As promised, please see below the bio for the text that will be used on materials relating to the presentation, including a biography and your credentials. Please could you provide a recent head shot to accompany?
Let me know if there are any errors.
Cordialement,
Claudine
Isabella opened the attachment marked with her name and read through the text:
Isabella Baker joined Hôtel Benjamin earlier this year after a prestigious career in the hospitality industry, during which she managed a hotel complex in England, overseeing the running of several sites. Since joining Hôtel Benjamin she has been working with CEO Claudine Dupont on improving the overall offering to guests, streamlining processes and ensuring that Hôtel Benjamin offers that something extra required of hotels in the Hotel Club family.
So there they were, in black and white. Her lies. She could barely remember her application – had she really said all that? Somehow seeing it written made it all seem too real. But she could hardly back out now.
‘It looks good,’ she replied finally, which was true. The design of the leaflet was on point, with gold embellishments and pictures from the hotel brochure edged in black. It looked chic and contemporary and on-brand.
But whatever she might tell herself about staying on the side of truth, she had now crossed a line. She had accepted a write-up about herself that contained something completely false. And it was going to be distributed as part of the package when they presented to Hotel Club in a few weeks’ time. After which it would be out in the world, together with her picture, and it would no longer be containable.
She was supposed to be going through some designs for new room-service menus, but the various options sent through by the graphic designer seemed to all blur into one. Her concentration was shot.
Her heart seemed to be racing and sweat was forming on her brow. She knew she needed to calm down to stop this escalating. She had to distract herself. She forced herself to look at the designs and for a moment it felt as if she were winning.
But as her concentration broke, the sweat came again, this time more intensely. She needed air, she needed to breathe.
Pushing back her chair, she walked quickly out of the office down the thankfully empty corridor and to the lift. She pressed the button for the ground floor and, as soon as the doors opened after the lift’s descent, she sped through the glass front door before anyone could question her. And she was out. She was free.
It was times like this when she wondered whether she’d be better off being a smoker. Nobody questioned you going to stand outside a building for a while if you were addicted to nicotine. As it was, she’d noticed Mélodie’s head snap up and watch her as she stepped out. She’d have to come up with some reason for her hasty exit, grab a coffee to bring back as an alibi.
Trying to regulate her breathing, she drew out her phone and called Juliette.
‘Oui, hello?’
‘Juliette,’ she managed. Her voice came out in almost a gasp.
‘Bella, is that you?’
‘Yes.’
‘What is it? What’s happened? Are you ill?’
‘No. I’m OK. I’m just— Oh Juliette, I’ve got myself into a situation.’
‘Tell me everything.’
She felt weak as she opened her mouth. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘But you have to promise not to hate me.’
‘I don’t understand,’ her friend admitted a few minutes later, once she’d relayed her lies and how they’d come about. ‘Why didn’t you correct them at your interview? They would still have been impressed, I am sure. Perhaps when you said you managed achambre d’hôtesthey misread it or something?’
Bella had been walking during her confession, her pace fast, matching her breathing. Now, spent, she made her way to a pavement café and slipped into a chair at an empty table. ‘It’s not quite that, Juliette. I mean, I was trying to— well, make myself sound better than I was. I suppose… I may have caused the confusion with my— with how I described things.’
‘So you lied?’
‘Well, yes. No. Sort of. I made it… I left things open to misinterpretation.’
There was a silence. ‘But why would you do that?’
‘Juliette. You know. I couldn’t get a job. Nobody wanted me.’ Bella felt her eyes fill. ‘I was running out of time, out of money. And I just thought,what would Juliette do?’
‘Me? You think I am a liar?’
