Ten
If someone asked Rose Sewell, back when she was Rose Sewell, how she felt about Michigan Chemical, it wouldn’t have been a particularly hard question to answer.
She hated it. She hated the management. She hated the work. She hated the fact that it was all menial, meaningless labor that she did all day, every day, and in the end it wasn’t the sort of thing that she wanted to keep doing, if she had any choice in the matter, which for the most part, she figured she didn’t.
After all, the alternatives all involved going hungry, or finding a new job, and in this economy, with her qualifications, it wasn’t going to be a peach of a time, and she wasn’t going to get any better job by doing it, regardless.
So she had kept at it, and with time, it had grown to be a part of her life. Not a beloved part, and certainly not one of the parts that she looked forward to each and every day. But it didn’t have to be something that she looked forward to ‘each and every day.’
It was a job, and it paid well enough, and it kept her busy. There was gossip, there was stability, and there was a life there, under all of it. A life that occasionally took her to business conferences, and one time, got her into the bed of a man who at the time seemed way, way out of her league. A man who, as it turned out, got her pregnant. A man who she’d married, a year later, without him ever realizing the missed connection as far as she could tell.
And now, it was her own little company. Something that she had a responsibility to, the same way that she had a responsibility to Sarah and Violet. Three hundred and fifty-two people, of whom she knew about a dozen well, and about a hundred by sight, were being watched over by her. They were all her responsibility.
If she wanted them gone, then they were out of jobs. If she wanted them to keep their jobs, then they were in the money, regardless of how bad at their job they happened to be.
And there was one other thing that she was responsible for, too: making sure that they stayed profitable. Making sure that there was a job for them to come back to. When the company ran out of money, and couldn’t afford to pay, it wasn’t going to be a long time before people started to get ideas about how much loyalty they actually had to the company.
It wasn’t going to be a long time before people started thinking that maybe if they weren’t getting paid there was other work that paid them. Maybe it would pay better, or maybe it would pay worse, but in the end, if it paid, it was better than not getting paid.
That was her real responsibility, and with a bunch of people bearing down on the company, trying like the devil to make sure that she couldn’t keep it solvent forever…
Well, it wasn’t a good situation.
Rose Kilpatrick wasn’t Rose Sewell any more. She wasn’t some data entry job, a nameless, faceless entity in lower-middle management who just made sure that clients got their shipments on time, while men twice her size made sure that the shipments were there to get filled, and science types made sure that there was something to fill those shipments with.
She was the owner. And if she had to empty out the company’s coffers to stay that way, then that was her right as the owner. It was her money to spend, and it was her company to keep.
The problem, of course, was that none of that mattered one bit. She could feel real good about herself, as she pushed harder and harder to make sure that she stayed in charge. She would, too, if the need arose, because it was important. But it wasn’t so important that she needed to lose someone their job.
Duncan would be able to keep himself working, if he was let go. He was a resourceful guy. Craig was smart enough. Linda and Marcus and all of them were technically expendable. But there was always the chance, however slim, that there wasn’t going to be a big let-down at the end of the rainbow. Sometimes, things worked out, as surprising as it was, and she had to gamble on that. Because things sure as hell weren’t going to go any better if she stuck around.
She took in a breath. It was probably smarter that she got out of her involvement with running a company, anyways. She wasn’t that smart. She wasn’t experienced with this kind of work, and she didn’t actually want to be in charge.
She just thought of the company as her responsibility, and she was willing to do the work to protect something she was responsible for. It was that simple, really. And now she was going to get rid of it, because that was the responsible thing to do.
She took a deep breath, fidgeted with the heavy steel pen in her pocket that she’d picked up at an office store for thirty dollars, and hoped looked flashy enough not to embarrass her.
In five minutes, there was going to be a meeting to sign the final paperwork to release everything, and that would be the end of her short career as a businesswoman. Oh, well. It was hardly a big deal. She hadn’t really wanted to be a businesswoman in the first place, after all.
Rose sucked in a breath, checked her phone again. Four minutes.
And then it rang, so loud that it made her jump, and her husband’s face, broad and manly and sexy as hell, and only her husband on a technicality, appeared on the screen. She answered it.
“Hello?”
“Don’t sell,” he said. “I’ll be there in five minutes.”
And then he hung up.