A story of sisters, secrets and a sanctuary with a dark heart from author of Sunday Times bestseller The Recovery of Rose Gold.
Part One
I want to live a life in which I am free.
The world’s gone mad. People always say that.
On the contrary, we’re much too sane. We’re going to die
someday, every single one of us. Never again the touch of a
soft breeze. Never again the pinks of a setting sun. Yet we still
rake the leaves come fall. We mow the grass and plow the
snow. We spend all our time on all the wrong things. We act
like we’ll live forever.
Then again, what should a time bomb do? It has only two
options.
Tick or explode.
1
Natalie
6 January 2020
“I stand at the head of the conference table. The chairs around
me are filled with men: short, tall, fat, bald, polite, skeptical. I
direct the close of my pitch to the CEO, who has spent fifty
minutes of my sixty-minute presentation playing with his
phone and the other ten frowning at me. He is past his prime,
trying to disguise the fact with hair plugs and a bottled tan.
‘Using this new strategy,’ I say, ‘we’re confident we will
make your brand the number one beer with men twenty-
one to thirty- four years old.’
The CEO leans forward, mouth slightly ajar as if a cigar
is usually perched there. He oversees a household-name
beer that’s been losing market share to craft breweries for years.
As sales have slipped, my new agency has found itself on
thinner and thinner ice with these clients.
He looks me up and down, sneers a little. ‘With all due
respect, what makes you think you ’ – he spits the word like it’s
a shit sandwich – ‘can get inside the mind of our man?’
I glance out the conference room window, squint at the
Charles River in the distance, and count to three. My team
warned me about this guy, a dinosaur of corporate America
who still believes business belongs on the golf course.
What I want to say: Yes, however will I peel back the layers of
such complicated minds? Can a simpleton ever truly understand the
genius of the noble frat star? For now they crush empties against their
foreheads, but someday they will command boardrooms. Someday they
will be you and insist they got to where they are through nothing but
sheer hard work. By then they’ll have traded the watery swill you call
beer for three-hundred-dollar bottles of pinot noir. They’ll still spend
their weekends falling down and throwing up, only now they’ll do it in
hotel rooms with their best friends’ wives. When Monday rolls around,
they’ll slump at this table and wonder why I don’t smile more often. They
will root for me to break the glass ceiling as long as none of the shards
nick them. They will lament the fact they can no longer say these things
aloud, except on golf courses.
What I actually say: ‘To get up to speed on your business,
I’ve spent the past two months conducting focus groups with
six hundred men who fit your target demo.’ I scroll to the
appendix of my PowerPoint deck, containing forty slides of
detailed tables and graphs. ‘I’ve spent my weeknights collating
the data and my weekends analyzing what all of it means. I
know these men’s occupations and income. I know their levels
of education, their religion, their race. I know where your guys
live, their lifestyles and personal values, their attitudes toward
your brand as well as toward all of your competitors’ brands. I
know their usage frequency, their buyer readiness, and the
occasions when they buy your beer. I know their degree of
loyalty to you. When I get on the train to go to work or am
lying in bed at night, I relisten to my interviews, searching for
any insight I might’ve missed. I can say with confidence I
know your guy as well as I know my own father.’ I wince involuntarily.
‘Which means I know them as well as you do. I don’t
think I can get inside the mind of your customer. I know I can.
Because I already have. With all due respect.’ I grin so the jab
sounds playful instead of aggressive.
Everyone else in the room appears impressed. My assistant,
Tyler, forgets himself and claps. I shift my eyes in his
direction, and that’s enough to make him stop, but by then
the others have joined in, both the clients and my account
team. The CEO watches me, amused but undecided. It was
a risk, publicly challenging him in order to galvanize the rest,
but I’ll rarely interact with him; I’m told he shows up to
advertising meetings only when he has no one else to antagonize.
The marketing team members are the ones I need on
my side. The CEO sits back and lets his underlings finish the
session. He leaves halfway through the Q&A.
“‘I would love to work for her. She’s such a boss bitch.’”
Five minutes later the clients have signed off on our
strategy brief for the year. Handshakes and back pats are
exchanged. Invitations to lunch are extended for the first
time in months. The account team stays with the clients but
I bow out. My lunch hour is for catching up on e-mail.
If my inbox is empty, I spend the hour at the gym.
Tyler and I take the elevator forty floors down to the lobby
of the Prudential Tower. I smirk while he raves about how
awesome the presentation was. I didn’t choose him as my
assistant; he was assigned to me. What he lacks in ambition
(or any set of demonstrable skills, really) he tries to make up
for with personality.
On Boylston Street I shiver in the cold while Tyler calls an
Uber. Once we’re nestled in the car, I turn toward him. ‘I
want you to buy a box of Cohibas from the cigar parlor on
Hanover. Wrap the box in navy blue paper. Send it with a
note on the back of one of my business cards. Not the shitty
agency-issued ones but the thick card stock I had made with
the nice embossing. Do you have a pen? Then get your phone
out. I want the note to say this exactly: “To a productive partnership.”
End that sentence with a period, not an exclamation
point. Then under that line, a dash followed by “Natalie”.
Got it? No “Yours truly” or “All my best” or “Cheers”. Just
a dash with my name. Send it to the CEO.’
Tyler gapes at me. ‘But he was so rude to you. In front of
all those people.’
I tap a list of post-meeting to-dos on my phone. Without
glancing up, I say, ‘When I was coming up in this industry,
you know what I spent most of my time doing? Listening.
And taking notes.’
Out of the corner of my eye I see his expression sour
slightly. He’s only three years younger than I am.
‘I want the minutes of today’s meeting on my desk within
the hour. Please.’
‘In my two years at DCV no one has ever done meeting
minutes,’ he mumbles.
‘Maybe that’s why you almost lost the client that pays
all of our salaries.’ I wait for a snappy comeback. When
I don’t get one, I pull a folder from my bag. ‘I glanced
through your Starburst brief. It’s riddled with typos.’ I find
the marked-up pages and hand them to him. ‘It reflects
poorly on both of us when the work is subpar. More careful
proofreading next time, okay?’ His jaw tightens. ‘And I told
you: section headings in all caps and bolded. Not one or the
other. Both. You’d be surprised how far attention to detail
will take you.’
The car pulls up to our office building. We ride another
elevator together, this time in silence. On the sixth floor
we get off. As we’re about to part ways, Tyler sniffs. ‘If you’ve
never met the CEO before today, how can we be sure he
smokes cigars?’
‘I know my target.’ I head into the women’s bathroom.
A minute later I walk down the hallway, scrolling through
my calendar (three more meetings this afternoon). I’m about
to round the corner to my office when hushed voices in
a nearby cubicle catch my ear. I recognize the first as one
of the assistants, a woman who doesn’t know she’s being
considered for a promotion. ‘I would love to work for her.
She’s such a boss bitch.’
‘Or your run-of-the-mill bitch.’ That one is Tyler.
The other assistants titter.
‘She treats me like a child,’ he says, gaining steam from his
friends’ reactions. He affects a shrill voice. ‘Tyler, I want you to
go to the bathroom. When you wipe your ass, use four squares of toilet
paper, but make sure it’s three-ply, not two. If it’s two, you’re fired.’
They all giggle, these people who are almost my age but make
a third of what I do.
I straighten, pull back my shoulders, and stride past the
cubicle. Without slowing down I say, ‘I don’t think my voice
is that high-pitched.’
Someone gasps. The last thing I hear before closing my
office door is total silence.”
Extracted from This Might Hurt by Stephanie Wrobel, out now.
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