“Yes, Devlin Media Corp was once a thing of great beauty,” Portia said. “But we failed in our responsibilities. We grew bloated and complacent.”
The picture behind her changed, showing the company headquarters, but through a dark filter that made the building look dirty, and shot at a bad angle, so that the towers were slightly obscured by the smoke from a fast food restaurant. I silently cursed the Photoshop gods.
“We began to think like a charity instead of a business,” she went on.
The picture changed to show an overweight family of six sitting on a couch, watching a television. I recognized the woman; she was one of the most friendly cafeteria workers we’d ever had. I’d missed her when she’d had to go on leave due to a broken leg, but thanks to her health insurance package, she’d been able to come back to work within a few months. How the hell had Portia gotten a picture of her family? That was slimy as hell.
“We began to throw money at spongers, wastrels, programs that were inessential to the core of our mission, of our purpose.”
Charts went up along the screen, blaring fire engine red lines showing steadily nose-diving profits. Until you looked at the scale, of course, and realized that Portia had manipulated the graph to give an inaccurate impression, but most of the audience was sitting too far away to see how she had labeled the x and y axes, and she rapidly clicked past it anyway, before even the people close to her could have given it much scrutiny.
Especially if their eyes were on her face, which she had now set in an expression of noble determination, her shoulders squared as if she were an Amazon warrior given one final mission for the good of all.
“But Devlin Media Corp can become a thing of beauty again,” Portia said, her voice ringing across the room like a call to battle. “We can once again honor the vision of our founder. We can once again compete in the global marketplace!”
“We never stopped,” I muttered.
“Portia doesn’t want competition,” Grant muttered back. “She just wants to crush everyone else and make a throne out of their skulls. I can’t believe I was so blind!”
I brought his hand to my lips and pressed a kiss to it. “You wanted to believe the best of her. That’s not a crime, or a weakness. That’s just you being a good man.”
“And thanks to my goodness, thousands of people may be about to lose their livelihoods,” Grant said tightly.
Onstage, Portia was in full stride now. “This isn’t a takeover from Pinker Inc. This is a chance to reclaim our company’s birthright! This is a chance to enter into this century, onto this world stage, as a power to be reckoned with!”
She raised her fist as if she were planning to smash all that stood in her way.
“Once we’ve shed the detritus accumulated over the years, our profit margins will soar. Our business will operate at peak efficiency, delivering results that no one can argue with. We will become faster, brighter, better. With the help of Pinker Inc., we will become a giant in this economy, and no one will be able to stop us!”
Thunderous applause greeted this pronouncement, and my stomach dropped down to my shoes. I tried to tune out Portia’s final words as she wrapped things up with more misleading statistics and an analysis that would have gotten thrown out of an Econ 101 course—but that I was still afraid the shareholders would listen to, motivated by her rhetoric and her promise of future profit.
Grant was looking nervous too, and I knew that I had to help him. I took his other hand and pulled him so that he was facing me, not the lying hell-beast onstage.
“Babe.” I tugged at his arms until he looked me in the eye. “Okay, she got a head start. But I know you can turn it around.”
He shook his head, defeat creeping into his posture. “I wish I shared your faith.”
“Hey!” I said. “Listen to me. You are Grant Fucking Devlin. You’ve got a smile that could sell every brand of toothpaste in America, a head of hair that could let a politician get away with slapping a baby, an ass that could make an entire convent of nuns reconsider their life choices—”
Grant was trying not to laugh. “I’m not sure those are the qualities the shareholders are looking for, Lacey.”
“You’re likeable and persuasive, was the point I was making,” I said with a little glare to make the ‘Lacey is giving you a motivational speech, so shut up’ subtext more apparent.
“More importantly, you have two other qualities: a head and a heart. All this research we’ve been doing, you know this company backwards and forwards, not just the flashy surface stuff like Portia does. And you love this company—which is something Portia the Robot From Planet Cut-Throat will never understand. And that’s why she’ll lose, because she’s fighting for money, but you…you’re fighting what you believe in. And that makes you stronger than she could ever dream of.”
Grant reached out and gently stroked a strand of hair over my ear. My breath caught in my throat.