Jack (Secret Revenge #1)

by Robin Edwards

  Five minutes after they ordered (blackened red fish on plank for one, and a Mediterranean grilled chicken salad with aioli dressing for the other) a more personal conversation was underway from the usual buy-sell-invest real estate jargon.

  “You’ve been working for my agency as an intern for two years and not once have I seen you pissy, aggravated, or show any sense of entitlement like my agents. They can be a dismal bunch, and your usual office cattiness can ensue. You however, don’t seemed phased. Hell, some days you come in like you’re walking on sunshine,” she said with a slight chuckle.

  “How?” Daphne looked obviously confused.

  “How’s what?” she replied, not quite understanding what Angela was getting at. The middle-aged mentor inhaled her cigarette and exhaled a haze around herself of smoke and resolution.

  “I’m going to be honest with you Daph…” She had started calling her assistant this nickname earlier in the week, and Daphne still couldn’t tell if it was a way for her hard-edged counterpart to make their acquaintance more casual and easy going, or a way to exact superiority by giving her a pet name and still being horribly impersonal with her.

  “Every time I saw you flounce into the front doors, rather than you brighten my day with your gleeful ‘hellos’ and ‘how-are-yous’ and skip-to-ma-loo sunshine smile, you annoyed me. I’m used to either stoic kiss-asses or employees who keep their nose to the grindstone and only speak to me if I speak first. I’m fully aware I’m a demanding person and run a tight shift so I’m used to two week resignations as handed to me by my past assistants and it being either theirs or someone else’s in the building that couldn’t hack it; that finally broke and found something better as far as employment, or nothing at all, and just left. You on the other hand insist on being chipper and upbeat no matter the circumstances going on in that open foyer, or even recently in my private office. You just bounce back, and keeping bouncing,” she said with a slight smirk.

  “So, how? Or, I guess the better question would be ‘why’?”

  Again, a much unexpected surprise had blindsided Daphne about her boss. She cast her eyes down and to the left for a moment, but her attention was quickly snapped to, as a blonde haired waitress stepped up to their table. She gave them a smile, then sat down their drink orders of two iced teas, one with lemon and the other with lemon on the side in a dish. Daphne was glad of the distraction. It’d give her time to dig, and come up with an answer as to why she makes it a point to remain positive in the face of…well, everything.

  Why did she often do it? She never considered the reason really, but she remembered when she started. She added some artificial sweetener to her glass. One packet. Then, another. Angela on the other hand squeezed her lemon into her glass, no sugar, no sweetener, stirred the contents, while keeping her eye on her lunch date, patiently waiting for a response.

  “Well,” the young woman started, “when I was in community college a few years back, that was my first time away from home, and I didn’t know all the harshness and things you could end up facing often times on your own. But, I learned quick that first semester.”

  At that statement, the young woman’s eyes cast down to her glass. She cleared her throat, and without much buildup or hesitation she went on.

  “My roommate hung herself in our dorm, and I was the one that found her…in our room”.

  The pause after that statement was deafening. The matter of fact way which she shared such a traumatic event was like hearing glass break in an empty house. Silence never seemed so loud, and the rushing cars below suddenly seemed in Surround Sound. Angela looked intently at Daphne, and furrowed her brows a bit. She asked with slight precaution, “what was her reason, or do you not know?”

  Daphne hadn’t thought about that night in nearly a year. It seems like it was not too long ago. Three years goes by so fast, she thought to herself. “No,” she answered flatly.

  “She just…was there. She had some problems I know, mostly with her boyfriend. He was pretty awful at times, but I’m not sure that was the reason. She and I hadn’t become friends in the few months I had gotten to know her, but she was a nice person from what I had come to know of her. I had never seen a body before that, except when my grandfather passed. And even then, that was at his funeral. Not in such a personal space, at such an unexpected time. It seemed like just another night coming back to my room. And there she was.”

  Daphne did give any further details on the scene. She didn’t even want to remember the details, so recounting them to anyone else was not something she wanted to do either. However, she did address how it affected her.

  A few minutes later, another waiter finally arrived with their orders they had placed. Daphne was grateful for the speedy service. Perhaps, a bite or two would settle the swimming tides in her stomach. A few bites into their meal, Daphne went on explaining how she didn’t have her family there to shield her from her the nightmares after that.

  Moving her to another dorm room out of compassion and sensitivity was regulation in those rare instances on campus, but she was too far from home for her father and mother’s arms. She also too new to campus to have made friends to talk to about the nights of waking up screaming from seeing her roommate every time she shut her eyes. She had also started having to take anxiety medication to help with the sleep disturbances and manage her panic attacks that later came in the semester.

  As Daphne ate hefty bites of her salad and sipped on her tea, she thought back to how grateful she was for the holidays when her father would make the four hours trip to pick her up from the college. Being home made all the difference in whether she was going to be a functional person the following Monday, or a blubbering, shaking mess crying in the bottom of her dorm room on-suite shower.

