Chapter Twenty-Six

Hunter

It had been two weeks since Lucille had finally succeeded in getting Snow out of the company and I was still struggling to deal with it. The office just wasn’t the same without her there. She brightened up the entire space, seeming to bring happiness and levity to any situation that we might find ourselves in, whether it was a client who decided last-minute that they needed their entire campaign redone to suit the marketing epiphany that they experienced in their tequila-fueled dream, or the fact that our doughnuts and coffee had still not made their return to the kitchen. When it came to the clients, Snow was always thinking a step ahead of everyone and ensuring that the accounts were managed in the best way possible, even when she wasn’t a formal part of the team working on it. She was always willing to offer a thought or give a bit of constructive criticism, but was just as fast to tell the team that the campaign they came up with was phenomenal and that she never would have been able to come up with it, even though the truth was more likely that she would have been. Now the clients were upset and accounts were threatening to leave the firm because Snow was no longer there to handle their campaigns and give them exactly what they wanted.

Beyond that, though, just being in an environment that was completely controlled by such a vicious woman as Lucille who had been handed everything that she wanted was intolerable. Her mere presence hung over the office like a thick, dark cloud, and everyone had seemed to shut down, pulling in within themselves more with each passing day with Lucille at the helm of the company. I had held out hope for a few days that Mr. Royal would catch wind of the firing and make a valiant return from his vacation, snatch back his company from his evil wife’s claws, and send her back into the smarmy corporate swampland from whence she came. A postcard that I received halfway through the first week without Snow, however, destroyed that hope for me and I was forced to confront the reality that this was what we were going to have to deal with throughout the course of our contracts. Unless we could find legitimate reason to sever our agreements, quitting would mean giving up our severance packages and all of the benefits we had been promised when we started working with Walter. It felt oppressive and frustrating, sucking the life and the motivation out of everyone in the office.

I had just returned from a run to the coffee shop for lunch, the one break that I was able to get during the day, when I noticed a man standing in the lobby. I didn’t recognize him as anyone who worked with the company or as any of the clients that we had been working with recently, so I stepped up beside him. I purposely stayed several feet away from him so that I could try to see his face without him noticing what I was doing. As I masked my curiosity by shifting through some of the magazines piled up on the table in the reception area as if I was checking the dates, I noticed that the man was staring through the glass case hanging on the wall at the pictures of employees who had been honored with awards and superlatives over the years.

I stepped a little closer and noticed that his gaze didn’t seem to be moving as though he were looking at all of the different pictures and plaques, but rather that he was staring at one specific one. He glanced slightly to the side as if he had noticed that I was looking at him and then turned to look at me fully.

“Hey,” he said, gesturing for me to come closer. “Who is this?”

I walked up to him, thankful that his interest had glossed over the fact that I was at least slightly stalking him. He was pointing into the glass and I followed the gesture. Snow’s face smiled at me from behind the glass, her eyes sparkling from a picture taken when she earned special recognition for being the top account earner the year before. It made me feel even sadder to look at her face shimmering there behind the glass, her presence there in the office and yet gone.

“That’s Snow Whitman,” I said. “She used to work here.”

“Used to?” the man asked.

“Yes. She…stopped working here recently.”

I hesitated to tell him what really happened. I still didn’t know who he was or why he was there so I didn’t want to give too much personal information about Snow and her situation. The man nodded as he continued to stare at her picture.

“Did the current acting president of the company have anything to do with her leaving?” he asked.

Well, since he asked.

“Yes. Lucille Royal stepped into the role of acting president a few months ago after she married Walter Royal, the owner of the company. She is the one responsible for dismissing Snow.”

The man nodded again, and something about his expression told me that I wasn’t really giving him any new information. He stared at the picture for a few seconds longer and then turned to look at me.

“Will you please show me to Mrs. Royal’s office?” he asked. I was slightly taken aback by the request and I hesitated in saying anything. He gave me a slightly quizzical expression. “She’s expecting me.”

I nodded.

“Oh,” I said, feeling like that was all that I could manage to get out in that moment. “Sure. Right this way.”

