Under Fluorescent Lights by Rafaella Sparkle

In the glossy world of corporate ambition, the real game is played behind closed doors… and someone is always watching.

At Valor & Watts, a global consulting firm with offices in Madrid and London, success is measured in strategy decks, whispered alliances, and perfectly timed betrayals. Into this world steps the French girl. She is elegant, ambitious, and disturbingly unreadable. From the moment she arrives, rumors follow her: Why Madrid? Why now? And what is she really after?

As she rises through the ranks, she navigates icy colleagues, corporate politics, and a dangerously magnetic connection with Jack, a married British manager who knows how to play the game… and how to break the rules.

But under the fluorescent lights, secrets fester. A missed client meeting. A forbidden romance. An anonymous email that changes everything. As her carefully curated image begins to crack, the question becomes not just how far she’ll go… but who’s already plotting her downfall.

Tense, addictive, and razor-sharp, Under Fluorescent Lights is a scandal-filled tale of ambition, betrayal, and the high cost of being seen.

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Excerpt from Under Fluorescent Lights © Copyright 2025 Rafaella Sparkle

1. FLUORESCENT LIGHTS

There’s a certain stillness to serviced office buildings just before dawn. The kind of silence that clings to
frosted glass and lingers in the corners of lifeless reception areas. Outside, the street is still yawning itself
awake, a quiet corner of Madrid slowly stretching beneath sodium lamps and rustling newspapers. But
inside, beneath the cold hum of fluorescent lights, something pulses. The echo of secrets. The tension of
ambition. The faint scent of coffee… and something else, something curated.

It’s too early for the office to feel alive, and yet, someone is already there.

On the ground floor of an otherwise forgettable building near Calle de Santa Engracia, tucked behind a door with too many fingerprints and a logo sticker slowly peeling at the edges, sits the Madrid outpost of Valor & Watts. A London-headquartered firm in the thick of its Iberian expansion. Think consulting, think strategy, think endless decks of slides with words like “synergy” and “streamline”, the sort of business where ambition floats in the air like cologne.

And in the centre of the small open-plan office, just beyond the two-desk pod closest to the window, she sits.

The French girl.

Though no one really calls her by name, not unless they’re speaking in HR tones. No, she’s simply the French girl, with a capital “F.” As though her nationality were a defining feature, as though her presence were somehow… mythic. Even now, in the pre-office hush, she taps away at her keyboard like she’s racing against something no one else can see.

Her desk is part of a three-desk pod, two desks by the window, hers facing them, central in the room. Symbolic, perhaps. Strategically placed like a chess piece. Her chair is always perfectly aligned. Her posture, flawless. Her expression? Impossibly unreadable.

But what most people notice first isn’t her typing. It’s the bike. Yes, the bike.

Each morning, instead of locking it to the racks outside or asking to store it in the underground car park, a reasonable request in any normal setting, she wheels her matte-black Dutch bicycle straight through reception and into the office. Like a commuter-turned-art-installation, the bike now sits inside the workspace, leaned delicately against the back cabinet like it belongs there. Like it’s another desk. Another employee.

No one said anything at first. When the team was still small, when the desks weren’t all full, when everything felt like a startup in a foreign city. But now? Now the office is cramped. Ten desks. No real meeting rooms, just the shared bookable ones in the main serviced building. Two bulky filing cabinets. A communal sofa crammed between the final desk and the door. A tiny coffee corner with a machine that spits steam more than caffeine. The space is tight. And yet the bike remains, unmoved, untouchable.

Just like her.

People talk. Of course they do. They always have. About her perfume, for starters. How it only appears when certain directors are visiting from London. Or how, on other days, she arrives slightly dishevelled, hair in a hurried bun, mascara smudged, blouse rumpled, like the ghost of someone more glamorous. They whisper about her hygiene, her mood swings, her clipped replies that somehow feel both too formal and too familiar.

But the real stories? The ones no one ever quite forgets? They begin with moments. Like the night after the meeting in Valencia.

A critical client meeting. High-stakes. Slideshow rehearsed to within an inch of its life. Her colleague, who’d flown in the day before, was already en route when she cancelled. A WhatsApp message, two minutes before start time: “Not feeling well. Apologies.”

The meeting happened anyway, strained and awkward. The client noticed. Everyone noticed.

But later that night, at the team dinner arranged by the visiting director, who should be there, sparkling, effortless, present?

Her.

Wine glass in hand. Red lipstick pristine. Laughing too freely. Sitting far too close.

That’s when the whispers turned into something else. That’s when people really began to watch. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves again.

Let’s rewind.

Let’s go back to the beginning. Because the French girl didn’t arrive alone.

On a cold Monday morning, when Madrid’s skies hung low and grey, and the office coffee machine still spat more bitterness than flavour, two new hires stepped into Valor & Watts.

Same department. Same team. Same dull onboarding presentation hosted in a meeting room they had to reserve themselves.

That’s when she met Ava.

If the French girl was winter, Ava was a Madrid summer. Warm, golden, radiant. Where the French girl’s charm was a velvet blade, Ava’s kindness wrapped around you like sunlight. From the moment she walked in, curls bouncing, trainers squeaking slightly against the tile, she was liked. Instantly.

She said yes to everything. Group lunch? Yes. After-work drinks? Of course. Welcome drinks at that terrible bar with the sticky tables and good mojitos? Absolutely.

Her desk was in the pod by the window, sitting next to the French Girl. She made it home almost immediately, sticking up a small photo of her dog, keeping a rainbow mug that said “YES GIRL” in bold, bubbly font, and offering tissues, mints, and sympathy on demand. She was the kind of colleague who remembered birthdays and made jokes during meetings, who offered to help before you asked, who stayed late not for politics but because she cared.

And somehow, despite their differences, they clicked.

Lunch breaks, coffee runs, whispered jokes over Teams. They became inseparable. Like satellites orbiting the same strange sun.

But even Ava didn’t know everything.