That New York Minute

by Abby Gaines

  “It’s time to get down to business,” Tony said. “We don’t call this the partnership shortlist announcement breakfast for nothing.”

  Rachel laughed politely.

  “So I’m delighted to announce that our three candidates are Clive Barnes, Garrett Calder and Rachel Frye.”

  Why did he say my name last? Please, let it be alphabetical.

  A round of applause from the existing partners. Only one of them was female. Definitely time for another woman on the team.

  “It’s been some years since our last partnership vacancy, but the selection process hasn’t changed,” Tony said. “All three candidates will be required to prepare a new client pitch, with the help of their team. And I’m delighted to say that this year, we have an opportunity that’s worthy of your best efforts.” He paused for effect. “Brightwater Group.”

  Wow. One of the largest private education providers in the country was looking for a new ad agency? The account would run into tens of millions of dollars.

  Rachel took quick stock of her rivals. Clive’s expression was neutral—he was strongest in sports advertising, so this wasn’t his forte. Farther down the table, Garrett’s eyes were closed. Was he asleep, or was his shark-brain already devising some incredible campaign that would blow hers out of the water?

  Not on my watch, buster. When it came to expensive fragrance or luxury cruises, Garrett might be hard to beat. But for campaigns aimed at the family market—Aunt Betty’s pies were a prime example—Rachel was the go-to gal. Brightwater was exactly the kind of account where she excelled. Its facilities might be private, but it was targeted firmly at lower income families.

  The confidence Garrett had managed to puncture with his stabs at her creative ability surged back. I can do this.

  “We want all of you to have every chance to impress us.”

  Tony was talking about the partnership; Rachel steered her attention away from The Shark.

  “That’s why we’re going to be up-front about the reservations we have about each of you as partner material,” Tony said.

  Reservations?

  “Ladies first.” Tony nodded at Rachel.

  Oh, yeah, the not-good-at-thinking-on-my-feet thing. She tried to simultaneously sit up straight and look flexible. Garrett smirked.

  “Rachel, you’ve been with us a long time, and your loyalty means a lot to us,” Tony said.

  She smiled loyally.

  “But we wonder if that makes your work a little…what’s the word…stale?”

  Excuse me?

  “No, that’s not it,” he said. “Safe. Your team’s work is solid, but safe.”

  Was that the same as tame, as Garrett had called it?

  “Well, Tony—” Rachel cleared her throat, her face hot “—my clients place a lot of trust in me, and I honor that trust by not taking unnecessary risks.”

  A faint snort from Garrett, who no doubt thought that taking risks won CLIOs.

  Possibly true.

  “The results of my campaigns speak for themselves,” she said.

  “They do,” Tony agreed. “And they’re saying safe. We’d like to see your work winning some awards out there in the marketplace.”

  “You’ve always said KBC is about more than flashy awards,” she reminded him. “It’s about teamwork, and the whole being greater than the sum of the parts.”

  Garrett snorted again, louder this time. Obviously a loner like him wouldn’t share that view.

  Tony chuckled. “Seems our clients are quite attached to those gold statues. Bottom line, Rachel, if you want to make partner, we’ll need to see more risk-taking, more brilliance.” Why didn’t he just come out and say it: more Garrett.

  Rachel forced a smile. “Then that’s exactly what you’ll get, Tony.” Dammit, risky brilliance was so not her thing. The partners would likely never have made such a demand, if Garrett hadn’t come in and made her look tame.

  “Moving on to you, Garrett.” Tony grinned at Mr. Brilliant Risk-Taker. “From the day you arrived at KBC, you’ve shaken up our creative work and we’re all the better for it.”

  Garrett nodded an acknowledgment.

  “Obviously you’ve moved around the industry somewhat,” Tony continued.

  “I’ve had some excellent jobs,” Garrett agreed. Which wasn’t what Tony had said. “I appreciate the chance to make partner at KBC.”

  Why now? Rachel wondered. Why here? She knew why she wanted—needed—this partnership, but why couldn’t Garrett keep on flitting around the industry?