I led him in silence through the quiet, depressed-feeling floors of the building until we reached Lucille’s office. The door that had to be replaced after its unfortunate encounter with Snow’s shoe looked dramatically out of place and I felt the urge to knock more formally on its elaborate carved wood surface than I would have on the simpler door that Mr. Royal had had on the office ever since I had worked with him. I withheld the formality and rapped on the door twice.

“Yes?” Lucille said in the annoyed, burdened tone that had become her usual approach since before Snow’s departure.

I opened the door without bothering to announce myself.

“Your appointment is here,” I said, realizing that I didn’t get the man’s name and feeling as though I was failing in the assistant department.

“Hello, Lucille,” the man said as he stepped around me and into the office.

Lucille’s face dropped when she saw him and I noticed her grip on the pen that she was holding tightened.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

Ooo, not a pleasant meeting, I see.

Feeling the hint of a smile coming to my lips knowing that this man was able to fluster and unnerve Lucille so much while remaining absolutely calm and collected, I turned and started to pull the door closed.

“You know why I’m here,” the man said as I stepped out into the hall and closed the door.

I didn’t know at that time what was happening, but somehow I felt a bit more optimistic.

Robin

I watched Snow as she peeled out of her sweater and draped it over the back of her chair. In one smooth movement she walked around the side of the chair, dropped down into it, and collapsed forward onto the table as if her spine was suddenly made out of ribbon. I pushed a cup of coffee toward her with my fingertips, but she didn’t respond.

“Snow? Are you still in there?”

“I don’t know,” she muttered back.

“Well, you spoke. That’s a plus. I haven’t heard actual words come out of you in a while.”

She looked like someone had grabbed onto her spine and pulled up, lifting her off of the table and unfolding her until she leaned back against the chairback.

“What am I going to do?” Snow asked.

“What do you mean?” I asked, taking a sip of the sweet hazelnut coffee in front of me.

Watching me take the sip seemed to bring Snow into the reality of the coffee in front of her.

“Since when does The Wishing Well serve coffee?” she asked.

“I think that they always did,” I said, looking down into the light brown swirl of my coffee, “but tonight they are trying specialty coffee.”

“Interesting,” she said.

A waiter was roaming past and Snow reached up to touch his elbow to get his attention. He looked down at her expectantly.

“Is there something I can get for you?”

“Ice cream,” I said. “Please. Just a…” I gestured with my hands, indicating the sheer size of the bowl I wanted, “a big ass bowl of ice cream.”

“Flavor?”

“Vanilla bean if you have it. Chocolate. Anything, really. Just ice cream.”

The waiter gave a short laugh and walked away toward the kitchen.

“What am I going to do?” she asked.

“Oh, we’re back to this now,” I said. I took another sip of my coffee and set the mug down resolutely. “Ok. What do you mean?”

“Without my job.”

“Snow. Seriously. I know that you’re sad about your job. I know that you’re extra sad because it was Lucille who was able to fire you and you feel like she finally got the one-up on you after all of these years.”

“She did get the one up on me,” she snapped. “She humiliated the living bejeezus out of me and then fired me. Well, technically she fired me and humiliated me simultaneously and I just didn’t know what was happening at first.”

The waiter returned with approximately half a gallon of ice cream piled into a serving bowl and placed it on the table in front of her.

“I gave you half vanilla bean and half chocolate,” he said.

“Bless you,” Snow said.

The waiter walked away and Snow picked up her mug of coffee and poured it over the ice cream.

“I just can’t believe that this happened. I worked so hard. So…hard. For so long. I always thought that I would be able to stay one step ahead of her.” She scooped up a spoonful of the ice cream-swirled coffee from the bowl and shoved it in her mouth. “Even when I left for that stupid leave of absence, I was pissed off but I thought that I was going to figure something out and be able to get back to where I was supposed to be when it was all over.” She stared down into the bowl and shook her head. “I never should have gone. I never should have let her run me out of the office.”

“What exactly did you think that you were going to do? She’s the president of the company. She’s also a crazy bitch. If she couldn’t figure out how to get you out that day, she would have just kept going and figured out another way to get you gone.”

