“Yes. The meetings have been going very well,” I said, kind of stalling. “Some minor issues I’ll have taken care of. You know, I get in a room with them, they all have something to bring to my attention.”
“I expect so.”
“But overall, these are great companies. Everything is as it should be.”
“I expect so,” she repeated.
I really didn’t want to have to tell her about Janelle, but I had to. “I had to let one of our managers go, though. Janelle Gorman. She’d been running Superior Talent’s Vancouver office for the last several months.”
Deafening silence.
Then: “You fired one of our female business managers, mere days before my women-in-media gala?”
Nice. Now it washergala.
Which meant she’d be taking this personally.
“She was inventing expenses that didn’t exist and billing them to clients, and to the company.”
“You have proof of this?”
“Of course. She was stealing from the models and from her employees, most of them women. How does that help women in media?”
I could hear her nail tapping. Hopefully, this time, she was annoyed with someone other than me.
“Well. This is disappointing.”
“She was stealing from us, Mom. I’ll be following up with Superior when I get back to Toronto. In person. We can’t have this kind of thing going on under our noses, obviously. This would’ve caught up with her. The sooner we found out and handled it, though, the better.”
Silence again.
“I did the right thing here.”
“Yes,” my mother said. “You did the right thing. Just not at the best time. You’ve just arrived in town for the gala, a man with a recently sullied reputation,” she reminded me, “and now you’ve fired one of the women-in-media we’re supposed to be celebrating.”
“I get that. But just because she’s a woman doesn’t mean she’s deserving of that celebration.”
My mother sighed. “Tread carefully, son.”
Yeah. I was trying to. “Look, I had a talk with her last night. I assured her there won’t be any formal investigation beyond my office, or charges pressed. That we’ll handle this all quietly. In exchange for her handling it quietly. She has more to lose here than we do, and that was made clear to her. She signed the paperwork.”
My mother made a dismissive sound in her throat. “That nasty contract of yours?”
“Yes. That nasty contract that covers our asses in situations like this. I’m sorry it had to come to that.” I wasn’t sorry. Not at all. “But this is for our protection. The woman had to go.”
“Alright. I hear you.”
I sighed and sat back in my seat. “The good news is, from what I’ve seen so far, the other businesses are all in great shape, like I said. They’re exactly what we expected them to be. These women will make you proud. And absolutely everything else here is going well.”
Everything except the snarky attitude from a certain woman in a leopard-print blazer and a curve-hugging, pink-and-magenta dress so explosive it looked like the visual representation of an orgasm on a carnival ride. Seriously, did she not know clothes also came in black and white? Gray? Unoffensive beige?
I could see an email from her now, waiting for me at the top of my inbox.
I resisted the urge to click on it.
“Glad to hear it,” my mother said, though she sounded unmoved.
“You can ask Sir Frowns-A-Lot,” I suggested, “if you don’t believe me.”
