“Samantha.” Victoria’s voice grabbed my attention back by the nape of its neck. “I thought you were going to show everyone what makes Colorado special. Instead, you’ve given us run-of-the-mill … luxury porn.”
“Luxury porn?” Scrolling back through my pictures, I realized she was right. I’d captured nothing uniquely Colorado. The amenities could exist anywhere in the world, just with different views out the windows. “I can fix this,” I said, looking directly into the camera.
Maya mouthed the word, “How?”
I mouthed, “I have no idea.”
“You realize you two are on video and we can see you, right?” Marcus frowned.
“I have an idea,” said Parker from his video square. “I’ll share my screen.”
Marcus’s charts and graphs disappeared and Parker’s desktop took their place, a chaotic landscape of editingsoftware, a Minecraft game, and thirty-seven open browser tabs of Pokemon card auctions on eBay.
“I’ve been tracking everything related to Sam’s trip. Including where she’s tagged.” Parker double-clicked. The giant monitor switched to a screenshot of a new post.
A picture of a grumpy mountain man who looked very familiar.
And VERY irritating.
To my complete and utter horror, the picture I took of Noah and Yeti now filled the conference room wall. It was the candid shot I’d snapped at the airport when I thought I might need evidence for a future police investigation into my own disappearance.
“Wait a second,” I said. “I didn’t upload that. That’s not my post. I swear I didn’t post that.” Frantic, I searched every face on screen for validation, but nobody was looking at me. They were all looking at Noah, transfixed by his windswept hair, piercing blue eyes, and the half-smile playing at the corner of his mouth as Yeti drooled beside him. It was hard to tell through the speakerphone’s distortion, but I was pretty sure I heard Victoria whistle.
“I didn’t post that ...” I repeated weakly.
“No, you’re right, it’s not your post, Sam,” Parker confirmed. “But you’re tagged in it.”
“What? How?” Then I saw the username above Noah’s photograph. My jaw dropped.
IT. WAS. MY. MOTHER.
If someone had handed me a genie-filled lamp in that moment, my first wish would have been to wish I was adopted.
“Now that’s what I’m talking about,” Victoria purred, leaning so close to her camera that her face threatened to burst through the screen. “Can’t get any more authentic thanthat.”
“Wait,” Marcus interrupted. “Are those numbers right?”
“Yup,” Parker highlighted the statistics and zoomed in for a close-up. “And the post only went up this morning. The numbers are still climbing.” He scrolled through the comments while the rest of us processed what we were seeing.
“OMG who is this mountain man? ”
“That dog is literally a wolf and I’m here for it! ”
“Finally some REAL Colorado content! Not another lame fancy spa treatment shot that no one can afford!”
I stared at Noah’s giant image on screen. Mom had captioned it, “Mountain Man and Wolf-Dog,” tagging my personal account along with every single one of my business hashtags, effectively hijacking my professional brand to broadcast her shameless matchmaking agenda to the world.
“Wait, scroll back up,” Victoria commanded. “What was that one about authentic content?”
Parker obliged, and there it was — another comment on Mom’s post.
“This is what AUTHENTIC Colorado looks like! Not those fake marketing posts!”
My cheeks burned as I sank deeper into my chair, which suddenly felt less like a luxury office accessory and more like a witness stand. The contrast between my carefully curated resort photos and this candid shot of Noah, his authentic ruggedness, that barely there smile, Yeti looking wolf-like instead of a planted prop, was painfully obvious.
Marcus’s marketing brain was visibly recalculating. “Those numbers are higher than all of Samantha’s other posts.”
Wonderful. My own mother was better at my job than I was. And she still had an AOL email address and shared the same phone with Dad.
