by Nicole Deese
I switched the camera remote to record, thankful the special exfoliant I’d concocted had removed every last trace of my self-tanner, and lifted the first foundation toward the red blinking light. While my mouth chatted away about the pros and cons of each product, my mind continually drifted to questions not even my subconscious wanted to face: What kind of woman dated a guy for nearly a year and didn’t feel much of anything when it was over? I definitely would not be googling such a question. The last thing I needed was for my social feeds to be consumed by sympathy offerings for a broken heart. Or worse, the unwanted encouragement to engage in risky behaviors. Like bang cutting. When would the world learn that hasty haircuts never solved anything?
After a solid first take, I squared my chin and smiled before signing off with a promise to be back soon with more from Makeup Matters with Molly. And I would be back. Because I didn’t need a manager like Ethan to be successful. And I certainly didn’t need a boyfriend like him to be happy. I’d learned how to make a living—meager as it was—before he’d ever come along on his flashy corporate horse and swept me into a world of wealthy campaigns and celebrity connections.
All I needed to do now was play my cards right where he was concerned. I’d push through these contracted months ahead the same way I pushed through every challenging hurdle in my life: by powering through and working hard.
Ethan might own a piece of my brand, but he didn’t own my face or my personality. He didn’t own me.
As soon as I plugged the camera in to my laptop to start the upload of the raw footage to Val, I saw a notification on my phone. New email from Ethan Carrington @ the Cobalt Group.
My stomach twisted at the thought of reading his reply. Only the email wasn’t addressed to me at all. It wasn’t a personal reply, but a group message. An interoffice memo.
Immediately the blood in my hands, arms, and torso cooled to a temperature that should be impossible midsummer. I zoomed in on the message, as if the words would make better sense if only they could be viewed in a larger font.
I was wrong.
Subject: Announcement: New assistant and editorial manager for Makeup Matters with Molly!
Let’s all congratulate Rosalyn Bronswick and her team members on this well-deserved promotion. Rosalyn comes with years of experience and glowing referrals from her past clientele. As you all know, Cobalt strives to acquire only the best and most reputable staff today’s marketing industry has to offer. Please accept our warmest Cobalt welcome to you, Rosalyn!
-Ethan
My hands shook as I fumbled to click out of the email screen and into my contacts. How dare he do this to me—to Val! I slid my finger down to Ethan’s name, making a mental note to change his contact name to something far more sinister once I had a moment to think.
After only half a ring, his voicemail cut in. “You have reached the voicemail of Ethan Carrington, vice president of the Cobalt Group. Please leave a message, and I’ll return your call as soon as I can. Ciao.”
“Ethan, what exactly do you think you’re . . .” I clamped my teeth together until my jaw throbbed, realizing I was breaking the first rule of the new boundaries I’d set for our new business-partners-only status. Despite his juvenile behavior, I was a professional. And I had to act like it. For Val’s sake. As well as my own.
I couldn’t afford to lose at whatever game he was playing with my career.
I released a static-filled breath and cleared my throat. “Hello, this is Molly McKenzie. I just received notice of a staff change that pertains to my editorial team. As I’ve expressed before, I am not in need of a new personal assistant, as Val has both impeccable work ethic and creative ability. So if you’d kindly redirect your hiring of Ms. Bronswick to another influencer seeking her qualifications within Cobalt, I’d greatly appreciate it. Thank you.”
I hung up the phone, wanting nothing more than to smash something breakable into a thousand pieces, because I knew, I knew, there wouldn’t be any sort of contractual discrepancy that could clear this matter up. No, this could only be cleared up by a change of heart. And seeing as I was starting to think Ethan was void of that particular vital organ, that outcome seemed less than feasible at the moment.
