Mr. Brown arrived at 8:35, flanked by two junior executives I vaguely recognized from the fourth floor. He didn't apologize for being late—men like him never did. He simply settled into his chair at the head of the table, his silver hair immaculate, his expression already skeptical.
"Let's get started," he said, not looking at me. "I have a nine o'clock."
I took a breath, clicked to my first slide, and began.
For twenty minutes, I walked them through the data. Consumer trends, market positioning, competitive analysis, strategic recommendations. I'd rehearsed this so many times that the words flowed automatically, leaving part of my brain free to monitor reactions. The junior executives were nodding, taking notes. Mr. Brown was stone-faced, his pen tapping an irregular rhythm against his leather portfolio.
When I finished, silence filled the room. I stood there, the laser pointer clutched in my damp hand, waiting.
"The demographic segmentation," Mr. Brown said finally. "You're assuming a fifteen percent overlap between the millennial and Gen-Z cohorts. What's your source for that?"
I'd anticipated this question. "The Pew Research data from March, combined with our internal customer surveys. The methodology is detailed in Appendix C."
"Pew." He said it like a dismissal. "Anyone can cite Pew. I'm asking what original analysis you did."
"I cross-referenced the Pew findings with our point-of-sale data from Q2 and Q3. The overlap held consistent within a two-point margin of error."
He flipped through the bound report, his frown deepening. "The font choices are inconsistent. Slide twelve uses Arial, but the rest is Calibri."
I blinked. "I—I'll correct that immediately."
"And the color scheme on the charts. It's not consistent with our brand guidelines."
"The brand guidelines specify blue and gray for internal documents. I used—"
"I know what you used, Miss Blanchard." He looked up at me then, and the coldness in his eyes made my stomach drop."The question is whether you understand that attention to detail matters. That you can't coast on a name and a pedigree."
There it was. The thing he'd never said outright but that poisoned every interaction we had.
He thought I'd gotten this job because of my father.
It wasn't true—by the time I'd applied here, Dad's reputation was already tarnished by the scandal that had cost him his own firm. If anything, the Blanchard name was a liability, something I had to overcome rather than leverage. But Mr. Brown had known my father professionally, had played golf with him at the club before everything fell apart. He'd made assumptions, and nothing I did could shake them.
"I'll revise the formatting and have an updated version on your desk by the end of the day," I said, keeping my voice steady through sheer force of will.
"See that you do." He stood, and the junior executives scrambled to follow. At the door, he paused. "Your analysis isn't bad, Miss Blanchard. But analysis is easy. Execution is what separates the professionals from the privileged."
Then he was gone, and I was alone in the conference room with my immaculate handouts and my shattered confidence.
I couldn't face the office after that. I told my assistant I was going out for coffee, grabbed my coat, and fled.
The coffee shop on the corner was crowded with the late-morning rush—freelancers with laptops, mothers with strollers, a few suits grabbing a second caffeine hit before their next meeting. I joined the line, pulling out my phone to look busy, to avoid making eye contact with anyone who might see the tears I was barely holding back.
Coasting on a name and a pedigree.The words kept echoing. As if I hadn't worked twice as hard as anyone else in that office. As if I hadn't stayed late every night, come in early every morning, sacrificed every weekend to prove I deserved to be there.
But it didn't matter. It would never matter. In Mr. Brown's eyes, I would always be Thomas Blanchard's daughter—soft, spoiled, skating by on connections I didn't actually have.
The line shuffled forward. I was so lost in my spiral that I didn't notice the man until he was beside me.
Or rather, until I felt him. A presence at my shoulder, close enough that I could smell expensive cologne and something underneath it—something clean and sharp and distinctly masculine. The hair on the back of my neck stood up.
I turned, and for a fraction of a second, I looked directly into a pair of green eyes.
They were remarkable eyes—pale and cold and startlingly intense, set in a face of sharp angles and shadows. Dark hair, swept back. A jaw that could have been carved from granite. He was tall, well over six feet, with the broad shoulders of someone who'd never had to squeeze himself into a corner of the subway.
Our gazes locked. Something flickered in those green depths—recognition? interest?—and my breath caught in my throat.
Then someone called my order—"Skim latte, extra foam!"—and I jerked toward the counter. When I looked back, the man was gone.
