“I’m glad you asked that.” She flipped through the handbook and slid it across the desk toward me. “Why don’t you give yourself a little refresher.”
Mr. Glass was standing a few feet behind the desk, positioned diagonally from Lucille as if he didn’t want to be close to her even though he knew that he couldn’t just walk away. I looked up at the advisor, hoping for some kind of encouragement. He only stared back, his face stony, his eyes registering no emotion. I stepped up to the side of the desk and looked down at the handbook. The text was old and nearly faded into the page, obviously printed decades before I even came on the scene. I felt like I read by the words too quickly for them to really sink into my brain and I went back to read them again. As I did, they started to swim on the page.
“In an effort to preserve the wholesome and family-focused corporate culture of Royal and Company Advertising Agency it will be policy that no employee shall engage in relationships with more than two persons in any given six-month period. If it is found that this policy has been broken, or if it is suspected that any employee has engaged in inappropriate or egregious sexual practices, it is cause for immediate and unnegotiated dismissal from the company.”
I felt like I couldn’t breathe. The sickness in my belly had increased to the point that I was afraid I was going to throw up. I straightened and stared directly across the desk at Lucille, refusing to show any emotion.
“I know for a fact that you couldn’t know what I was really doing.”
“Are you sure about that?”
I had to try to cling to the hope that the same vagueness and ambiguity that I had found in the information I could locate about the Enchanted Woods was all she knew, and that she had taken it and used a flight of fancy to bring her to her conclusions. Though they might have been right, at least in the fact that I had engage in sex with multiple men in less than the six months permitted, I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of admitting it.
“Yes,” I said.
“You were at a retreat called The Enchanted Woods. It is located, appropriately, in the middle of the woods and services only exclusive and limited clientele. You were provided with a selection of men to have sex with, presumably on a paid basis. Is there anything that I missed?”
I was shaking, the humiliation and anger that I was feeling starting to make cracks in the hardened shield that I had put up on my way to the confrontation. I didn’t know how to respond to her. Part of me wanted to deny it, to tell her that she didn’t know what she was talking about and that she was completely wrong about my activities during my leave. I knew that if there was some way for Lucille to check back after me, Fawn would protect my privacy and not offer any information. There was another part of me, however, that refused to lie, that refused to back down and hide behind the same demure cover I had hid behind for so long.
“That policy hasn’t been enforced in years, not since I’ve been working here, and you know it.”
“It doesn’t matter if it hasn’t ever been enforced,” Lucille said. “The point is that it is policy, and you went against it with your little escapade. That means that I have every right to do exactly what the handbook dictates and dismiss you.”
“I find it incredibly ironic that you are trying to fire me for doing nothing more than exactly what you have done every single time you have wanted to get a little bit higher in a company.”
“I’m not trying to fire you, Snow. I have fired you. Your ID chip will no longer allow you in the building as of tomorrow. I could have deactivated it today, but frankly I was looking forward to seeing the look on your face when you found out. Face it. There’s nothing for you to look down on me about anymore. We are exactly the same.”
The thought curdled my blood and I shook my head at her.
“No,” I said. “We’re nothing alike.”
Lucille nodded slightly.
“You’re right. We aren’t. At least I married the man.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Hunter
It had been two weeks since Lucille had finally succeeded in getting Snow out of the company and I was still struggling to deal with it. The office just wasn’t the same without her there. She brightened up the entire space, seeming to bring happiness and levity to any situation that we might find ourselves in, whether it was a client who decided last-minute that they needed their entire campaign redone to suit the marketing epiphany that they experienced in their tequila-fueled dream, or the fact that our doughnuts and coffee had still not made their return to the kitchen. When it came to the clients, Snow was always thinking a step ahead of everyone and ensuring that the accounts were managed in the best way possible, even when she wasn’t a formal part of the team working on it. She was always willing to offer a thought or give a bit of constructive criticism, but was just as fast to tell the team that the campaign they came up with was phenomenal and that she never would have been able to come up with it, even though the truth was more likely that she would have been. Now the clients were upset and accounts were threatening to leave the firm because Snow was no longer there to handle their campaigns and give them exactly what they wanted.
Beyond that, though, just being in an environment that was completely controlled by such a vicious woman as Lucille who had been handed everything that she wanted was intolerable. Her mere presence hung over the office like a thick, dark cloud, and everyone had seemed to shut down, pulling in within themselves more with each passing day with Lucille at the helm of the company. I had held out hope for a few days that Mr. Royal would catch wind of the firing and make a valiant return from his vacation, snatch back his company from his evil wife’s claws, and send her back into the smarmy corporate swampland from whence she came. A postcard that I received halfway through the first week without Snow, however, destroyed that hope for me and I was forced to confront the reality that this was what we were going to have to deal with throughout the course of our contracts. Unless we could find legitimate reason to sever our agreements, quitting would mean giving up our severance packages and all of the benefits we had been promised when we started working with Walter. It felt oppressive and frustrating, sucking the life and the motivation out of everyone in the office.
I had just returned from a run to the coffee shop for lunch, the one break that I was able to get during the day, when I noticed a man standing in the lobby. I didn’t recognize him as anyone who worked with the company or as any of the clients that we had been working with recently, so I stepped up beside him. I purposely stayed several feet away from him so that I could try to see his face without him noticing what I was doing. As I masked my curiosity by shifting through some of the magazines piled up on the table in the reception area as if I was checking the dates, I noticed that the man was staring through the glass case hanging on the wall at the pictures of employees who had been honored with awards and superlatives over the years.
I stepped a little closer and noticed that his gaze didn’t seem to be moving as though he were looking at all of the different pictures and plaques, but rather that he was staring at one specific one. He glanced slightly to the side as if he had noticed that I was looking at him and then turned to look at me fully.
“Hey,” he said, gesturing for me to come closer. “Who is this?”
I walked up to him, thankful that his interest had glossed over the fact that I was at least slightly stalking him. He was pointing into the glass and I followed the gesture. Snow’s face smiled at me from behind the glass, her eyes sparkling from a picture taken when she earned special recognition for being the top account earner the year before. It made me feel even sadder to look at her face shimmering there behind the glass, her presence there in the office and yet gone.
“That’s Snow Whitman,” I said. “She used to work here.”