  The layout of the dorm room was such that each two rooms had an adjoining bathroom between. She always tried to muffle her cries, never knowing if the other girls in room 3b could hear her. Through therapy, her parents’ love, and just sheer will to beat her anxiety she learned ways to process things; wrap her mind around things and keep living. She started reading a lot of literature on loss, grief, trauma and how to keep going on. Her mind had been made up nearing graduation she didn’t want to shut out the world and its possible horrors.

  Every now and then, she would feel the beginnings of a panic attack: the nausea, fluttering heartbeat, overwhelming fear, but the coping techniques she had learned made all the difference. Had made the decision to push onward she never would have graduated, applied for the internship with the agency, and definitely not put in for the personal assistant position later on.

  By the time Daphne had finished nearly half her meal and disclosed more about herself than she had planned at the beginning of their lunch, she refocused her attention back to the woman in front of her. Angela had been enjoying her plate, taking sips of her tea, taking in Daphne’s tale of overcoming the fear, the anxiety of life’s many unknowns.

  But her body language was different. Her face had actually softened, as well as how she sat. Her overall demeanor was more like that of conscientious friend, and not the stoic authoritarian that originally drove them to this bustling dining spot. She had eaten most of her meal as well, and was now lighting her second cigarette. Resting an elbow on the table she inhaled, and exhaled a gray, cloudy sigh. Daphne now wondered did she always do that: breathe in the thoughts, and exhale the feelings. As she began to speak, it was obvious what her assistant had brought a lot to her own mind.

  “I remember being in that moment in my life, not knowing what is what, where is up or down, and how to figure it all out. Having things happen, that leave you with more questions than answers happening was happening all around me, but it was much sooner than you. I was in my early teens and not delving too deep into all my “ugly” moments but, let’s just say life had been a bitch almost from the beginning. By the time I was eighteen years old I had worked to get myself into college, because that was the one thing I was certain of. I wanted to d
o more than what was expected of me in this life, which wasn’t much. I kept my grades up to get scholarships, but found myself a job when I was 16 and walked myself there every day, ‘til I could afford a car. You see, I had no one to do anything or tell me how to do anything, ever. I had parents, but they were…” she took a pause, an emotional one.

  “They were the ‘no one’ in my life. So, I had me. I knew I would have me if I had no one else, or even if I did. Relationships came, and went. I remained. Once I went to business school, I was completely self-reliant. I found an affordable apartment, which was more like a slum, but it was mine. Got a job in a retail store to pay the bills and get by, and forged my way through to my degree. But even before I was done with education I knew I wanted my own business in real estate. I had seen so many ads in the newspaper of the amount of money people were willing to spend in the area for homes in upscale areas, and it seemed sensible to me to get my share. I made it a point to know the pros and cons and all the unspoken rules of the market, and then set out to change them.”

  This last defiant statement caused her to let out the first genuine hearty laugh Daphne had her from her, rather than the condescending ones she had been used to hearing echo through the agency from Angela’s back office. Then, Angela leaned back in her seat, and looked somewhat beyond cityscape.

  “A lot of people look at entrepreneurs and assume it was the love of what they do that drove their ambitions and made them a success. It makes for great interviews in leading magazines and biographies, but I can tell you some of the best in any business were driven by desperation to survive, or by anger.”

  Her gaze returned to Daphne now, and the intensity in her green eyes demanded the girl’s attention to these next words.

  “Be driven by more than your ambition, because even that, especially coupled with anger can wear you down eventually. That car can get you where you want to go, but you eventually run out of gas.”

  Sitting up and taking another drag off her cigarette, she realized she was not just giving this newcomer advice, but herself as well.

  “That’s the reason I am getting out.”

  The look on Daphne’s face was sheer shock, and confusion. “Wait? What?”

  Did Daphne just hear her correctly? Did this woman just confirm what had only been a rumor around the agency’s lounge and water cooler a year ago? Angela noted her shock, and scoffed as she put out her cigarette in their table’s glass ashtray, and let out one of those familiar snarky chuckles Daphne hoped wouldn’t find its way outside the office.

  “Don’t know why you’re all surprised, Daph. I know people had already been gossiping with my two previous assistants about what emails I had sent to investors, handling different data entry things that contained that information about a possible closing of the agency that they had no business even uttering to anyone. You can’t tell me you didn’t hear rumors.”

  Daphne’s face became flushed, and she didn’t want to admit that she had ever behaved any less than professional, taking part in the rumor mill and whispers of mass termination, or exaggerations about Angela’s accountants “fudging the books” to hide possible bankruptcy. More so out of curiosity, she would eavesdrop on this conversation on that one. But that wasn’t something she didn’t suspect Angela to be aware of that had been going on in the agency for quite some time on the matter. She chose her words carefully.

