The security lines were short, and the hotel slippers were easy to slap into a bin on the conveyor belt.
The hotel robe was too fluffy for the X-ray machine to see through, and a very sympathetic TSA agent patted Nicole’s shoulders with the backs of her hands and looked under the robe’s cowl collar before waving her through.
Crying in first class seemed absolutely ridiculous, so Nicole held it together during the eight-hour flight to San Diego, the Ryde car trip back to her apartment, and until she set her backpack on her threadbare couch.
The time was only one o’clock in the afternoon, and she needed to water her plants.
She connected the engineering marvel of rubber tubing to her kitchen faucet and spooled it outside to the tall towers overflowing with plants, and she took care of them.
As the water dribbled into the black potting soil warmed by the California sun, the gaping hole of loss swallowed her.
43
Oops
KINGSTON MOORE
Monday was set-up day at the Javits Center golf show, and Kingston had been working the cavernous main expo room for three hours with the movers, ensuring the booth was perfect.
This show was Sidewinder’s first mega booth, an enormous tent at the end of a row like an English king’s battlefield palace. Tables, couches, pamphlets, and three walk-in closet-sized golf simulators had to be perfectly placed.
At lunch, he’d left the Javits to work in his suite for a few hours, catching up on emails about his other three Last Chance project companies he was working on, too, because there was no rest for the wicked. His [email protected] email inbox was burgeoning with questions, notes, data spreadsheets, and bad news.
He spent hours dealing with the accumulated problems.
As he plowed through those, the sun finally reached the West Coast, where Nicole and the others would doubtlessly, hopefully, be rolling into the lab by nine in the morning.
The chandeliers above dripping knife-edge crystals, glassware-laden glass shelves lining the walls, and cut-crystal candy dishes standing on the coffee table at his knees sparkledrainbows in the LED lights like Kingston was sitting inside a massive, shattered glass heart.
At his direction, the hotel staff had packed the dresses and things she’d left and shipped them to her address in Carlsbad.
With them gone, the last of her sweet jasmine and vanilla perfume had dissipated, and the suite smelled like liquor and New York City car exhaust.
Finally, he was done with his Last Chance business after neglecting it all weekend.
Time to do what must be done at Sidewinder.
The first email memo was easy.
He logged into Outlook and clicked into his special anonymous email for managing Sidewinder that he now thought of as his “silent partner” account, [email protected], and typed out the email announcing the next round of layoffs two weeks hence.
The tone was terse, but it didn’t need to be flowery. The best way to give someone bad news was to be clear and quick about it. Drawing out the suspense or giving people false hope was cruel.
Kingston was many things—a liar, a traitor, a thief, unworthy of trust—but not cruel.
He sent it and then logged into his Sidewinder email account, checking to make sure it had gone through to the company’s emails because sending out the layoff notices without a warning shot was a dick move.
Yes, hisOctober Layoffsemail had hit his Sidewinder inbox.
Good.
He switched back into Outlook and his Last Chance email account, copied and pasted the April employment termination email from a Word docx in the Last Chance server’s cloud, changed the dates that people were going to be fired, copied and pasted the email addresses of the people he’d analyzed to be redundant, and sent it.
There.
Done.
Sidewinder Golf was thoroughly on track now, what with Morrissey having done him a solid yesterday by contacting Dali Manufacturing in China and starting the tech transfer process.
