I stepped up to the door of what was once Mr. Royal’s office and hesitated. I didn’t really want to go through it. I didn’t really want to step into the office and face the woman now sitting behind the desk. In fact, if I could have just turned around and left, pretending that I had never gotten the memo that she wanted to speak to me, I would have, but that wasn’t an option. Unfortunately, the new Mrs. Royal had inherited the entire company from her new husband and that meant that she had inherited me right along with it. I was at the mercy of her bidding.
I took a quick glimpse over toward Cindy’s desk and saw the slight woman hunched over her computer, typing feverishly. I was fairly certain that she wasn’t actually typing anything of consequence and was instead just trying to do whatever she could to look busy so that she didn’t have to face the new Madam President. This never would have been a concern if Mr. Royal was still leading the company. Cindy was his secretary, responsible for all the same things as the classic 1960s version of the position, just without the shady innuendo. She answered phones, took messages, and typed up memos. If Mr. Royal needed something more than that, he came to me. As his personal assistant, I took care of all of the other musings of his mind, either helping him to accomplish what he was envisioning or doing what I could to rein him in and turn his focus back to more practical pursuits. It had once been an ideal job. Walter Royal was as hilarious and eccentric as he was romantic and impulsive, which meant that his ideas were often far-flung and a blast to try to follow, but also that it didn’t surprise me in the least that he had gotten swept up by the thought of a whirlwind courtship and marriage to a young, mysterious woman.
Now the job was nothing short of a nightmare. Lucille Royal had been in the office for less than a week and I already hated her. She was cold and harsh, smiling only in that way that I half expected to see a forked tongue flicker in and out when she looked at certain people in the office. Her absconding with the doughnuts and coffee from the break room had resulted in a small riot, but that had gone nowhere but back into the conference room for an impromptu seminar about the importance of health and nutrition in the workplace. Being her assistant had left me feeling like a twelve-year-old hoping to get an interview for his school paper by shadowing a powerful CEO. She had me scurrying for juice and sourcing essential oils rather than doing anything that even closely resembled advertising. It had been an order to drive two hours to an herbal shop that turned out to be the tiny back room of a woman’s cottage to purchase particularly ominous-looking substances intended for “women’s uses” that pushed me to threatening to quit. Lucille had hung my contract over my head, though, and I knew that I was screwed.
Knowing that I couldn’t delay it any longer, I knocked on the door and waited for Mrs. Royal’s response.
“Yes?”
Always pleasant.
It had taken only two days for the saccharine smile and false enthusiasm to disappear and for the new president to start showing her true character. I wasn’t sure how many other people within the company had seen her the way that I had, but I knew that the changes that she had already implemented were just the beginning and that Mr. Royal would have been crushed to see even the beginning of her fa?ade cracking.
Not bothering to announce myself, I stepped into the office and closed the door behind me. She was sitting at the desk with a stack of files in front of her. There was something in her eyes that I might have called a glint if it wasn’t so dark. With a foreboding feeling in my gut, I walked up to the desk and dropped down into the chair across from her.
“You wanted to speak with me?” I said.
Lucille looked up at me from the paper that was on the desk in front of her, then back at it.
“Yes,” she said. “I want you to bring this to H.R. for me and then assist with the removal.”
I watched as she added her sharp, severe signature to the bottom of the page and then took it from her as she held it out to me.
“Removal?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “I have a feeling that this might be an unpleasant dismissal and I would prefer that the former employee not cause disruption for the rest of the team.”
I looked down at the paper she had handed me. It was a notice of dismissal letting the H.R. department know that she had decided to remove someone from their post. I glanced at the name and my eyes snapped to Lucille.
“Snow Whitman?” I asked in shock.
“Yes,” she said.
I was really beginning to hate hearing that word come out of her mouth.
“Why could you possibly want to fire Snow?”
“I have my reasons,” Lucille said. “I don’t believe that I need to justify them to you.”
I resisted the urge to crumble the notice up and turned, stalking out of the office. When I got a few steps away from the office, I looked down at the paper again, looking at the section where Lucille was supposed to indicate the reasoning behind her dismissal of Snow. This was not the first time that I had seen one of these forms, though all of the others that I had brought to H.R. had been from Walter. The others that I had seen had long explanations, detailing problems with the person and the specific breeches of contract that they had enacted to justify the dismissal. This page, though, only had one phrase. Incompatible with work environment.
The simplicity of the statement made the entire situation even more frustrating. I had been working at Royal and Company for a few years longer than Snow had, and I had never seen anyone like her. She came in like she already owned the world, yet was never oppressive or arrogant. Instead, her confidence in herself seemed to have injected the entire office with more energy and enthusiasm, and immediately everyone worked harder and pushed themselves more. I understood why the new accounts always wanted her. She had a way of looking at a company and being able to create a campaign that made them feel as though they were the only focus of her life. Her work was unique and exceptionally effective, which was why Mr. Royal had been actively grooming her to step into a higher leadership position when he eventually retired. Now that Lucille was around, however, that seemed less and less like a realistic prospect.
I took a few steps toward the H.R. office, but then changed my mind. If the She-Devil of Advertising was going to oust Snow, the least that I could do was give her a heads-up before security stalked down and escorted her out of the building. I made my way to Snow’s office and walked in without knocking. She looked up at me, more startled by my sudden appearance than she was irritated that I hadn’t announced myself before entering.
“Hi, Hunter,” she said.
I noticed that she appeared to be building a statue out of paperclips and it temporarily distracted me from my original mission.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
She looked at her project and shrugged.
“Madam President confiscated my files for the Diamond Mine account and I finished my other campaign presentations, so I figured that I would design some furniture.”
“Well, not having access to your files seems to be the least of the worries that you have when it comes to Lucille.”
“What do you mean?”
I held the paper out to her and Snow dropped the paperclips before taking it. She read it in stunned silence for a few seconds before standing up sharply and glaring at me.
“Are you serious?” she asked. “She’s trying to fire me for being incompatible? She’s the one who wanders in here and starts changing things, and I’m the one who’s incompatible?”
“I’m sorry, Snow. I wish that there was something that I could do about it.”
She sat back into her chair, shaking her head with a look of pure shock on her face. There wasn’t even the anger that I would have anticipated, just an almost hollow look, as if she didn’t know what she was supposed to do and didn’t want to step out from behind her desk because if she did she was going to have to really accept what was happening. After a few seconds of processing the information, she looked up at me and shook her head.
“No,” she said. “I’m not going anywhere. She can’t just fire me. She has to have a reason for getting rid of me, and she doesn’t have one. I’m not going to let her get away with it.”