On a long exhale, I held my eyes closed, remembering how I’d pushed Cobalt into hiring Val as a Cobalt employee as part of my initial representation negotiations with them. At the time, the idea had made the most sense. They had the big bucks after all, and I’d wanted Val’s salary to reflect both the growth of my channels and of the competitive industry as a whole. Upon signing, Val received full employee benefits—medical and retirement, and an annual performance bonus. It had been the perfect scenario: Val worked exclusively for me and my brand, while her monthly paychecks came directly from Cobalt.
What could I even say to her? Being let go was her worst fear, and I’d . . . I’d allowed it to happen. Urgh! What kind of heartless jerk fired a responsible single mother out of retribution?
If I couldn’t smash something, I needed to move. To walk. To think outside this room furnished with camera and lighting equipment appraised at twice the value of my car.
Forgetting the makeup tutorial waiting for me in my studio, I shoved my phone into the back pocket of my jeans, ripped open the front door, and shot down my porch steps to the sidewalk. I marched at a pace that should have been a sprint if not for my wedged sandals. I needed a solution I could offer Val before I called her. Something positive and concrete. Something that would make this all seem—
The buzzing in my pocket cut my thinking session short.
Val.
Her name sent a hot jolt through my chest. Help me, help her, God. A prayer so immediate and desperate it shocked me.
I answered mid exhale and threw myself into problem-solving mode. “Val? Okay, listen. I just read the email. It’s horrible, yes, but we can figure all this out together. There’s absolutely no reason to panic. I’ve already thought of a few options, we just need to process them out loud.”
But apart from a sniffle, the other end of the line was quiet.
“Val?”
“He already gave me two options.”
“Who?”
“Ethan.”
He’d given her two options? When? “What are they?”
“To take two months’ severance pay and leave the company . . . or take a promotion with twenty percent higher pay with full benefits and monthly bonuses.”
“Wait, I’m sorry.” I stopped walking. “He said he’d give you better pay if you do what exactly?”
“If I transfer away from your brand,” she finished.
For the better part of five seconds, I stood frozen in place in the middle of the sidewalk as my neighbor’s cotton ball of a dog panted at me from the other side of their picket fence, his face as confused and expectant as my own felt.
“Well that’s not happening,” I finally said through a bubble of hysteria. “That’s just . . . that’s absolutely ridiculous. He can’t possibly think you’d take that. We’re a team. There’s no Makeup Matters brand without you.”
Again, Val was so quiet I pulled the phone from my ear to check the connection.
“I took it. I took his offer.”
Though my ears heard the words, my mind refused to process their meaning, as if an Out of Order sign had just been stapled to my forehead. A guttural decompression of escaped air was my only response.
“I have a son, Molly. I have to think of him. The tourist industry is in bad shape here, and I can’t rely on my parents’ business to help us when they can barely pay their store rent and—”
“You . . . you . . . took his offer?” The words stumbled from my mouth like a drunk spotting sunlight for the first time in days. “Without talking to me first?”
“Actually,” she said with an assertiveness I’d never heard from her, “I took his offer after you failed to talk to me.”
“What? No. That’s not true. I told you the photo shoot hadn’t gone as planned and that
we’d had an argument—”
“You and Ethan had more than an argument. You had a breakup, Molly. A breakup that put both our careers in jeopardy, and you didn’t bother to tell me.”
“No, I was planning to tell you that we broke up—”
“When? Before I read the email about my replacement, or after?”
“That’s not fair. I had to meet with my . . .” What was Silas to me exactly? “With my legal representation first, because I was afraid I was going to be sued for breach of contract, and then I needed to communicate my new professional boundaries to Ethan. I didn’t want to worry you over nothing if he responded . . . rationally.” The word soured on my tongue.
Ethan wasn’t rational with the people who had wronged him. He was ruthless. I only had to think back to Felicity Fashion Fix for proof of that.
“You didn’t listen to me.” Her soft voice pulled me down a new path.
“What? When?”
“I told you what he was planning. I told you that he wanted a new team for your brand, and you didn’t listen to me. You said it would never happen, that you’d never let it happen.”
