Mom stood at the door with Amelia in her arms.
“How do I look?” I asked. Nerves made me jittery. I twisted back and forth showing off my outfit. I had my hair pulled back into a loose bun, and I wore a forest green dress with black leather trim I had purchased in Switzerland when I first started working. It wasn’t designer. I had been determined to make it on my own and couldn’t afford haute-couture, but it was nice and office suitable. I liked it.
“Very professional. You’ll be fine,” Mom said with a smile.
I looked up and down the street. My car hadn’t arrived yet. “Okay, Amelia will most likely need a change in about an hour. She’ll be grumpy, and you’ll think she wants a nap, and then you realize it’s a diaper. She’ll be happy after that. Next time she gets grumpy it will be nap time.”
“I know, Gemma. She’ll need a snack before nap time, and she will be starving when she wakes up.”
“She’s not good with words.” I fussed with the little sweater she had on over her dress. Tears pricked my eyes. I hadn’t been away from her for longer than a few hours since she was born. I didn’t know if I could do a whole day. I didn’t know if I could do the job.
“We have a busy morning planned. We have the big house to unpack, and lots of dusty sheets to wash,” Mom said as she tickled Amelia with kisses. “We’ll send you pictures and messages. I expect you to be too busy to reply much. It will be okay Gemma; you can do this.”
This was my grand scheme to prove John wrong. I could succeed without his help. I started brushing up my resume the day after Christmas. And just my luck, CP Manhattan had job listings for their marketing department posted online. The hiring process had been crazy fast, and within two weeks I had an offer.
The townhouse wasn’t big, by my standards it was ‘the small house in the city.’ Having grown up at Orchard View, everything seemed smaller. Moving in was a matter of unpacking into the closets and pulling down the dust cloths that covered all the furniture. Knowing Mom, being as hands-on as she was, she wouldn’t call in a service to help until it was time for the dusting and vacuuming. Even then she might only do it because Amelia could be a handful and Mom’s personal assistant, Yana, would be busy getting the kitchen ready.
A black car stopped in front of our stoop. I was down the steps by the time the driver was out and asking if I was Gem Lafayette.
“That’s me,” I confirmed. It would take a minute to get used to not correcting everyone with Lafayette-Peters. I didn’t want to give anyone a hint that I might be related to John, the current P in CP Manhattan.
Once at work it was difficult not to walk around like a deer caught in headlights. Everything was so flashy and high-tech. The jobs I had in Switzerland had been for smaller companies in smaller facilities, and I always worked remotely. Nothing quite matched the spectacle of working in lower Manhattan.
After my initial meeting with my hiring manager, Maggie, I was whisked off to HR to get last-minute paperwork signed, and my ID badge. I was on my own to navigate the maze of floors and cubicles back to the marketing department.
I knocked on Maggie’s door. She was a few years older than me and dressed like a social media influencer. Maybe it was the sophisticated Boho fashion, the over-the-top jewelry, or the perfect makeup that made me think that she looked ready for a photoshoot.
“All set? She asked looking up from her computer.
I nodded.
“Great. I hope you brought running shoes, because you are hitting the ground running.” She picked up a stack of file folders and printouts. “Follow me.”
I had thought my first day at the job nerves had settled, but this had them zooming about and bouncing off obstacles. I trailed behind as she walked through another maze until we were in a glass-walled conference room. It felt a bit like a fishbowl with everyone able to look in at what was going on inside.
A few moments after Maggie dumped everything onto the table, another woman, Bria, joined us.
“I figured you haven’t had a chance to grab any supplies yet,” she said as she slid a legal pad and a few pens across the table to me.
“Thanks,” I said.
Both Bria and Maggie were dressed much more casually than I was. Maybe I needed to rethink my business wardrobe. At least I had worn some color. I had been nervous because I hadn’t worn a black or gray business suit. And I was concerned that my up do wouldn’t be considered professional enough. Bria’s hair was in a messy bun, and it looked intentional.
“So, is it just me, or am I dressed too much like a banker?” I asked.
This made both Maggie and Bria laugh.
“First day everyone always does that, don’t worry about it. Dress how you’re comfortable, but no pajamas,” Maggie said.
“I hope I can wear jeans?”
“You can wear fashionably professional jeans.”
“What does fashionably professional even mean?” I asked.
“It means designer, darker denim, not faded, not something that looks like you wore them while gardening. Holes that are intentional and not exposing too much flesh, edgy”— Bria made finger quotes— “not trashy. If you’d wear them out clubbing or to the beach, probably not best for work.”