  “Good, good.” Tony nodded his approval. “But the real issue for us is your team skills.”

  Garrett stilled. Rachel half expected to hear the da dum…da dum…theme from Jaws.

  Tony looked slightly nervous. “A partner must be capable of motivating a team and forging strong interpersonal connections.”

  Based on something other than fear of losing a limb, Rachel could have added. Just last week she’d spent half an hour in the women’s washroom comforting a junior account exec Garrett had chewed out.

  Exactly the kind of behavior that made him unsuited to the one-and-only partnership up for grabs.

  “We’d like to see more evidence of your ability to engage with your colleagues, in particular your team,” Tony said. Several other partners nodded.

  “I can do that.” Garrett’s voice was arctic.

  Ha! It was all very well to sit there broodingly handsome, but handsome is as handsome does, buddy. The old aphorism of her mother’s made Rachel smile for the first time since he’d stepped into her elevator.

  Mom was right…which meant this wasn’t so bad. Garrett might be a genius, but he had never made the slightest effort to engage with others, and he was well-known for his scathing put-downs. A shark didn’t change its spots—fins?—that easily.

  All I have to do is let Garrett harpoon himself in the foot with his own inability to be part of the team. The partnership’s still mine.

  “Excellent.” Tony rubbed his hands together. “That’s it, then. Good luck to all of you.” He raised his coffee cup in a toast, then sat down.

  “Uh, Tony?” Rachel said. “What about Clive?”

  A lip quirk from Garrett…but he looked interested in Tony’s answer.

  Clive, ever the nice guy, said, “Thanks, Rachel,” as if he meant it.

  “Sorry, Clive.” Tony didn’t bother to get up. “What can I say? Your last couple of creatives have really sung, your team’s working great together…we’re very impressed. Just keep doing what you’re doing.”

  Rachel’s gaze swung to Garrett—she saw her own shock mirrored in his eyes. Clive Barnes could do nothing to improve? Did that make him the front-runner? Now that she thought about it, he’d won a CLIO a few years back.

  Dammit, how had this meeting gone so wrong? If she’d been more on the ball she wouldn’t have allowed Tony to get away with saying she was too “safe,” wouldn’t have allowed the others to agree. With her lack of a real denial, she’d effectively proved his point. Idiot.

  “There’s something else you all need to know,” Tony said.

  He launched into a commentary on the tough economic climate. Advertising budgets were down, in line with household expenditure. Old news. Was he softening them up for an announcement that the chief creative officer wouldn’t earn as much as they might hope? Disappointing, but money wasn’t everything.

  Rachel popped a flake of croissant into her mouth.

  “I want you to know that this is as difficult for me to say as it is for you to hear,” Tony said.

  She paused in her chewing.

  “HR has been assessing our staffing needs in the current economic climate,” he continued. “They’ve determined that KBC is top-heavy.”

  “Too many partners?” Garrett suggested.

  Rachel fought an inappropriate urge to laugh. Go ahead, Garrett, that ought to win you a few votes. Not. She swallowed her croissant.

  “Not exactly,” Tony said. “Too many
executive creative directors.”

  The croissant stuck in her throat; Rachel coughed.

  There were three executive creative directors at KBC, and they were all in this room.

  “You want to get rid of one of us,” Garrett said. Way too calmly. Didn’t he realize this was a disaster?

  “Two of you.” Tony turned disaster into cataclysm. Rachel felt as if her throat was closing up. Her eyes started to water.

  “Whoever isn’t named chief executive officer will be deemed surplus to requirements and therefore redundant.” He might have couched it in HR-speak, but they all knew what he meant. Fired.

  Rachel gulped down her cold coffee, clearing the stuck croissant. “Tony, you can’t mean that. We’re all assets to the firm. Loyal assets.”

  Okay, Garrett wasn’t loyal, but she didn’t need to point that out.

  “Expensive assets,” Tony said. “And I have a hundred and eighty-five loyal staff on the two floors below. If we don’t rationalize, the whole company suffers. This will give us a chance to promote a couple of deserving people to creative director.”