I spun around and stomped my foot, sending the dog on the other side of my neighbor’s fence scurrying away. “And I won’t let it happen now. He can’t do this—you’re my assistant, Val, not Ethan’s.”
The silence between us was different this time, charged with an invisible energy that pulsed through my phone and wrung my insides out like a damp towel.
“I’m your . . . assistant?” Tears slicked her question as panic wove through my ribs.
“My assistant and my friend. You know what I mean.” She had to. “We’re partners—me and you—and as long as I have a channel, you’ll have a job with me. I’ll hire you as an employee again, pay your salary. And your benefits, too. Whatever you need, just say it and I’ll make it happen.” For however long I could, even if it meant taking out a loan.
“Partners don’t hide critical information from each other.”
“I was only trying to protect you.”
“I didn’t need you to protect me. I needed . . .” Val’s sigh was synonymous with many I’d heard before. Not a sigh of reconciliation but of rebuff. “I needed you to be honest with me. That’s what friends do; they tell each other the truth no matter what it might cost them to tell it.” She paused. “I have to think about what’s best for me and Tucker.”
“And you think that’s taking a job with Ethan? He’s manipulating you, Val. The only reason he’s even offering you this is to get back at me. He wants to hurt me, and if you say yes to him, he’ll end up hurting you, too.”
“I’m not stupid,” she said in a voice so quiet and chilled I strained to hear her over the gang of adolescent skateboarders who crossed the street. “I understand the risk I’m taking.”
I gripped the fence at my back and swallowed against the unfamiliar lump in my throat, against the pain of the accusation she’d just unleashed: that I was the bigger risk. “Please . . . we can figure this out. Please don’t do this.” Please don’t choose him over me. But even as I thought it, I knew I couldn’t compete with him. No matter what I offered, Ethan would always have something better and shinier to flaunt. Larger financial reserves, bigger career opportunities, far more stability for a single mom raising a child.
A muffled sob sounded on the other end of the phone, and my hope climbed. Maybe our friendship was worth more than all those things, more than the money or the job security or the—
“I want to thank you, Molly, for these last three years,” she said. “You took a chance on me when Tuck and I needed it most, and I . . . I won’t ever forget that. I’ll always be grateful for the time I spent working with you.”
The past tense of that sentence was too much. I moved to the edge of the sidewalk, my knees collapsing under me as my heart galloped a thousand miles in my chest. No! Stop! Don’t do this! were the only phrases cycling through my brain.
“Also,” she said, then cleared her throat, and I could almost imagine her slipping her glasses off and wiping under her eyes with whatever zip-up hoodie sleeve she was wearing today. “I’ll do everything I can to make the transition smooth. I can finish up editing those last videos you’re sending, and I’ll . . . I’ll update Rosalyn on your summer post schedule so you can stay on track after I’m gone.”
After I’m gone.
This time, I was the one without words. I didn’t care about a smooth transition. Or about Rosalyn being updated on my summer post schedule. I didn’t want her calling me or messaging me or pretending to know anything about me.
I wanted Val.
I tied off the hurt in my heart the way I’d done after my parents had left the States and after my Mimi had died and after Miles had devoted his life to a ministry that held little space for a sister who talked about fashion and makeup and social media campaigns, then simply said, “Fine. That all sounds fine. Thank you.”
And while I hadn’t been able to squeeze out a single tear for the loss of a man who hadn’t actually loved me, the pain of losing a friend I’d never even seen in person was truly incomprehensible. I’d hired an assistant three years ago when keeping up with the demand of my pages had become unmanageable on my own. But what I’d gained was the best friend I’d ever had.
In many ways, Val was my only friend.
And I’d just lost her to my ex-boyfriend.
