorframe when he’s wrapping up a conversation rather than ending it. The slight tension across his shoulders that means the call was more complicated than he’ll say. The flicker when something on the other end amuses him, there and gone before his voice settles again.
She has been cataloguing Hugh Harwick for ten years.
He hangs up.
‘Sorry. Bruges.’
‘Bruges?’
‘New distributor. Long story.’
He drops into the chair across from her and reaches for the coffee Priya has left. He doesn’t thank her, which Sylvie has learned is because Priya once specifically asked him not to do it in front of clients — something about authority, something Sylvie finds both reasonable and very funny.
‘Right,’ he says. ‘Show me what you’ve got.’
Sylvie turns the laptop towards him.
‘Slide four is going to be a problem,’ she says. ‘Specifically, for you. I’d like to get there before you do.’
He raises an eyebrow.
‘I know what you’re going to say,’ she continues. ‘You’re going to say the Dunmore Single Malt doesn’t need repositioning, it needs better distribution, and that repositioning a thirty-year-old product as a lifestyle brand will alienate the existing customer base.’
She holds his gaze.
‘You’re not wrong. But you’re also not right, because the existing customer base is sixty-three on average, and I’m not being brutal. I’m being mathematical.’
There is a pause.
‘Sixty-three?’ he says.
‘The survey data is in the appendix.’
Another pause.
She watches him not enjoy this, then watches him accept it, which is one of the things about Hugh she has never been able to resolve: the speed with which he moves from resistance to recalibration once the evidence is clear.
It makes him good at what he does.
It makes him hard to argue with for long.
‘Fine,’ he says. ‘What are you proposing?’
‘A dual approach. We protect the existing line entirely — no rebrand on the Dunmore, no lifestyle language. The campaign for that segment stays exactly where it is. What we reposition is the Harwick name as the house. The umbrella. The new expressions — the small-batch gin, the limited-run blends — those carry the new identity. The Dunmore benefits from the halo without being touched.’
He is quiet for a moment, looking at the slide.
‘The existing customers don’t feel abandoned,’ he says slowly. ‘And the new market doesn’t think they’re buying their grandfather’s whisky.’
‘Exactly.’
‘It’s more expensive to run two parallel identities.’
‘It’s more expensive not to.’
She pulls up slide six.
‘The projection is here. I’ve built in a conservative estimate — if the new expressions hit thirty per cent of the target demographic in year one, the Dunmore line holds and the overall Harwick revenue increases by —’
‘I’ve read the numbers, Sylvie.’
She stops.
He’s looking at her with an expression she knows well: the one that means he has already reached the conclusion and is mildly annoyed he didn’t get there first.
‘It’s a good deck,’ he says. ‘Slide four included.’
She closes the laptop.
POV: HUGH
The thing about Sylvie Watson is that she is always three steps ahead and entirely relaxed about it, which should be irritating and mostly isn’t.
He’d known about the sixty-three statistic. He’d seen it in the quarterly report six months ago and filed it under problems for later, which is a category he visits less often than he should.
The fact that Sylvie had not only found it but built an entire strategic solution around it before arriving at his office on a Tuesday morning is — well.
It’s Sylvie.
It would be more surprising if she hadn’t.
They work through the rest of the deck over the next hour. She flags a timing conflict between a Harwick event in October and a client she’s already committed to; he checks the calendar and moves the event to the first week of November without ceremony.
She notes that the new gin launch needs a venue with a specific industrial aesthetic.
‘The brickwork matters, Hugh. This is not negotiable.’
He tells her about a converted warehouse in Ancoats his father nearly bought in 2003, which she immediately asks him to send her the address for.
This is how it works.
Has worked for as long as he can remember.
She needs the access he can provide: the exclusive product lines, the limited editions no other event company in Manchester can get its hands on, the weight of the Harwick name when it matters.
He needs what she does, which is harder to quantify but not difficult to describe: she knows what the room should feel like before the room exists.
She has built her agency on exactly that.
He was her first client.
Neither of them has ever made a thing of it.
‘The Ancoats space,’ she says, still typing. ‘Does it have loading access from the rear? The gin bottles are heavier than you’d think.’
‘I’ll find out.’
‘I need to know by Thursday. If it doesn’t work, I have a backup in Spinningfields, but the aesthetic is wrong — it’s too clean. It’ll look like a bank.’
‘No one wants their gin to look like a bank.’
‘Hugh.’
She glances up.
‘No one wants anything to look like a bank.’
He laughs.
She goes back to her notes.
Across the table, with the grey sky behind her and the half-empty coffee between them, she looks exactly as she always does: focused, slightly impatient, completely in command of whatever she has decided to be in command of today.
He has known her for ten years.
If someone asked him to describe what she is to him — and occasionally people do, usually at dinners, usually after the second bottle — he says ‘business partner’ first, because that is accurate and because it is the answer that closes the question. If pressed he adds ‘friend,’ because that is also accurate and requires no further explanation.
What he does not say, because he has never needed to say it, is that neither of those words quite covers the whole of it. Business partner does not account for the fact that he thinks of her opinion before he has formed his own. Friend does not account for the particular quality of a Tuesday afternoon in this office, the specific ease of working through something difficult with someone who already understands half of what you are about to say.
He has never found a word that covers the whole of it.
He has not, as a rule, looked for one.
‘Right,’ she says, closing the laptop. ‘I’ll have the amended deck to you by end of Thursday. The October-to-November move needs to be confirmed in writing by your team. Priya can copy me in.’
She’s already standing, already reaching for her bag, already moving into whatever comes next.
‘There’s a group dinner Friday,’ he says. ‘Alan’s organising. You coming?’
She pauses — barely.
‘I’ll check my diary.’
‘It’s at Elnecot. Alan says eight o’clock, but you know what that means.’
‘It means nine.’
She slings her bag over her shoulder.
‘I’ll let him know.’
She crosses the floor and the lift doors open. Hugh turns back to his calendar, and the meeting ends the way their meetings always do: efficiently, productively, and without anything being said that isn’t strictly about work.
He has no reason to think about this.
He doesn’t.1
