I felt a surge of hope.
“You don’t have to,” I said, thinking about one of the more eventful firings that I had been a part of in the last few years. “Do you remember when that girl Tina was fired a couple of years back? There were about ten different reasons why she was eligible to be fired, but she said that she wasn’t and threatened to bring it to court. I don’t think that it needs to go that far, though.”
“Why not?”
“Anybody with eyes can see that the two of you don’t exactly get along.”
“That’s an understatement.”
“And she wants more than anything to be more successful than you. So, let her try. Get out of her way for a while and give her a chance to see that it’s not competition with you that has kept her from being as successful as she thinks that she can be. If you just stay out of her sight for a while, I’m sure that the heat will die down and you’ll be able to come back without this turning into one big hot mess.”
“What am I supposed to do? Hide in my office and pretend that I’m not here until she figures out that the reason that she isn’t as successful as I am is because she doesn’t have the skills that I do?”
“No,” I said, my mind churning now. “You’re going to actually go away. Give her exactly what she wants. Be out of the office and out of her hair for a while.”
“How?”
“When was the last time that you took a vacation?”
Snow looked off into the middle distance for a second as if she were trying to pull that memory forward.
“Never,” she said. “Wait! Five years ago, I took three days off for that horrible christening.”
“That was over a weekend, so you took one day off, and you came in for a couple of hours that Friday morning and then stayed late Monday, so you took exactly no days off.”
Snow pursed her lips at me.
“Never,” she said.
“Exactly. That means that you have some serious accumulated vacation time. Ball it all up and take it.”
She looked at me as if she wasn’t entirely convinced.
“That would be about three months of vacation,” she said.
“We’ll call it a leave of absence. Just go. I’ll take care of getting Mrs. Royal in there to back off for a while.”
Snow nodded.
“Alright. I’ll go. But do one thing for me.”
“What?”
“Steal back the Diamond Mine files and submit my preliminary ideas to the client. Explain to them that I’m taking a leave of absence, but that I will keep working on their campaign if they want me to when I return.”
“I will,” I said.
Snow pulled a huge purse out from under her desk and emptied her drawers into it. Swiping the paperclips into the bag and scooping her empty coffee mug into her hand, she walked around the desk and toward the door.
“Thank you,” she said.
I nodded at her.
“Of course,” I said. “Go on. I don’t want her to see you before you go. Have fun while you’re gone, OK? This is your chance to be and do whatever you want. Take advantage of it.”
I watched as she disappeared out of the office and down the hallway. When I was sure that she was gone, I walked back to Lucille’s office. She looked up at me with expectation when I stepped into the room.
“So?” she said. “Did you do it?”
“She’s gone,” I said. When a cruel smile came to her lips, I stepped forward and put the paper back on the desk in front of her. “But I didn’t have her fired.”
“Excuse me?” she asked angrily. “I gave you specific instructions to have Snow Whitman removed from this office.”
“And that’s exactly what I did, but what you didn’t seem to think about was that she has a contract. There are very specific guidelines regarding termination in that contract, and if you attempted to dismiss her outside of those parameters, you would be putting both the company and you personally at risk of a nasty lawsuit. I don’t think that that is something that you are really interested in dealing with in your first few weeks leading the company. Do you want to explain to Mr. Royal why you both fired his top employee and drained the company’s insurance because of a labor suit?”
Lucille looked at me as if she was going to throttle me, but she didn’t move from her position behind the desk. I saw a glimmer of something in her eyes, but I chose to ignore it.
“Has she left?” she asked, her tone quieter and more controlled now.
“Yes,” I said.
“Where has she gone?”
“Wherever she wants to. If there’s nothing else that you need.”
Without waiting for her to come up with something else that she might want me to do, I left the office, closing the door behind me. I knew that this wasn’t the end. It couldn’t be. I might have been able to keep Snow from being fired today, but I didn’t delude myself into thinking that that was going to stop Lucille from doing anything that she could to remove Snow from her presence and her company. She was going to try to find a way to oust Snow and I worried that there was little that anybody could do to stop her. Hopefully her efforts wouldn’t be enough and that Mr. Royal would return in time to see that his blushing bride was nothing short of a scheming bitch. He might have turned over control of the company to her, but until it was fully in her name, which was something that I could never see him doing, she only had limited power. He could still come back and prevent her from causing any further damage to the empire that he had spent the vast majority of his life building.
Chapter Five
Snow
“Your boss rewarded you for not taking your vacation every year by giving you more vacation time?” Robin asked.
I nodded from where I lay on my bed, staring up at the ceiling.
“So that leaves me with an even longer time than I thought,” I said. “Fourteen weeks. More than three months of having absolutely nothing to do because that crazy bitch wants to get rid of me.”
“You are the only person I’ve ever known who would complain about having three months of paid time off just handed to you.”
“It wasn’t just handed to me. I earned it. It was part of my perks package. I just happen to have never used it until I was just forced to. I don’t think that’s something to be excited about.” I flipped over on my side to look at him. “What am I supposed to do? I live and breathe work.”
“Don’t I know it.”
“I didn’t get successful because I didn’t work hard.”
“You could have taken her route and just fucked your way to the top.”
Robin suddenly dissolved into a cascade of giggles.
“What’s so funny about that? It’s disturbing.”
“I just thought about the fact that she got to the top by being on the bottom.” He giggled harder for a few seconds and then suddenly went silent, his eyes widening as if something astonishing had occurred to him. “Or maybe the top,” he said. “What do you think? Mr. Royal is pretty old.”
I tried to withhold the shudder that coursed through me at the thought.
“I would really like to not think about that any more if it is all the same to you.”
“OK.” Robin looked around the room, his expression as though he was at a loss of what to talk about if he couldn’t continue down that line of conversation. After a few seconds he jumped, the thought that snapped into his mind seeming to startle him. “Oh! I can’t believe that I forgot to give this to you.”
He leaned over and started digging through the bag that he had shoved under his chair when he sat down.
“What?” I asked.
He sat up and held a wrinkled brochure out toward me.
“Look what I found.” He said. “Alright, look what was given to me by my date last night.”
“Name?” I asked, glancing at him through slightly narrowed eyes.
“I have absolutely no idea. But that’s not the point. Look at this. I thought of you as soon as I saw it.”
I took the brochure from him and looked at it. The cover had an image of a cozy-looking cottage tucked into woods, a curving stone trail leading up to its idyllic door.