That New York Minute. Abby Gaines
now. Improve my odds.
To her disappointment, Garrett said nothing. Maybe he would quit later.
Tony stood, signaling the meeting was over. Dazed, Rachel pushed back her chair, headed for the elevator with Garrett and Clive.
Her stomach churned. Fired. I could be fired. Eight years, up in smoke, just like that.
We can start over. Another of her mother’s sayings.
But I can’t. I can’t start over again. I won’t.
The elevator spat them out onto the floor where the real work was done. It was barely eight o’clock, but most people were at their desks.
Garrett peeled off to the left, ignoring the few greetings called out to him. Rachel took some hope from that. He really was useless with people.
She headed to her own office, her progress slowing as she stopped to answer Alice’s question about the storyboard she was working on, to inquire after Natasha’s boyfriend’s torn Achilles tendon, to congratulate Talia on her engagement and admire the ring.
At last she was in her office. Rachel stopped still, and surveyed all the things that anchored her here. Her Carolina beech desk, her red leather ergonomic chair, the whiteboard where she and the team spent long evenings brainstorming, the glass wall that allowed her to look out on “her” domain.
“How’d it go?” Haylee, the team admin, walked in behind her, a small sheaf of mail in her hand.
The mailroom, where Rachel had started, was now officially titled the communications center, handling actual letters and packages only a small part of its work.
“Not great.” Rachel perched on the edge of her desk and forced a smile. “I failed to fire on all cylinders.” For now, she would respect Tony’s request for confidentiality about the imminent sacking of two of the executive creative directors.
“That’s not like you.” Haylee fiddled with the cord of the window-blinds until they were wide-open, exposing the view of Madison Avenue far below.
“I said something to Garrett that put me off balance.” Rachel nodded in acknowledgment of Haylee’s small sound of surprise—Haylee hadn’t expected Garrett to be on the list, either. “A stupid joke about his mom, and it turns out she’s dead.”
Her distraction might have even worse consequences than she’d feared. How many of the partners would deem her unworthy of even her current job based on today’s performance? The sooner Garrett quit, the better.
Haylee grimaced. “Oh, yeah, his mom died in that plane crash.”
Rachel frowned. “No, it was cancer.”
“Uh-uh,” Haylee said with complete certainty. “It was a plane crash. One of those scenic flights … at Thanksgiving, maybe five, six years ago? I asked Garrett about his family back when he joined, and he told me. Poor guy, he’s still pretty cut up about it.”
Rachel froze.
Garrett’s sob story about the chemo and the Doris Day movies and “the difference between a miserable day and an okay one”… He’d made it up?
Why?
What kind of person would lie about his mother’s death?
She scanned the work area beyond the glass wall, where her colleagues, the hardest-working group of people she knew—people she might soon be forced to leave—bustled around. Then she saw him.
Garrett, chatting to Julie, a junior creative—one of Rachel’s junior creatives—his face a study in determined friendliness.
Julie looked overwhelmed … then, when Garrett touched her shoulder lightly, she peered up at him through demurely lowered lashes.
What the—? Before she even thought about what she was doing, Rachel had crossed to the glass wall, banged it hard with the palm of her hand.
“Rachel?” Haylee said.
Julie looked up, waved and returned to her work. Garrett swiveled to face Rachel. Their eyes met.
The events of the past twelve hours flashed through her mind. Last night in the bar, this morning’s elevator ride, the meeting, her guilty discomfort, her distraction, the way she hadn’t fought back when her work was questioned. What had Garrett said in the elevator? “You don’t react in the moment. That’s your weakness.”
Last night took on a whole new significance. Garrett had known he would see her in this morning’s meeting and he’d set out to humiliate her. Still, she could have recovered from that. But this morning, he’d spun her that garbage about his mother knowing it would set her off-kilter.
That one minute—that New York minute, as he called it—had changed everything.
Rachel didn’t have it in her to hide her outrage. Garrett took careful observation of her rigid posture, her hand still slammed against the glass, her doubtless heightened color.
One side of his mouth curled.
What kind of person lies about his mother’s death?
Not a person … a Shark. A slimy, ruthless predator.
And the blood in the water was hers.
CHAPTER FOUR
GARRETT WATCHED HIS FATHER approaching, plowing through the crowded bar like a frigate through a flotilla of pleasure craft.
Garrett drained his beer glass. The beer here at O’Dooley’s was on tap, rather than the bottled beers favored by the other bars in the locale. “Here comes my date,” he told Clive Barnes.
Clive took one look at Admiral Dwight Calder’s uniform—service khakis, suggesting there’d been no high-powered meetings today—and much-decorated chest, and stood. “I feel like I should salute,” he said out of the corner of his mouth, though the admiral would never hear him over the din of the Friday-night drinkers.
“Don’t encourage him,” Garrett said.
Clive polished off his beer. “Time I went home to Wifey.” He nodded to Garrett’s father as he left.
“Who was that?” his father asked. He pulled out the chair Clive had vacated and sat.
“A colleague.”
Dwight frowned. “He was wearing a pink shirt.”
“I have one just like it at home,” Garrett lied. He cursed his own childish reaction. When would he learn not to rise to his dad’s narrow views? “You want a beer?” he asked.
“Thanks.” Dwight glanced around the bar. “So, this is the kind of place you hang out.”
Garrett signaled to one of the waiters, distinctive in green polos with a shamrock motif, to bring two beers. “Sometimes.”
Not often, actually. He wasn’t much of a social drinker, and drinking alone didn’t appeal—last night excepted. But when his father had asked to meet tonight, Garrett hadn’t wanted to commit to a whole meal. He’d suggested his dad meet him here at seven, giving him plenty of time for the “drink and chat” that Clive had suggested.
Neither he nor his dad was a fan of small talk, so they waited for their beers in silence.
Garrett pondered his conversation with Clive, who’d been keen to understand how genuine Garrett’s interest in the partnership was.
The truth? He’d initially refused to let his name go forward because a partnership smacked too much of losing his independence. But his refusal had niggled at him. He wasn’t sure if he’d done the right thing. At the last minute, he’d decided he might as well keep his options open.
This morning, his knee-jerk reaction to Tony’s announcement had been to quit. He didn’t