  The firm already had four creative directors, a level lower than executive director and therefore less well compensated.

  “This approach seems shortsighted,” Clive said. “The firm’s reputation is likely to suffer.”

  “We believe this will be a wonderful opportunity for junior staff to rise to the occasion,” Tony said. “Now, it goes without saying that all of this is confidential. It’s only fair to give you guys a heads-up, but we don’t want staff to feel it’s not worth giving every one of your pitches their absolute best.”

  Rachel glanced at Garrett and for one brief moment, she could read his thoughts, plain as day. Total contempt for Tony’s maneuverings. An intention to quit in disgust.

  Do it, she urged him silently. Move on to your next firm now. Improve my odds.

  To her disappointment, Garrett said nothing. Maybe he would quit later.

  Tony stood, signaling the meeting was over. Dazed, Rachel pushed back her chair, headed for the elevator with Garrett and Clive.

  Her stomach churned. Fired. I could be fired. Eight years, up in smoke, just like that.

  We can start over. Another of her mother’s sayings.

  But I can’t. I can’t start over again. I won’t.

  The elevator spat them out onto the floor where the real work was done. It was barely eight o’clock, but most people were at their desks.

  Garrett peeled off to the left, ignoring the few greetings called out to him. Rachel took some hope from that. He really was useless with people.

  She headed to her own office, her progress slowing as she stopped to answer Alice’s question about the storyboard she was working on, to inquire after Natasha’s boyfriend’s torn Achilles tendon, to congratulate Talia on her engagement and admire the ring.

  At last she was in her office. Rachel stopped still, and surveyed all the things that anchored her here. Her Carolina beech desk, her red leather ergonomic chair, the whiteboard where she and the team spent long evenings brainstorming, the glass wall that allowed her to look out on “her” domain.

  “How’d it go?” Haylee, the team admin, walked in behind her, a small sheaf of mail in her hand.

  The mailroom, where Rachel had started, was now officially titled the communications center, handling actual letters and packages only a small part of its work.

  “Not great.” Rachel perched on the edge of her desk and forced a smile. “I failed to fire on all cylinders.” For now, she would respect Tony’s request for confidentiality about the imminent sacking of two of the executive creative directors.

  “That’s not like you.” Haylee fiddled with the cord of the window-blinds until they were wide-open, exposing the view of Madison Avenue far below.

  “I said something to Garrett that put me off balance.” Rachel nodded in acknowledgment of Haylee’s small sound of surprise—Haylee hadn’t expected Garrett to be on the list, either. “A stupid joke about his mom, and it turns out she’s dead.”

  Her distraction might have even worse consequences than she’d feared. How many of the partners would deem her unworthy of even her current job based on today’s performance? The sooner Garrett quit, the better.

  Haylee grimaced. “Oh, yeah, his mom died in that plane crash.”

  Rachel frowned. “No, it was cancer.”

  “Uh-uh,” Haylee said with complete certainty. “It was a plane crash. One of those scenic flights…at Thanksgiving, maybe five, six years ago? I asked Garrett about his family back when he joined, and he told me. Poor guy, he’s still pretty cut up about it.”

  Rachel froze.

  Garrett’s sob story about the chemo and the Doris Day movies and “the difference between a miserable day and an okay one”… He’d made it up?

  Why?

  What kind of person would lie about his mother’s death?

  She scanned the work area beyond the glass wall, where her colleagues, the hardest-working group of people she knew—people she might soon be forced to leave—bustled around. Then she saw him.

  Garrett, chatting to Julie, a junior creative—one of Rachel’s junior creatives—his face a study in determined friendliness.

  Julie looked overwhelmed…then, when Garrett touched her shoulder lightly, she peered up at him through demurely lowered lashes.

  What the—? Before she even thought about what she was doing, Rachel had crossed to the glass wall, banged it hard with the palm of her hand.

  “Rachel?” Haylee said.

  Julie looked up, waved and returned to her work. Garrett swiveled to face Rachel. Their eyes met.