“But it didn’t have to be this way. It didn’t have to go down this ugly path. I should never have gone to that retreat.”

I hated hearing her say that. It didn’t escape my awareness that I was the one who was responsible for sending her to The Enchanted Woods. I had made it seem that I had just happened upon the brochure for the place, but the truth was that I had sought it out for her. I knew someone else who had spent some time there and thought that it could really benefit Snow. She needed to relax. Like I had told her, she needed to learn more about herself and what she really wanted in her life. I hadn’t necessarily expected her to go straight for seven guys, but in a way, I was proud of her. I thought that if she went along with the situation at all that she would choose one or two types of men, then be finished. When I heard that she had chosen seven, bringing her right on up to the Dirty 8, I had been shocked, but also proud that she was willing to put herself out there like that. She was nothing if not committed.

“Yes, you should have,” I insisted.

“It did nothing but ruin my life.”

“Do you really believe that?”

Snow poked the ice cream coffee soup with her spoon a few times and then shook her head.

“I guess not,” she said.

“Are you still thinking about Noah?”

She looked up at me as if asking the question was some sort of betrayal, but I didn’t back down. I hadn’t heard her talk this way about anyone since she had met her ex. In fact, she didn’t even talk about him that way. This was new. There was something sparkling and glowing in her eyes even in the brief times that she had talked about him and I couldn’t understand why she was insisting on pushing the feelings away, especially now that she felt as though the rest of her life was falling apart around her.

“I told you. There’s no point in me thinking about him. It can’t go anywhere.”

“But why not?”

“I already explained that to you. We each signed contracts. We aren’t allowed to share any personal information or enable each other to get in contact outside of the retreat. I’m not even supposed to know that his name is Noah. All of the other men used their aliases throughout the entire time that I was with them. Even if I wanted to contact him again, I wouldn’t be able to.”

“But you do want to,” I said.

Snow sighed and I took that as confirmation. Suddenly I felt envious of Snow. Though she was hurting now, she was feeling something that I never had. I was about nothing more than sex. I rarely had the same partner more than once, and if I did, I was very careful to make sure that there was a clear understanding that it was not a relationship. We were not a couple. We would not be going on romantic getaways. We would not be having breakfast together unless it was snatching a granola bar off the grab-and-go counter at the hotel where we spent the night. While it was fun and I never had to deal with the type of pain that Snow was feeling, I never got to experience whatever it was that made it worth it to risk that type of pain.

It seemed that Snow was about to say something, but her phone jangled in her purse and she leaned down to fish it out. She looked down at the screen and clicked through the screen to check the text that she had just gotten. She read through it a couple of times and let out an exasperated sound.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Apparently, I’m supposed to go into the office tomorrow,” she said.

She filled her spoon with another huge bite of her ice cream concoction and put it in her mouth. I had to give it to her, she certainly knew how to girl.

“Why?” I asked, picking up the spoon from my place setting and snagging some of the goo for myself. It was so delicious I felt like I could probably go through a little heartache if it meant that I could stuff myself full of caffeinated ice cream. “I thought that you had been in no uncertain terms banned from the office.”

“I thought that I was, too,” she said, dropping the phone back. She rolled her eyes and let out a groan. “Maybe they’ve decided that I’m in trouble because of the door.”

“What did you do to the door?”

“I thought I told you about that,” she said in that way that meant she was trying to scoot past something without really acknowledging it.

“Um, no,” I said. “You told me that your coworker brought you a copy of The Apple and that you barged in to Lucille’s office to confront ----oh, lord. You bashed her door down, didn’t you?”

“Maybe,” she said.

“Snow...”

“Alright, yes. I kicked the door down. And they didn’t really say anything about it.”

“You are going to walk in there and the police are going to be waiting for you.”

“I would hope that Hunter would have mentioned the intention to throw me in jail in his text,” she said. “He might be Lucille’s assistant now, but he knew me first. Besides, he can’t stand her any more than any of us can.”

“Well, that’s reassuring.”

She nodded, taking another bite, but her eyes reflected worry that she obviously didn’t want to talk about.