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  “Understood.” He leaned back in his comically large swivel chair, and waved an arm. “Then let the pitch begin.”

  I wished his tone had been less… gladiatorial? But oh well. I suppose you don’t get obscenely wealthy by making friends.

  Joe and Tom stood up first, and introduced the basic pitch. Safety blah blah luxury blah blah speed. I tuned it out — though I hadn’t heard this pitch a million times, I’d been at plenty of these meetings, and there was little variety. Same buzzwords, different locations. And besides, if I paid Joe too much attention, I’d get to thinking about how he’d basically brought to pass one of the worst moments of my life, and then I’d lose my temper, and then who knows? Total chaos.

  On a note of minor interest, Charles seemed to have entirely dropped his eccentric persona and now he was utterly focused, listening intently, eyes scrutinizing every word Joe and Tom uttered, no matter how inconsequential I deemed them. Interesting.

  I wondered if Sierra would’ve been responsible for this part of the pitch, if she would’ve been at the front of the room, delivering the same speech but with better-placed emphasis. My heart twinged as I thought of how well she’d have done. She’d be in a perfectly pressed shirt and pencil skirt, professional, beautiful, in-command. She’d enunciate every word with ease and manage to put passion into even the driest of details. She would have brought the whole thing to life, made the colors just that much brighter.

  Don’t think about her, my brain insisted. You can’t.

  My mind wanted to go into a downward spiral, but my ears caught something. I looked up, and saw Joe and Tom frantically shuffling through some papers.

  “Sorry, sorry,” Tom was muttering. “We just—”

  “Organizational issues?” Charles said with a thinly veiled tone of regret.

  At last, Joe found the papers. “Nope, no worries, sir, we’ve got it.”

  Charles nodded, but looked displeased.

  I knew that, had Sierra been here, she never would’ve let the papers get out of order. It was a minor slip, but it rang through my head.

  Next up was what I took to be the architecture team. They were one group before me, and would explain the design of the compound — or village, whatever you prefer to call it.

  They had difficulty setting up their presentation slides — there seemed to be some kind of technical errors. Charles told them it was fine, things happen, but I could see him tapping his fingers and looking irritated. Again, something that never would’ve occurred on Sierra’s watch.

  Why wasn’t she here? She deserved to be here, probably more than I did. I’d worked hard, and I knew it, but nobody worked as hard as Sierra. It was impossible — she was a machine. While I’d pretty much waltzed into this pitch with only a hint of preparation, I was certain she’d been rehearsing it for months. I’d robbed her of the opportunity to bring all her efforts to fruition.

  I was a fucking bastard.

  That was the thought in my head as I scraped my chair legs back across the hardwood floor and stood to give my aspect of the presentation.

  The architecture team had finally managed to bring their slides up, but when they did, they seemed unfamiliar with which slide went where, and what the overall framing of the pitch was. Like, they knew the internal logic of their designs, but not how to sell them. They needed Sierra, who would have been the thread of continuity for this huge presentation. If she or the people she was presenting with didn’t know the answer, she would have known who to ask immediately instead of the presenters turning to Tom and Joe and everyone jumping into the uncomfortable void of silence.

  And I needed her too.

  But it was too late. I was already walking up to the front, eyes down, trying to run over what I remembered of the pitch. It was a large job, but nothing unusual. Shouldn’t be too hard to describe it, right? I knew what I was doing.

  My team stayed seated — framing didn’t require multiple voices. Like I said — straightforward. Easy. Simple.

  “What are you presenting?” Charles asked, as I assumed my position.

  “Framing, sir.”

  “Right, right, you mentioned that the other night. Let’s hear it.”

  I took the remote Tom handed me surreptitiously and clicked to my first slide.

  “Hi,” I said. Pause. Too long of a pause. Then, “I’m the owner — uh, CEO, rather — of Got Wood Inc. I have wood.”

  There were a few raised eyebrows in the room. I raced to clarify, “Rather, the company has wood. Lots of wood.”

