“And our master plan worked. We got you to shower! Mwahahaha!” Alice wiggles her fingers together, spinning on her high stool.
Yemi paces around the counter and hugs me. “Yeah, we mostly just didn’t want you stinking up our home.”
“How can I ever repay you?” I ask earnestly.
“Hmm...” Alice ponders, turning back to the humongous package taking up half the hallway with a cheeky smile. “I’d take a ridiculously expensive painting?”
“Oh God.” My hands cover my face. “It’s too much. I have to give it back, right?”
I lean against the counter. Tomorrow, I have to be a consummate professional for our big meeting at the Heimach Hotel when everything I want to do and say is against Catch Group’s Code of Conduct.
“I think you should sleep on it,” Yemi suggests as she shrugs. “You might feel differently in the morning.”
“Or when you see him at the meeting,” Alice adds.
This is Bancroft’s biggest little-black-book partnership opportunity: a meeting about partnering for Ditto users’ exclusive access to the Heimach Hotel’s gym, cycle class, spa and yoga facilities as well as discounts across the rooms and restaurant. Ruining things by being a no-show will jeopardize both of our shots at a promotion. I rub my eyes with my palms. How do I even start a conversation like that? “Hey, thanks for the multi-thousand-pound painting but also fuck you for keeping a huge secret from me. Are you ready for our career-defining meeting?”
20
“Where’s the report?” Susie’s sharp voice scrapes the inside of my ear like a long fingernail on a blackboard.
“It’s on your desk,” I pant down the phone. I scan the blueprint of her desk in my mind, half the time her Chloé Marcie handbag is slung over the entire surface. “It might be under something but—”
“I don’t see it.” She sounds frantic. “Darling, I’m about to have a very important meeting and Ineedthat report.”
“It’s definitely there, in a blue folder. I dropped it off before I left.”
The phone bounces against my face as I half walk, half sprint down the dusty pavement. I left on time, but it’s always on the days you have to look your best that you end up stuck on a delayed tube in the middle of summer and having to walk half the journey. At least the breeze from my pace is drying my sweaty forehead.
“If it was ‘definitely’ here, why can’t I see it?”
I internally cringe. Susie wasn’t exactly supportive of me leaving the office two hours earlier than usual on a Thursday to meet with Bancroft and the owner of theHeimach Hotel, so she gave me some extra last-minute work to do as a punishment. The hotel sprouts through the concrete in the distance; I burst into a full jog in heels.
“Maybe try underneath your handbag?”
She’s silent for a moment as I hear shuffling on the other end of the line. “This is why you need to book these meetings outside of work hours. It wastes both of our time.”
I guess she found the report.
“I’ll keep that in mind for next time. I have to—”
“Next time?” she interrupts. “I’m under a lot of pressure right now. I need to know I can rely on you.”
“I just mean... the Ditto presentation is in a couple of weeks so...” I trail off, not knowing how to say “hopefully I won’t be working for you after that” in a way that won’t end up with my head being stuffed and mounted in her house as a hat rack.
I can almost hear her eyes rolling in her skull like bingo balls circling a cage.
“I expect youractualwork on my desk by tomorrow morning, hopefully somewhere I can see it without having to search for it?”
“Of course. Have a good evening.”
“Have a good evening!” I repeat to myself in a whiny high-pitched voice, chastising myself for my attempt at pleasantry with a hungry, rabid hyena.
I reach the hotel’s revolving doors, which are nestled between a tall, glossy office building and a Blank Street Coffee. I take a deep breath and wipe my damp hair andface with my sleeve. My navy-blue fitted suit feels very Bancroftian. In sweltering weather like this, I’d usually opt for lighter colors and fabrics, but this meeting is too important to mess up by being underdressed.
I head into the lobby and the cold air hits my skin as if I’m crossing the tundra. Bancroft is standing with a man at the end of a wide expanse of onyx floor, but he hasn’t seen me yet. A sign of glowing backlit marble lancing spreads across the hotel reception. The word HEIMACH spelled out in industrial lightbulbs looms over the lobby. Well-dressed staff with slick hair and black jumpsuits rush around holding iPads. This hotel is a hotspot for cool, creative types who can often be found pounding on their laptops on a green leather sofa in the lobby workspace. Alice would fit right in here. I scan the clientele, checking people against the mental list of Ditto’s target audience attributes. Unique, young, cool. Seems as if we’re in the right place.
My sweat-soaked skin prickles as Bancroft clocks my presence, studying my outfit with a scrunch of his eyebrows so subtle I almost think I imagined it. Yemi was, of course, right. I spent a lot of last night staring at the ceiling, running scenario after scenario of what I should have done and said differently in his office. Before fully drifting off, I came to the conclusion that, even though it hurts, I can understand his instinct to not tell me. Craving his signature smirk, I shoot Bancroft an awkward tight-lipped smile and his eyes flash with something resembling relief before lookingaway. He’s standing with a man with platinum-blond hair dressed in a striped blue-and-dark-green suit and a bright red tie. He must be Christoph Teller, the youngest of the Teller family hotel dynasty. According toForbesandVanity Fairhis father is very good friends with Bancroft’s father, Malon. They tower over me as I approach, like two marble columns guarding the entrance of a club exclusively for those over six feet tall with an inheritance.