  “I had heard some things, but nothing for sure, obviously. I can tell you it’s the reason some people started looking elsewhere for work.” Clearing her throat, she hesitated but continued. “Some were concerned you wouldn’t give them enough advance notice to find something else, so they started looking for other work.”

  There was that thin lipped look on her supervisor’s face again. Not that Angela hadn’t figured this was what was going on months ago, but the thought still aggravated her that heresy overrode common business sense amongst her employees. Not to mention professionalism went out the window as some of those former employees not only left without proper notice, but proceeded to slander her name around to potential buyers and the general social media population.

  The young apprentice must have read her mind, because suddenly a lot of things fell in place for Daphne, and it showed on her face. She began to realize some of the unwarranted admiration and even apprehension of Angela may not all have come from her history of paving her way through the real estate business with a force not often seen, but by the overblown stories perpetuated by former workers at the agency once they left. She wanted to shrink back from Angela’s squinting eyes.

  Again, she couldn’t help but realize this middle aged trailblazer was not only intimidating for her presence in the real estate world, but her classic beauty. It was the kind of features you once saw in models of the sixties. The sharp haircut of Peggy Moffitt and the flawless cheekbones of Linda Keith. The combination of those two attributes staring down a possible competitor or employee, and topped with a razor sharp tone that could cut through stone when applied would make anyone feel two inches tall and lower than dust as she felt right now. There was that silence again.

  Daphne wanted to change the subject immediately and could see no way how to if she tried. Regardless, Angela was also one for not avoiding the tough topics, so she went on.

  “I’ve been looking at what I’m considering my last property, if I can ever get the slack ass agent to pull himself together. He’s canceling open houses for this property up on Ipswich Avenue, not corresponding with potential buyers, and it’s becoming a mess. It’s a three million dollar prospective sell, has had several upgrades to make it energy efficient and more modern as far as the interior but maintaining the style and integrity of the period which it was built. It’s more than enough to cover any remaining overhead we’ve accrued this past fiscal year, and still leave a separation incentive in the form of a bonus for everyone 60 days before we shut our doors. I’ve been planning for the past year or more, keeping my accountants on top of our checks and balances, and my own personal finances just to be able to ensure we all end it on a ‘happily ever after’ kind of note versus the ending where I am the wicked witch people apparently already believe me to be. Any remaining projects or sells will be going to auction in November if not sold by October. And I will be flying free with the rest of the birds on a Hawkner 400 or Cessna to St. Croix. Permanently.”

  The waiter couldn’t have come any sooner with the check. Daphne was feeling her lunch roll around a little. If she was going to have a full blown panic attack she’d rather it be in the car or even back at the office than right here, right now, in public. She would prefer to not have one at all in front of her mentor, but by God if it was going to happen she’d prefer it take place somewhere else, anywhere else. All she could think of was the irony to find all this out the moment she felt she was climbing the ladder to bigger and better within her career.

  To find out “straight from the horse’s mouth” that there was to be no agency in the near future was not what she was expecting to be told during this lunch with Angela, or any other. Was that the reason she invited her along? Was Angela even being fully honest, or was this just some kind of bait she threw out there to see if Daphne would bite, like the previous assistants, and share it with others back at the agency? Was testing her confidentiality, or sincerely disclosing something she had been meaning to address with everyone and just hadn’t yet?

  She started feeling her head get dizzy. Then, a sudden drop of something wet hit her hand that had been resting shakily on the table. Good grief, she thought to herself. Was she so dumbstruck that she was crying and didn’t even realize it. But there was another, then another, and distant thunder could be heard. She snapped out of her stupor to realize it was starting to drizzle. Rain. No more suitable weather to fit her mood at the moment. Daphne dug for her phone in her small purse to check the weather app. It wasn’t supposed to rain today, was it? She had brought no type of cover for this weather with her today. No umbrella, or even a jacke
t or coat. And that just added to the dreary feelings.

  She quickly noted the rain falling a little more heavily, but also the time on the face of her cell phone. It was nearly one-thirty! They had to get back to the office. Did time go by that quickly? By the time she looked up from her phone, not only had Angela made her way in doors, but she had already paid the bill, as she had decided waiting on their server was not a choice she was taking due to weather rolling in.

  Chapter 3

  The rain came, but in sheets. The ride back to the office started off much like the ride from it an hour and a half earlier. Silence. The traffic was creeping along far slower than it was before. Angela wasn’t one to feel like she had to explain herself to anyone, but now she felt addressing the closure of her business with at least one employee was decent practice before addressing it with all employees soon. Plus, she realized dropping a bomb like that on someone who just shared a very personal piece of themselves was unfair. Sensitivity was never her strong point, but this point in her career and life was calling for her to flex more of it.