Savannah had arrived early at the Velvet Beauty offices and Anthony, her second-in-command, was waiting for her.
‘The new packaging has arrived and it’s—’ His voice faltered.
Savannah felt sheer terror.
It was wrong. She’d screwed up. Anthony was a very calming person to have around. But he looked quite wild eyed, his spiky hair standing up on his head because he’d been running his hands through it. And his tie was, for once, slightly askew, which was never the case. Anthony was the poster man for exquisite dressing. Even on his trip to the Burren, Savannah knew he’d have brought perfect merino sweaters to wear over his ironed chinos.
‘What’s wrong exactly?’ said Savannah, evenly. She knew how to make herself sound calm.
‘Nothing! It’s fabulous!’ Anthony hugged her and twirled.
Savannah allowed herself to be twirled, allowed herself to enjoy the glory of having made a clever decision.
The new boxes were a beautiful matte black and it had been a risk. She hadn’t run it by Calum. He liked everything to be run by him even though it wasn’t his company. He pushed his way into everything.
‘The colour is glorious. This will take us to a whole new level. I can’t begin to tell you how glorious it is.’
‘Show me.’
Anthony was talking all the time as he led her through the office, down to the marketing office where several boxes lay stacked against the wall.
‘It was a genius decision,’ said Siobhan, the marketing manager, who Calum hadn’t wanted to hire because he said she’d go off on maternity leave soon as she was just married. It had been very stressful. Savannah had liked Siobhan from the first moment they’d met. It had involved a mild battle to hire her. Calum was still unsure: he was very tough on employees.
‘Oh Savannah, you are a genius!’
On her desk lay the flat-pack boxes that would be made up for their products: their creams, their perfumes, their candles. The skin balm that one magazine had called ‘nectar for the skin’.
In a move away from their clean, white packaging were these very elegant classy matte-black boxes with the rich cream writing.
‘We can’t wait to show everyone!’
‘They’ll be delirious,’ agreed Anthony. ‘I’m on my second expresso with excitement and I can’t tell you what that’s doing to my nerves. I think I’m going to go outside and have a cigarette to celebrate.’
‘You can’t,’ wailed Siobhan. ‘You haven’t had a cigarette in months.’
‘I need to celebrate!’ emphasised Anthony.
‘They’re beautiful,’ Savannah said.
Siobhan and Anthony had transferred many of the company’s products into the new boxes and the effect was wonderful. She thought of the whole new campaign she had in her head to relaunch, to take Velvet Beauty to a whole new level.
Briefly, joy and pride surged through her and then it drained away.
There was one huge problem with this momentous business decision. What would Calum say when he saw this?
She hadn’t mentioned the decision to change the packaging to him. She had gone ahead and made an executive decision. Which was right, because it was her company and yet still nothing happened in Velvet Beauty that Calum did not oversee, did not OK. He had somehow infiltrated her baby and explained that his business expertise was what the company lacked.
He would be angry that Savannah had spent a vast quantity of the budget on something he knew nothing about.
That she’d made the right choice about the packaging was immaterial. If anything, it made things worse. Because Calum, who liked to think he knew everything, was King of the World, had been supplanted by her and he would hate that.
What had she been thinking?
The fear suddenly rose in her. It was impossible to explain the fear to people who didn’t understand it. It was like being weakened by this creeping tingling that spread at speed over your body and into your chest. Every nerve cell pinged, sometimes she actually shook with nerves, a tiny vibration that people never saw.
Earlier in the year, for the first time ever, she’d thought she was having a heart attack and she’d gone to her doctor who’d said it was stress, contraction of the thoracic muscles.
Stress could mimic a heart attack but she was too young, her cholesterol was low, there were no other heart indicators on the expensive health checks she’d had in relation to her massive business loan. She was a healthy thirty-seven-year-old.
