The flight passed in a strained sort of silence, broken only by the occasional rumble of turbulence and Poppy’s ongoing habit of narrating her surroundings as if she were a tour guide.

“Clouds,” she announced at one point, peering out the window. “Big ones. Possibly rain-bearing. Oh—there’s a smaller one. Might be a sheep.”

Albert didn’t even look up from his laptop. “If I ignore you, do you go away?”

“No,” she said sweetly.

By the time the wheels touched down at London City Airport, Albert had convinced himself he could still get through the day without irreparably damaging his credibility. All it would take was restraint, composure, and—

“Good morning, Mr. Nestory,” said his London driver as he approached the car waiting on the tarmac. “Straight to The Shard?”

“Yes,” Albert replied, stepping inside.

Poppy fluttered in after him, landing lightly on the seat beside him. “And perhaps a croissant on the way?”

Albert glared at her. “fuck off, please.”

The driver’s eyes flicked up in the rear-view mirror. “Sorry, sir?”

“Not you,” Albert said quickly. “Just—responding to a message.”

The driver nodded slowly, that cautious, non-committal nod of a man who would rather not know.

At The Shard, his PA was waiting in the lobby with a tablet in hand. “We’ve got everyone assembled in the conference room,” she said briskly. “Crisis team, IT security, two consultants from GCHQ—”

Poppy landed on her shoulder, peering at the tablet. “You should tell her she’s missed a spelling mistake in that email draft.”

Albert’s eyes flicked to the tablet, then to the PA. “You’ve missed a spelling mistake.”

She blinked. “Pardon?”

“In the draft,” he said, gesturing vaguely. “Check it later.”

“Right,” she said slowly, glancing down at the tablet without a clue how he could have possibly seen it.

In the glass-walled conference room, half the table was already buried in laptops and cables. Albert took his seat at the head, sliding his laptop in front of him while Poppy settled on the table to his right, leaning back on her hands as if this were all terribly entertaining.

“Right,” Albert began, his voice cutting cleanly through the room. “Fill me in.”

One of the GCHQ consultants started in on the technical breakdown of the ransomware attack, but Poppy was having none of it. She yawned, then reached out and gave the nearest coffee cup a delicate nudge—just enough to make it shift a few inches across the table.

The man sitting beside it jumped slightly, looking down at the cup as though it had moved of its own accord.

Albert’s jaw tightened. “Stop it.”

Half the room froze.

“Sir?” asked his head of IT.

Albert cleared his throat. “I mean… stop overcomplicating it. Keep the report simple.”

"We haven't started yet, sir..." his IT master responded.

"Uh-huh, yep, let's go.", Albert interjected, clicking his fingers repeatedly.

The meeting continued, but Albert could feel the eyes flicking toward him, the little hesitations in the room whenever he muttered something under his breath to Poppy. Every so often she’d lean in to make some irreverent comment, and he’d find himself biting back a retort—not to preserve professionalism, but to avoid looking like he was in the early stages of a very public breakdown.

By the end of the meeting, he wasn’t sure who was more rattled—the team dealing with the cyberattack, or the team trying to figure out what on earth was wrong with him.