  Some of my team nodded, giving me much needed encouragement, but others in the room looked baffled. Several exchanged glances that seemed to ask, ‘Is he high?’ If only. If only.

  I coughed, and continued. “We’re a timber supply company, and I also do framing. So it’s a two-in-one business. We cut out the middleman.”

  Good, good. That was all accurate.

  “For this job, we’ll be… framing things,” I finished weakly, clicking to the next slide.

  Okay, small slip there — but nothing I couldn’t handle. Or, at least, nothing that Sierra couldn’t have handled. God, I wish Sierra was here.

  “Jacob?” Charles prodded.

  I swallowed heavily, realizing that I’d accidentally drifted off in the middle of my own presentation.

  “Sorry,” I apologized. “I was just… thinking.”

  “You do that often?” he joked, but there was an edge of steel in his tone. The subtext was clearly: What the fuck are you doing?

  And the answer, if I’d been able to give it, was that I had no idea. What was I even doing here without Sierra? As much as my dad and I needed this job, this wasn’t my dream — the project, that is. She was my dream.

  But I had responsibilities. Dreams were for untethered men, guys who didn’t have sick, bankrupt fathers and a company to keep afloat, didn’t have others depending on them. Lucky for them. I wondered what that was like, wondered if I could remember a time when I was a free agent. None came to mind.

  “Jacob,” Charles repeated, this time with the steel edge fully bared, “do you need us to return to you later, when perhaps you’ve had a moment to collect yourself?”

  I moved my eyes down from the crenelated ceiling to the long, oval table at which every one of my colleagues sat. Joe and Tom were making furious eyes at me, as though their pupils could jump out of their faces and bitch slap me. The others merely looked confused, or vaguely concerned. People shuffled papers, twiddled with pencils, anything at all to avoid watching… me, I suppose. A live-action, slo-mo train wreck.

  “I’m fine,” I said, trying to save myself from the humiliation. “I’m fine. Apologies.”

  Charles leaned back in his seat, waiting and irritated.

  I clicked the remote, and a new slide flicked on. It was the structure of an average house in the village, which was a mixture of condos and bungalows. The houses, unlike the usual retirement home fare, were quaint, adorable even. What you would picture in the middle of an English garden, surrounded by roses and latticework — not in Florida.

  Against every conscious effort in my body, my mind flickered to what it would be like to keep a home with Sierra. We’d awaken not unlike how we’d awoken the other day — to sunlight filtering in and dappling our faces. She’d yawn happily, and I’d clamber out of bed, still naked, and make us coffee, which I’d deposit on her nightstand. And then maybe, down the line, we’d be sipping our drinks and a toddler would run and jump in between us, plopping on the pillows and giggling with delight. We’d tickle our child until tears of laugher were streaming down all our faces.

  The life flashed before me in a moment, and it was so, so sweet. I thought of what my father had said, about how I shouldn’t let his troubled relationship with my mother impact how approached the rest of my life. Maybe it was right — maybe it was time to trust someone else, lean back and fall into their arms. Maybe that someone was Sierra. If she’d even have me.

  “Jacob!” Charles barked,
interrupting my thoughts of paradise. “What the hell is going on?”

  Joe cut in before I could reply, saying, “We are so sorry, sir, he’s not usually like—”

  “Enough, Joe,” I interjected. “Knock it off.”

  Who was this brave guy, and why were his words coming out of my mouth?!

  But it was too late to turn back, as evidenced by the gaping maws of the whole room, which hung low to the ground in shock.

  I turned to Charles, feeling awake and aware for the first time all morning — hell, for the first time since Sierra had left.

  “Sir, you’re probably wondering why this entire presentation is a mess.”

  Charles raised an eyebrow and replied, “Well, now that you mention it. Yes, the question crossed my mind.”

  Joe loudly said, “Sir—”

  But Charles lifted a hand to shut him up. “No. I’d like to hear what this young man has to say.”

  Joe shot daggers at me with his eyes, but I was not to be deterred. I took Charles’ opening and ran with it.

  “Sir, the reason Pillers is so disorganized this morning is because last night, Sierra was fired.”