I wouldn’t need an entirely new wardrobe, but I could modify the one I had to fit the culture around here.
“You are going to want to be comfortable because we have a lot of work ahead of us and not a lot of time.”
Maggie slid a few of the folders in my direction and a few in Bria’s.
“Gem, when you were hired, we mentioned that we recently had an upset in the entire department,” Maggie started.
I nodded. I knew I was a fresh hire to bring in fresh ideas, and that there had been some reshuffling in the department.
“The hiring process has been too slow for our needs. But we need to get started even if we don’t have a full team right now. It’s up to us to prepare a presentation regarding CP Manhattan’s outreach initiative. Numbers are low and we’re haemorrhaging clients. This campaign must serve as a means of attracting new clients and giving confidence about our products and services to our existing clients.”
Bria let out a heavy sigh and shook her head.
Maggie continued, “The red folder has the numbers we are currently looking at, and our goals.”
My gaze scanned over the information and the bar charts. “This is perfect,” I beamed.
“Perfect?”
“Yeah, we’ll be able to actually track the impact marketing has on the overall health of the company. It’s exactly the kind of project I was hoping to get involved with.” This would provide me with actual numbers that I could use to back up my claims that internet marketing wasn’t a joke job. I knew I would never win John over to thinking that I wasn’t anything but his annoying little sister, always in the way. Maybe I could prove to John that my career choice wasn’t worthless, and he could see that marketing wasn’t simply playing online.
“I’m glad you feel that way because we have to present something to the big wigs at the end of the week,” Maggie said.
“What?” I felt my stomach plummet. “End of the week isn’t enough time.”
We would need more time to prepare a concept and design a campaign. And I wasn’t ready to make a presentation to my brother. He couldn’t know I was there so soon.
“Peters has already stepped away from this, so we’ll be working with Campbell. He’s not been involved with marketing since I’ve been here. I figure we don’t have to give him a campaign launch, but we do need to tell him where we are headed, the concepts, etc. He should be fine with words, not pictures.”
I nodded, but I lost the thread of anything she was saying. Campbell, the C in CP Manhattan. My throat went dry. I hadn’t seen Chase Campbell in years.
Three years and a few months to be more specific…
That year I had spent the summer at the Hamptons with my old high school friends. We had gone off to our separate universities and were reconnecting. We had all changed so much. I chopped my hair off into a bob and dyed it red. Jasmine had gotten engaged. Elizabeth was going to join the Marines. Sophie and I had taken gap years after graduation, so we were effectively a year behind everyone in their studies.
We spent the days lazing about the beach and the nights looking for parties. My friends were out to get laid as often as possible. I wasn’t ready for that level of fun. Jasmine was the one who found out about the party we ended up at that night. Hollywood types and financial types were everywhere. And they all partied as much as, if not more, than college students. Booze was readily available, as was a variety of other substances.
Some man, he was practically middle-aged, stumbled into me and asked where the bathroom was. I told him, being intimately familiar with the house. It was my family’s, which meant John would be lurking around some corner at any minute.
This guy put his arm around me, and we staggered off toward the main house. He told me he could get me into movies, he was a producer. He stopped and looped his arm through another man’s arm. When the other man turned around, I froze. Chase Campbell. I hadn’t expected to see him. I hadn’t seen him for years, not since the funerals. He was more handsome than I had ever remembered.
And I remembered a lot. The first time I had fallen in love with him his hair was a mess of dark curls, and his skin was golden tan. I had thought he was muscular then, but he had been seventeen or eighteen and just a skinny kid. Grown-up Chase was no longer a skinny kid, he had filled out with glorious muscle definition. His hair was still a mess of dark curls, but shorter. And his jaw was covered with a dark beard that looked five days longer than sexy stubble.
Chase had given me a grin and checked me out. My toes curled from his expression alone. We agreed to meet at the beach later, and then he took the producer guy away and left me. It was a good thing because moments later John discovered I was at his party, and he chewed me out.
It was the same thing from him as it had always been, “Stay away from my friends,” and “You are not welcome here, leave.”
I met Chase at the beach later that night, and I finally understood why my friends were crazy trying to get laid. The sex had been more than I had ever imagined. I didn’t get an opportunity to see him again that summer. And with the way things developed, I was pretty sure he didn’t realize the redhead he made love to in the dunes was his best friend’s sister.
I sighed. I hadn’t seen Chase Campbell since he got me pregnant.