19
Molly
If I’d worried about how I looked when I met Silas at the diner with my uneven tan hidden under a track suit, tonight was a new kind of low. After a wholly unsatisfying resolve to the Fresh Summer Faces tutorial I’d been working on prior to Val’s call, and a few mindless surf sessions on social media for anything that might pull me out of this funk, I simply got into my car and drove. And somehow, I’d ended up here. In the driveway of The Bridge, eating a supremely large sleeve of hot, greasy French fries I couldn’t even recall ordering. Yet the evidence was in my hand, a glaring reminder that while I’d agreed to shun wine for the duration of the summer, I certainly hadn’t agreed to turn my back on deep-fried potatoes covered in salt.
As the sun descended behind the old estate, the manor basking in shades of brilliant marmalade and sherbet, I counted the silhouettes that passed by the windows I could see from my parking spot. There were a total of eleven cars sharing the lot with me tonight—many of them older, unattractive vehicles, most of which likely belonged to the residents. Glo said several used public transportation to get around, but a few of them shared vehicles, carpooling to school, work, internships, and the like. Why hadn’t I noticed before tonight how much my car stood out in this lot? My new red Tesla Model X, with the wing doors that opened like a spaceship, was about as commonplace as a glittering pot of gold sitting in the middle of a junkyard.
I shoved another few fries into my mouth, remembering the cashier’s check I’d signed over to the dealer for the total purchase price of the car. The salesman had tried not to react when Ethan told him I wouldn’t be needing finance options. A top-of-the-mountain triumph had rushed through me. This is what success feels like, I’d thought. Because I, Molly McKenzie, the girl who’d worn secondhand clothes for as long as she could remember, whose parents always owned vehicles at least ten years old, had finally arrived. After navigating her way through a world so strikingly unfamiliar to the one she’d been raised in, she was now the proud owner of one of the most enviable cars on the market today.
Or so Ethan had told me.
The car-purchase date had been a celebration, a just-rolled-over-the-five-hundred-thousand-follower mark with another eight high-paying sponsors who simply couldn’t get enough of my influencer magic.
And yet here I was tonight: that same successful woman, sitting in her flashy, depreciating-by-the-minute car, with more than seven hundred fifty thousand subscribers to her Instagram, and nowhere in the world to be. Not one person in the world to call.
As Val’s face surfaced in my mind, I reache
d for my depressed drink of choice—a giant Diet Dr. Pepper, light ice—and drank until the carbonation outburned the tears in my throat. Because I couldn’t—wouldn’t—cry about what Ethan had taken from me. Nor would I dwell on the fact that his only reply to my voicemail was an email reply that read:
Ms. McKenzie,
As per your contract, third page, paragraph five, all Cobalt employees who manage Makeup Matters are subject to our discretion for hiring, promoting, and dismissing. We hope you find Rosalyn Bronswick an exceptional replacement, and we look forward to the work she will produce with you.
Ethan Carrington
I gave the parking lot another once-over—in case I’d somehow missed Silas’s black sedan the first several times I’d searched for it. But his car hadn’t appeared. And perhaps that was the disappointment that had done me in. Because if I hadn’t fully realized it when I’d first parked out here, I could no longer pretend I didn’t know it now: I’d driven here for Silas. I needed a slice of his natural calm, his exceptional self-control, and whatever else he possessed that made circumstances seem more bearable whenever I was around him.
I wondered where he was tonight. His parents’ house again? A work commitment? A date?
That last thought came with a needle prick of envy. Could Silas be out on a date right now? I huffed and tossed the carton of fries to the passenger seat beside me. Scrunching up my nose, I imagined the sort of woman Silas might take out to dinner on a random Monday night. Because naturally, he would go out on a Monday night. It was the most practical of date days after all—no crowds to fight, weekly specials on dinner menus, and no pressure to stay out late due to an early Tuesday morning work schedule.
As for the woman, well, she’d be poised for sure. Elegant, yet principled, with some sort of social justice–oriented career just like Silas. Maybe she was a social worker, a human rights advocate, or something equally important having to do with writing policies for changed legislation. And her name would be something sophisticated like Catherine or Caroline or Camille. And certainly, she would be the epitome of emotional stability.