  Gasps went up around the table, as people turned to one another and whispered in shock. Sierra’s team looked particularly devastated, and it gave me a little shock of unearned pride, to see how much they liked and respected her.

  Charles said slowly, “I assume you’re referencing your partner.”

  “Well… not quite,” I replied. “See, we’re not actually partners, not in real life. Joe and Tom asked Sierra and I to masquerade as partners to sell you on our whole family-values image. What they didn’t know was that Sierra and I had history — we’d dated before.”

  Everyone fell into a deadly silence as they tilted forward in their seats to absorb the story. Joe looked like he wanted to throw his coffee or an expensive framed painting at my head, but I plowed on.

  “She hated me when I arrived for how I’d treated her years ago. And she was right. But over the course of the weekend, I managed to show her that I was a new guy, one who she could trust, and that I wouldn’t make the same mistakes again. We were, um… being intimate when Joe walked in.” At this, I turned to face Joe, who was quivering with anger. “He then got mad that we were, y’know, fraternizing, even though he’d asked us to pretend to be partners. And, I guess in conjunction with some very, very minor mistake Sierra had made recently, he felt that was grounds to fire her.”

  The air had been sucked out of the room. We were in a vacuum, a space vacuum, free-floating. And I had engineered the weightlessness.

  A beat passed. Another, and another. I looked at Charles, at Joe and Tom, at the company, waiting for someone to say something, anything, about my outburst.

  It was one more beat before Charles at last turned his chair to face my bosses. “Is what Jacob says true?” Simple, to the point.

  Tom looked at Joe, and I wondered for a moment if he’d known the entire story. I suspected not. So it was left to Joe to reply, like a man being dragged across a bed of nails:

  “Yes, sir. It is, technically speaking, true.” He broke off, then added, “But if I might—”

  “No,” Charles bellowed, his voice suddenly terrifying. “That’s enough from you. I hate lies, gentlemen. Despise them. Especially coming from business partners. Why did you force two people to pretend to be a couple for me? What other deceptions have you practiced? I’m rejecting your pitch.”

  Um.

  Crap.

  That’s not what’d I’d been hoping for. I just wanted to tell the truth, to honor Sierra, to call out Joe. I’d never intended for us to lose the whole deal — I mean not consciously, at least. Because it was fine for Joe to be punished, he deserved it, but all these people had families to support, bills to pay.

  And I’d just screwed each and every one.

  “Wait, Charles,” I exclaimed. “Give me a second, let me convince you to—”

  “I’ve made up my mind. And it was all thanks to you. You have my sincere gratitude. Don’t bother trying to convince me of anything. We’re done.” He stood up, pushing his chair back and ignoring it as it banged into the wall. To the rest of the company, he said, “You can all see yourselves out.”

  And with that, the man who had held my future in the palm of his hand stormed out of the room.

  Chapter 24

  Jacob

  THE MOMENT the door shut behind Charles, the room burst into chaos, most of it directed at me.

  “How could you?”

  “What the hell?!”

  “We all needed this, you asshole!”

  The screams came hard and fast, but I shook my head. “I’m sorry,” I said loudly. “It was the right thing to do for Sierra, who I know you all respect.”

  That gave everyone except Joe pause, who took the momentary silence as an opportunity to shout, “Go fuck yourself, Jacob!”

  He strode towards me, as if gearing up for a sucker punch, but Amy gripped his arm mid-stride and stopped him dead in his tracks.

  “Don’t you dare, Joseph,” she seethed. “You’ve already made an ass out of yourself.”

  Joe panted, red in the face, and everyone looked on, anxious to see if Amy’s intervention would work.

  The sudden slackness in Joe’s form suggested that it had.

  “You should never have fired her,” Amy continued. “That was a horrible mistake. She was smart, hard-working and kind, and she’s bent over backwards for the company. You overreacted to that damn Instagram video that was up for half an hour. Who’s checking a construction company’s social media? And now you’ve massively overreacted to this. You need to rein yourself in, because I don’t recognize my husband anymore.”

