one
Cheated
My presentation flashes across the screen followed by my work frenemy’s name. It’s a blessing the boardroom is dark, or everyone would see the wild bitch come over my face and glare daggers at Patricia Evans.
The next slide has all my data on it, but it looks twice as bad, glittered up with Patricianess instead of the straightforward chart I had made. Every carefully thought-out point I’d written in the meeting notes section is vomited from Patricia’s pink-lipped mouth with peppy precision, as if she wrote the words herself.
This doesn’t feel real.
It’s like something out of a movie.
I drag my hands down to my lap and pinch myself. The sharp sting barely registers against the thundering of my bleeding heart. Betrayal roars through my veins and a cold sweat gathers on the back of my neck.
The next slide is supposed to feature a selection of our best book covers and their market performance in different regions of the United States compared to other countries, but for some reason, she turned it into three separate slides. Way to go, Patricia! Now we can’t compare the numbers side by side…
The next few slides show a selection of changes we could make to several covers to improve their performance in markets where we haven’t had much luck. She’s added a few of her own suggestions that, at first glance, appear to be smart choices. But having immersed myself in this data for months, I know that higher contrast, realistic covers donotdo well in the Italian market.
“Book covers are like passports; some travel better than others. Germany? Loves dramatic fonts. The U.S.? If it’s shirtless and shiny, it’s already through customs,” Patricia delivers my joke to a bray of laughter from everyone around the table but me.
I want to throw up.
How could she do me this dirty?
More importantly, howdidshe do me this dirty?
Did I leave my computer on when I went to lunch? Did she coerce the IT guy to break into my files?
Did I accidentally save it to the shared work drive instead of my local machine?
I cringe, closing my eyes against my stupidity.
I did this to myself. I collated data for months on my laptop and then made the PowerfulPoint presentation on the damn work computer where it auto-saves to the shared drive if a local destination isn’t specified.
No. She didn’t have to steal your work. That washerfault.
I swallow back bile and watch the rest of my presentation play out. The lights come up and everyone claps. I manage a few, though my hands feel like lead.
“So, what’s the first actionable step here?” the CEO, Dan Michaels, asks.
Patricia looks stunned for a moment, and part of me hopes she falters—but I had created a “Likely Questions” slide at the very end that covered this. If she read those, she’ll know what to say.
She clears her throat. “We’ll want to reach out to the art department—”
Wrong!
I grind my teeth as I listen to her go on about shit she didn’t memorize correctly. The next step is to contact our foreign distributors to alert them of the re-cover plans so we can get a fresh launch on their bookseller’s schedules. Coordinating a release like this takes time, and we can’t just jump right into cover re-dos.
“That’s great,” Dan says, then looks at me. “Caitlin, could you help Patricia draft something up?”
My mouth opens and “Uh, yeah” comes tumbling out.
Dan beams. “Great. Let’s get moving! Authors to sign, books to sell. I want us to be a global competitor by the end of Q four.”
My gaze darts to Patricia, whose sweet smile seems to turn acidic when she looks at me. Our boss, Vick, moves through my line of vision and some last shred of self-preservation activates in me.
“Vick, could we chat in your office?” I ask, just loud enough for Patricia to hear.
He smiles, but it looks uncomfortable. His thick, salt and pepper eyebrows pull down into a grimace while his mouth tries to grin. It’s a smile that says,Oh no, I have to face a conflict I’ve been avoiding.
