Zoe was at home, researching a new article on quinoa. She’d already discovered it was an ancient grain, dating back at least three thousand years, to the area around Lake Titicaca in Peru. That might have put some people off further investigation, given her agenda, but not Zoe. She could still work around that. The people living then had fed it to livestock first, and once she’d read that its seeds have a bitter inedible coating, she had to find out more.
***
Rosa sifted through the post at the Sweetpea Café, while greeting customers like old friends. She’d invited a camera crew along for the reopening, and whether that was the reason for the hoards, or whether the café had been genuinely missed seemed unimportant as the tables filled up and chatter spread out across the room. There had been a moment when a customer had asked if there was any mango and she’d remembered Brett popping the lump of sweet orange flesh into his mouth, his smile enveloping the room over lunch on that fateful day, but then she’d pushed away the memory, explained that they didn’t serve mango because of its carbon footprint and moved to take the next order.
***
Sue sat in the lab, checking through her final table of results. Everything seemed in order. She thought about Brett and then she thought about George and how she had failed him twelve years ago. Constance, the solicitor, had been kind, had said that she’d been very young and that she’d done exactly the right thing, had confirmed that probably whatever she’d said would not have made any real difference. And it couldn’t bring the boy back.
Sue knew all of that was probably true. Even so, it bothered her that she had been so powerless, that she had had no voice at all. Knowledge was supposed to be power, but only if you were prepared to harness it, to use it for your own ends or to help others. Perhaps it was all her mother’s fault, bringing her up to believe that the best way to get on in life was to toe the line, keep your head down, stay below the radar. And that she, Susan, was the kind of person who, even if she was given a pair of oars in a rowing boat, would not ever be able to produce even the smallest of waves.
A few hours earlier, immediately after she’d returned from coffee with Constance, she’d marched around the lab for the last time. All the glass containers had been removed, but the power sockets and heating apparatus remained. And she’d known then, as she knew now, that there was no point fighting how things were, especially if they weren’t that bad. She wasn’t that kind of person. It wasn’t how she lived her life. So now she checked again on her laptop that using sludge – human waste – to feed the larvae, was flagged as viable in her conclusions. She addressed her covering email to Dougie and Gemma and various other eminent people at the Sanitation Trust, took a deep breath and then pressed send.
***
Mark was out in the barn. He lifted forkful after forkful of hay and delivered it into the stall where one of his cows was recuperating from a minor illness. Airpods in, he sang along as he worked. As the cow turned its head in his direction and then ambled forward to eat, he stopped what he was doing and ran his hand along the length of her flank.
‘There’s a good girl now,’ he said.
***
Adrian opened up his presentation and shared his screen with the CEO and marketing director of Supreme Foods. The words “Food for your Mood” were emblazoned across the top, each letter a different colour, as he had envisaged from the first time he had shared his brilliant idea with Brett, many months before. The two men seated across the table from him exchanged glances which Adrian couldn’t decipher, but which he hoped signalled their excitement. After all, they had forked out a grand in legal fees for a lawyer to oversee the confidentiality agreement he had insisted they sign before he would allow them access. It would be stupid not to get their money’s worth.
‘That’s the essence of it,’ Adrian said at the end. ‘You can imagine how fast it will take off – whoosh, like a rocket.’ He made the noise and waved his arm in a diagonal, upright motion. ‘Everyone will want a piece of it. I can guarantee.’
‘That’s it?’ the CEO said, with a flick of his eyes to his left, where his marketing director sat. Again, Adrian tried to decode what he saw, but the CEO’s tone clearly hinted at irritation. They had to like it. Maybe he’d run through things too quickly for them?
‘In summary, yes,’ Adrian stammered. ‘But, what I’ve presented, it’s only the bare bones of the idea. If you’d like me to…flesh out any areas for you, I’d be happy to do so.’
The CEO stood up.
‘We got your drift, Dr Edge, thank you, and that’s sufficient. We’ll talk it over internally and let you know if we’re interested.’
Adrian’s smile almost left his face and his eyebrows knitted themselves together. This wasn’t what he’d expected and it wasn’t good.
‘When do you think…’
‘If you haven’t heard from us in ten days, you’ll know we’re not interested.’
The CEO moved towards the door. Adrian stood up now, collected his laptop and shook both men’s hands. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Ten days. I appreciate the opportunity to share my vision with you. I’ll wait to hear then.’
As he closed the door behind him, he heard one of the men – it sounded like the CEO – burst into fits of laughter. Were they laughing at him and his idea? Had they really not understood how marvellous and ground-breaking his initiative would be? Of course, he might have been mistaken and they’d loved it and it was all an act to keep him keen. He knew how these things worked. Or perhaps the marketing manager had just told the CEO a very funny joke.
***
Diana stood in Brett’s office, running her hands over all the surfaces, trying to remember what it had felt like when she came in every morning and Brett was sitting there, opposite her, smiling broadly, with a list of things for her to do. Sometimes, he’d wait till she was leaving and then he’d call her back, just as she reached the door, to impart something he’d forgotten first time around. It had become a standing joke between them, that the moment she thought she had everything down, he’d add to the list. But it had always been such fun, that was the best word to describe her years at Heart Foods: long hours, hard work, but fun, and she doubted she would find the same enjoyment elsewhere.
She was there to clear out his room. The CFO, the others – they’d been very kind – said she could take a memento – although she suspected the offer was a crude attempt to remove the bitter edge from her mission. Now she was standing there with a cardboard box in her hand, she couldn’t bear to disturb anything. Somehow, if she left it all exactly as it was: his chair angled to the side, as if he had just got up and gone to the fridge for some iced water, the photo of him with his late parents and beloved dog, taken in Cornwall when he was a child, up close to his PC, his copy of ‘how to make your first million’ near where his left hand would have rested, bookmarked at chapter one. He’d joked to her that, only twenty pages in, he’d realised he already knew everything in there, but he’d keep it, just in case.
But Diana had to start somewhere and it must be better for her to be the one to rummage through Brett’s personal effects. She sat down at his desk and, after a deep sigh, she opened his top drawer. There was little of interest: an ancient fountain pen she’d never seen him use, some dogeared business cards, a discarded phone, a pack of chewing gum. She pulled each item out and dropped them into the box. But the drawer would not fully extend and, as she wrestled with it, something rolled forwards from the back, where it was concealed, into the light.
At first Diana thought it was a marker pen, but it was too big and, with its pale blue end and bright orange tip, the colours were all wrong. Then, as she brought it closer to her face, she saw what it was. EpiPen 0.3mg Epinephrine auto injector, she read.
Brett’s parting words to her most days came suddenly into her head. ‘You take care,’ he’d say, as he waved her off, with a smile that made her knees weak. And as she clasped the EpiPen to her chest – the EpiPen which might have saved Brett’s life – she thought then of how little care he had taken of himself.