  In an authoritative voice, Tom ordered the rest of the room, “Get out, please, everyone. Go to your rooms. Keep an eye on the company Slack chat for updates.”

  People scurried out in droves, probably to avoid the marital showdown that seemed to be brewing. I tried to fall in with the crowd, but Tom said, “No, Jacob. You stay.”

  Reluctantly, I peeled away from my co-workers, who were out in seconds and shut the door quickly behind them.

  “Yes?” I asked Tom as I shuffled back over to him, Joe and Amy, who were all clustered towards the front of the room.

  “You should’ve told us about your previous relationship,” he said.

  I rolled my eyes. “Aren’t we past that now? What’s to be gained by chiding me?”

  “I’m not finished. You should’ve told us, because we need company disclosure about that kind of history… but the rest of it? That’s our fault.” He loosened the tie at his neck and took off his suit jacket. “We should never have asked you two to pretend to date. It was unprofessional in the extreme, and I regret it immensely. Two single people wouldn’t have made a difference in our family values presentation. I see that now.”

  I nodded slowly, agreeing with his words, but worried about what potentially fraught corridors they could go down. “In both our defenses, I didn’t know that Sierra worked for you and she didn’t know that I worked for you. Different departments, different branches, in different cities. I hadn’t seen her in two years until Thursday night.”

  “And,” Tom continued, “given that it was our error, Sierra shouldn’t have been fired. Technically, by the book, fraternizing isn’t allowed within the company, and yes, it could be grounds for dismissal. But we didn’t play by the book either — we threw out the whole thing when we asked you to fake a relationship. Sierra didn’t deserve what happened to her, Joe.” This last part, said with his eyes affixed on Joe’s face, which was downcast.

  “Wouldn’t you agree?” Tom prodded his brother.

  Amy added, “Dear, I won’t blame you for making mistakes, but I will blame you if you don’t try to make up for them.”

  I watched and waited while Joe processed the words of his brother and wife. At last, he lifted his eyes from the floor. His lips drew tightly together before sp
reading apart as he whispered, “I can’t believe what I’ve done.”

  I let out a sigh of relief I hadn’t even known I was holding in.

  “I just fired our best employee,” Joe admitted. “Sierra was, beyond a doubt, holding this whole thing together.”

  “As evidenced by what just went down,” Tom added, gruffly referring to the conference room melee.

  While it gave me immense relief to hear Joe own up to his errors, that didn’t do squat for Sierra or for Pillers’ pitch. She was still out of a job, and we were all still out of the biggest contract of our lives. My bosses needed to do something to make this right… and then, maybe after I’d orchestrated that, I could begin to make things right with her. I know, I know, it was a long shot, but these were desperate times.

  “Joe,” I said, staring down the co-CEO. “We need Sierra. She’ll know how to fix this pitch.”

  Joe opened his mouth, but it was Tom who shook his head and replied, “It’s too late. Charles is a, uh, difficult man. Once he’s gone, well, that’s it. There aren’t second chances around here.”

  “Maybe,” I allowed. “But if that’s not true, Sierra’s the only one who can make it right. She could you sell you your own nose if she had an Excel spreadsheet and an hour. Besides, the very least you guys can do is apologize. Give her a call.”

  I’m not sure where all my chutzpah was coming from — since when did I talk to my bosses like this? Perhaps it was because a part of me knew that, if they didn’t hire Sierra back, I wouldn’t be able to continue working for Pillers — I just wouldn’t feel right about it. No sooner had I realized that than a shiver ran down my spine — my fate was inextricably linked to hers. That was a new and terrifying twist.

  Tom’s brows furrowed, and he licked his lips, hesitating. “That might open the floodgates to a wrongful termination lawsuit.”

  Amy, who had been quiet for some time, laughed sardonically, “Oh Tom, those floodgates are wide open already. In fact, I’d bet if you gave her a call, Sierra would be less likely to sue you, which would be a boon for us all. And, setting aside all the legal mumbo-jumbo, Jacob’s right — this young woman deserves a damned apology.”