Fourteen
Rose finally reached him the fourth time that she called. Or, more accurately, after four calls, he called her back after thirty seconds. It was enough for her, and it was still an hour before she usually made her morning appearance at the office, so the reality was, as much as she hated it, she wasn’t late per se. Not yet, anyways.
He sounded the same on the phone as he did in person. Some people are more polite; some ruder. Some were more tentative or more certain of themselves. However they felt about the phone came through the way that they talked on it. Bryce sounded like someone who was used to talking on the phone because he had to be. Nothing else.
“What’s the problem?”
“Someone faked a leak.”
“About?”
“Michigan Chemical dumping into the river.”
“And you’re not?”
“No, of course not.”
He let out a long, low breath.
“What are you planning?”
“I’ll just… I’ll just sell.”
Bryce laughed. “Sell to who? You’re in it now, sweet. You’re not going to get out that easily.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“What do you think it means?”
“It sounds like you’re telling me that I’m trapped.”
He let out a low breath. “And if I was telling you exactly that?”
“How could that even be true, though? I didn’t do it.”
“You missed your chance to get out of it. Now you’ve got something very valuable, though.”
“What’s that?”
“A chance to take complete control of your company. You’ve still got a controlling interest, right?”
“Sure.”
“Hold onto it. And buy more. Hit something absurd—eighty percent of the company in your pocket.”
“Bryce, I’m sinking here. I’m not cut out for this.”
“You’ll do fine. Just trust me, okay?”
“No, you listen to me, for once in your life, will you?”
“Not this time, Rose. Calm down.”
“How in the hell am I supposed to calm down?”
“You’re supposed to listen to me, and I’m going to talk you through this, okay?”
“You said nothing was going to hit me.”
“This is going to wash out in the end. You’ll see.”
“I’d like if it washed out sooner, rather than later.”
“And it will. The evidence is fake, right?”
“Unless they’re suggesting that someone smuggled out a memo that never got sent out. Certainly, I never sent it.”
“Is it possible that the previous owner—the one before me, that is—did send it?”
Rose let out a breath. She’d thought about it. There was a possibility. And if that possibility were to be the case, then there was at least two people she knew would have gotten that memo. Two people who could confirm once and for all.
“Anything is possible, I suppose.”
“Okay. Close that possibility. Get the answer to whether or not someone can confirm to you that it’s false.”
“And if it’s not?”
“Then you call up the Today show, and you tell them your name, and you tell them that you’re so glad that they uncovered this travesty, because your people didn’t during the transfer of power.”
“Is that supposed to work?”
“It’ll have to work.”
“I just want out. It’ll be easier if we get out. Come on. Please. You said—”
“I said you shouldn’t be afraid to sell. Get what you wanted, and get out. What did you want? To have the company’s name ruined and its people out of a job?”
Rose’s head hurt and she hated to admit it but she wanted nothing more than to start sobbing. Her eyes stung and threatened to start leaking any moment. But she held herself together because she had to.
“No.”
Bryce’s voice was surprisingly comforting. Something told her that he seemed like the sort of man who would be trying to bully her into submission at this point, but he simply wasn’t. He was helping. Like he said he would help.
“Then I need you to start listening to me, alright? Go into your bedroom, pick out a power suit. Something blue. It’ll set off your eyes.”
“Okay,” Rose said. She rubbed at her eyes and picked Sarah up as she tried to crawl up onto the fireplace hearth. She’d scrape herself silly if she actually managed to get up onto the brick lip.
“Then I want you to take two minutes, look in the mirror, and I want you to try to convince yourself that you’ve got this.”
Rose knew that she didn’t have it. It was the most precarious situation she’d ever been in, and she’d been a single mother, with babies fathered by a man whose name she didn’t even know. But if he wanted her to think that she had everything under control, then she was going to have to figure out what she could do to convince herself.
“Anything else?”
“Kiss the girls for me.”
She looked down at Sarah, who looked back up at her with wide eyes. Then she pecked a kiss on the baby girl’s forehead. Sarah gurgled. It was either happy, or annoyed, or she was thinking that she wanted to go to the bathroom. One of those.