  The events of the past twelve hours flashed through her mind. Last night in the bar, this morning’s elevator ride, the meeting, her guilty discomfort, her distraction, the way she hadn’t fought back when her work was questioned. What had Garrett said in the elevator? “You don’t react in the moment. That’s your weakness.”

  Last night took on a whole new significance. Garrett had known he would see her in this morning’s meeting and he’d set out to humiliate her. Still, she could have recovered from that. But this morning, he’d spun her that garbage about his mother knowing it would set her off-kilter.

  That one minute—that New York minute, as he called it—had changed everything.

  Rachel didn’t have it in her to hide her outrage. Garrett took careful observation of her rigid posture, her hand still slammed against the glass, her doubtless heightened color.

  One side of his mouth curled.

  What kind of person lies about his mother’s death?

  Not a person…a Shark. A slimy, ruthless predator.

  And the blood in the water was hers.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  GARRETT WATCHED HIS FATHER approaching, plowing through the crowded bar like a frigate through a flotilla of pleasure craft.

  Garrett drained his beer glass. The beer here at O’Dooley’s was on tap, rather than the bottled beers favored by the other bars in the locale. “Here comes my date,” he told Clive Barnes.

  Clive took one look at Admiral Dwight Calder’s uniform—service khakis, suggesting there’d been no high-powered meetings today—and much-decorated chest, and stood. “I feel like I should salute,” he said out of the corner of his mouth, though the admiral would never hear him over the din of the Friday-night drinkers.

  “Don’t encourage him,” Garrett said.

  Clive polished off his beer. “Time I went home to Wifey.” He nodded to Garrett’s father as he left.

  “Who was that?” his father asked. He pulled out the chair Clive had vacated and sat.

  “A colleague.”

  Dwight frowned. “He was wearing a pink shirt.”

  “I have one just like it at home,” Garrett lied. He cursed his own childish reaction. When would he learn not to rise to his dad’s narrow views? “You want a beer?” he asked.

  “Thanks.” Dwight glanced around the bar. “So, this
is the kind of place you hang out.”

  Garrett signaled to one of the waiters, distinctive in green polos with a shamrock motif, to bring two beers. “Sometimes.”

  Not often, actually. He wasn’t much of a social drinker, and drinking alone didn’t appeal—last night excepted. But when his father had asked to meet tonight, Garrett hadn’t wanted to commit to a whole meal. He’d suggested his dad meet him here at seven, giving him plenty of time for the “drink and chat” that Clive had suggested.

  Neither he nor his dad was a fan of small talk, so they waited for their beers in silence.

  Garrett pondered his conversation with Clive, who’d been keen to understand how genuine Garrett’s interest in the partnership was.

  The truth? He’d initially refused to let his name go forward because a partnership smacked too much of losing his independence. But his refusal had niggled at him. He wasn’t sure if he’d done the right thing. At the last minute, he’d decided he might as well keep his options open.

  This morning, his knee-jerk reaction to Tony’s announcement had been to quit. He didn’t doubt for a second that he could outperform both Rachel and Clive, but that wasn’t the point. He hated that kind of manipulation.

  But even worse, he hated to display his emotions in public. He would quit on Monday, right after he told Tony, in private, what he thought of KBC’s idiotic plan to save money. Garrett wasn’t about to hang around in a firm that thought so little of him it would toss him out on a whim. Always be the first to leave—the philosophy had served him well.

  He would walk out of KBC with no regrets. Last night, two bottles of champagne had convinced him the partnership was something he could do on his own terms. This morning had proven him wrong, and that was fine. Like he’d told Rachel yesterday, “Let it go.”

  Of course, he’d been aware of the irony of those words. Aware he was drinking in a futile attempt to let go himself. He’d failed, as he did at this time every year, to stem the rising tide of regret. Of bitterness.

  Rachel’s situation had seemed blessedly uncomplicated, compared with his own inner turmoil. It was obvious her boyfriend was dumping her; equally obvious she was hanging on for dear life. Begging.