I set about clearing the desk. I took Natalie’s coffee cup and went to find the kitchen. It was completely spotless. I dunked the cup into the dishwasher and set about making myself a coffee in a fresh cup. Something told me that winning Andrew over was going to be a marathon, not a sprint. For a moment I thought about making Andrew a coffee, but he didn’t look the type. With his bod, he probably only ever drank glacier water and protein drinks.
“Can I help you?” a man asked from behind me.
I turned to find an older man looking at me like I was an errant schoolgirl. My heart began to scamper in circles around my chest. I was at a crossroads.
Not much defeated me, but I would struggle to make up a believable story even if a lifetime supply of Ferrara’s cannoli was at stake. It was why I’d initially started spending Saturday mornings emptying trash cans with my mother rather than doing whatever it was that eight-year-olds did on the weekends. I’d told her I’d finished my math homework. My mom could tell from a mile away I hadn’t been telling the truth, and for the next five years, my Saturday mornings were lost. Swift and severe punishment had always been Mamma Rossi’s style.
But now it was sink or swim. I needed this job, and I wasn’t a kid anymore.
“Good morning,” I said like I’d known the stranger in front of me our whole lives. I beamed up at him. “I’m Sofia, Andrew’s new assistant. I’ve taken over from Natalie.” Was it technically a lie if I was going to be Andrew’s new assistant but I just hadn’t been hired yet?
He stepped back. “He recruited someone new already?”
I shrugged. “I started this morning. Can I get you a coffee?”
He pulled his eyebrows together. “You don’t need to do that. We get our own coffees around here.” He pulled off a checked hat that made him look like an old-school private investigator and headed out of the kitchen. “But . . .” He turned back. “Next time you go in to Andrew, could you take some data I have on—You signed an NDA, right?”
I nodded, trying my best to look convincing.
“Some stuff on Verity.” He pulled open the bag he was carrying and brought out some paper. “It’s a complete disaster and I need Andrew to see it.”
“Sure, no problem.” I took the three sheets of numbers from him.
He nodded but didn’t move away. “A word of warning. He won’t like what you’re giving him, so hand it over and . . . duck. Or run.”
I kept my smile firmly fixed on my face, wondering whether or not I was about to be a victim of a 217—assault with an intent to murder. “No problem,” I said. “Leave it with me. Should I tell him who it’s from?”
Too late. The man in the hat had disappeared. Apparently, my storytelling had levelled up some time in the last twenty years. I scooped up my coffee cup and headed back to my desk—or what would be my desk once I actually worked here.
After I’d finished tidying the office and brewed my second cup of coffee, I called Natalie to get the password to the computer. Despite the fact that she begged me to come home and offered to lend me money to get me through the next month, she relented. She gave me the password (g0_2_He11_BLakE) and a truncated list of her day-to-day duties, and explained where she kept her electronic to-do list. I skipped over the part where Andrew hadn’t yet agreed to have me as an employee. I was manifesting hard enough to rip a hole in the universe, so I didn’t need to dwell on the fact that it hadn’t happened yet.
I’d not heard a sound from Andrew’s office and half suspected he wasn’t there at all. Maybe his office was three miles away through a maze of endless corridors, and I was sitting in front of an empty room.
Each of Natalie’s saved folders were organized by company. She had said something about how Andrew went into companies that were facing collapse and fired all the workers and made lots of money. From a brief Google search last night, I’d worked out that he was a turnaround specialist. He turned around failing companies. Natalie had made him sound like a monster, but surely if he stopped companies going to the wall, he was saving, not destroying, jobs.
If the hat guy had given me data on Verity, maybe that was a company Andrew was considering saving. I pulled up Natalie’s file and read all the documentation. Verity, Inc. began as a serious, journalist-led magazine at the start of the last century—like a British version of The New Yorker—but had been reinvented at some point. Now it was more like the National Enquirer.
It didn’t take an MBA to spot falling profits and plummeting circulation on the papers Hat Man had given me.
The company was ripe for a turnaround.
This must be Andrew’s next project. I just needed to figure out how to get him to hire me, so I could help turn Verity around.
Three
Andrew
Didn’t people understand that I wanted peace? I cancelled the call from Tristan flashing on my mobile and minimized my email screen, turning back to the Financial Times and the article about Goode Publishing.
For the most part, Bob Goode was good at what he did. He was managing to buck the trends with rising profits and increased circulations with most of the magazines he owned, but Verity was the exception.
My phone started to buzz again. Fucking Tristan. I stood—what I always did when I wanted a call or a meeting to be as short as possible. Just as I was about to accept Tristan’s call, there was a knock at the door.
I ignored it. My first meeting didn’t arrive until one and my team knew better than to bother me before midday.
I pressed accept. “Andrew Blake.”
“Honestly, Andrew. I’m calling you. I know it’s you. You know it’s me. Have you ever thought of starting a phone call with a simple hello?”
I had no intention of replying to Tristan’s bullshit, but even if I’d wanted to, I wouldn’t have gotten a chance. Despite me ignoring the knock on the door, another one followed, and then the girl from this morning appeared with papers in her hand.
I cancelled the call with Tristan and watched as the woman grinned at me, marched over to my desk, and put two sets of papers down.
“The older gentleman with the hat asked me to bring you these,” she said, pointing to the papers on the left. “And this is your mail.” She pointed to the papers on the right. “Which I’ve opened and put in order of priority.”
Why was she still here? And why was she acting like she worked for me?
“Get out,” I said, my tone low and serious.
“No,” she replied. It was like she’d hit me with a hammer.
“Excuse me?” Bloody Americans.
“No, I won’t get out.” She folded her arms and looked me square in the eye. “I’m going to stay and be your new assistant. I don’t expect a better package than the last assistant you had, and I’ll work just as hard and be just as dedicated.”
“Dedicated?” I asked, skipping past the fact that not only had the woman in front of me refused to leave, she was now demanding I pay her. “My last assistant left. If you can’t be more dedicated than her, you should definitely leave.”
I sat and brought back up my email account, clicking open the folder on Verity and scrolling through to bring up last year’s financial results.