He snorted.“Reply that I’ll attend,” he said.“It’s a personal meeting.”
I nodded and went back to it, checking my phone quickly to see what Clara had said:Is Fernando at work?Have you seen him?
I saw him yesterday for about a minute but that’s it.We don’t really cross paths at work.Why?
I RSVP’d yes on Mr.Harvey’s behalf to the mysterious email address behind the calendar invite, then added it to his calendar.
I don’t know.He’s being kind of weird with me.
I picked up my phone to examine Clara’s last message closer.Was there trouble between them?I hadn’t seen her much this past week or so since I started working at the Harvey Group, but the last time we’d spoken properly, she had seemed loved-up.
“Are you looking for evidence of our saboteur on your phone?”Mr.Harvey asked.
I looked up at him, feeling like a startled deer in the headlights.I could feel heat creeping up my neck and onto my face.“Um, no.”
“Then put it down and do your work,” he growled.
I swallowed, made a show of very quickly turning off my phone screen and putting it face-down on my desk, and then glanced up at him.
He was still staring at me.
I opened the top drawer of my desk, threw my phone in, and closed the drawer.
He grunted and went back to his work.
I breathed a very-carefully-not-loud sigh of relief that he was no longer liable to fry me to death with his eye-lasers, and tried to focus on the press queries that had come in.
Not that it was easy.Every single one, without fail, was about Ridley Angus.Every opening question made me cringe.
Do you have a statement to make about reports that Ridley Angus is an alcoholic?
Will Ridley be dropping his sponsorship?
Are you expecting there to be any penalties from the NFL?
Does Angus have a drinking problem before or during games, or just on his off-time?Has he ever been drunk on the field?
I replied to all of them with a blanket statement, refusing to give specific comments and asking them to wait for announcements in due course, reminding them that Ridley was still one of the top athletes in his field and he would continue to concentrate on his sport.Mr.Harvey had carefully and expertly worded it to remind them that there was nothing wrong with Ridley’s age and that he was still a champion player, without actually giving any real hint of a response yet, given that we still didn’t know what our official response would be.
It took me a couple of hours to reply to them, with more coming in thick and fast as I tried to cover them all.By the time I was done, I felt like I’d climbed to the top of a pile of sand in an hourglass to haul myself into the top half.
Of course, tomorrow morning the hourglass would be tipped upside down and I’d have to start all over again.
“Keaton,” Mr.Harvey said, and it was such a precise pronunciation of my name that I found myself sitting straighter in my chair as I looked at him, like I was snapping to attention.“Go down the hall to Ace’s office.I want you working with him for the rest of the day.”
And just like that, everything seemed to crumble.
What had I done wrong now?
Olly
Keaton looked at me with shining round eyes.Like he was about to cry.
“I need you to look into this saboteur,” I said quickly.I wanted him to know he wasn’t in trouble – wasn’t being sent away and punished.I actually just had a job for him to do.“You and Ace need to find a way to save Ridley’s career.We can’t have his public image going into a downward spiral.”
I had an image at the back of my mind of other sportsmen who had been caught out in the press.Men who had done stupid things and been vilified for it.It always seemed like one bad thing followed another.Public life problems prompted performance issues.Investigations into personal conduct became investigations into professional conduct.Wives and girlfriends got involved, mistresses and one-night stands.Down and down until the public hated them.Sometimes the career would bounce back.Sometimes it wouldn’t.
Tiger.Rooney.Odom.Armstrong.
