Page 2 of Failure to Match

“Chances are good we’ll run out of candidates before we find him a partner. It’s notus, it’shim,” Alice reiterated. “Jackson Sinclair doesn’t need a matchmaker, he needs a miracle worker. And a really good therapist, if I’m being honest.”

Mitch shrunk an inch in his seat.

“And?” Vivian pushed. “What’s our plan? How do we work around these obstacles?—”

“We don’t. We fire him,” Alice countered smoothly.

This time when Mitch jolted, he managed to kick her hard enough to earn himself an irritated glare.

Vivian’s lips twisted into a sneer-like smile as she stepped up to the table. My stomach crumpled. “Your proposed solution is to fire Jackson Sinclair as a client? Do you have any idea what that would do to our reputation? Half of our active accounts joinedafterMinerva announced the partnership at her luncheon. What do you think will happen if she takes her business somewhere else?”

They’d probably run into the same issues with him that we had. I bit my tongue; Alice didn’t.

“Again, we told you this might happen, right after he sent one of his assistants to do the onboarding interview on his behalf,” she said. “Westillhaven’t actually met him in person.”

Vivian waved a dismissive hand and started to pace again. “Not taking him on as a client wasn’t an option. And firing him now is out of the question. What I need from the three of you is a solution.”

“That’s the problem, we don’t have one,” I said. “We’ve tried everything short of Immersive, and that’s only because he won’t agree to it.”

A blessing in disguise if you asked me. Not that I was senior enough to even be considered for the role, but I couldn’t imagine being stuck to Jackson Sinclair’s hip like that for an entire month, knowing what I did about his file.

The Immersive Coaching Package was normally reserved for our most challenging clients. They were assigned a full-time relationship consultant and dating coach who spent four weeks studying their daily life, routines, behaviors, and habits, then used the gathered data to find them a suitable match. The whole thing was very intense.

The assigned consultant was even required to attend their dates and observe them from a distance so they could “coach” the client afterward if required (which, nine times out of ten, if a client’s situation was critical enough to warrant an Immersive, then coaching was definitely required).

“I’m with Jamie,” Alice said. “Unless he’s willing to bend on some of his criteria and spare us a bit of his time, then we’re all out of ideas.”

Vivian crossed her arms, but instead of lashing out, she granted us a single firm nod. “All right. I admit that his rigid schedule and expectations for a partner make this more limiting than we might like, but it’s not impossible. Failure isn’t an option here—it just isn’t. We have to find a way to work around it.”

Again, denial.

I slumped back in my chair, but Alice stood firm. If anything, Vivian’s reluctance to see the reality of our situation only fired her up. “We’ve done everything we can with the information we’ve been provided. Sixty-seven women miraculously met his insane criteria, and not one of them was able to secure even a second date with him. Notone. Our data has to be flawed for that to happen but, again, he refuses to partake in our assessments himself, so we’re stuck working with what we have. All his tests, questionnaires, and interviews were done by his staff, and some of them weren’t even fully filled out. His team is dictating what information we need to do our job, and it’s just not working.There’s a reason we wouldn’t have made these exceptions for someone with a different last name, Viv.”

I was half-convinced that Jackson didn’t actually want to find a partner, but I couldn’t figure out why he’d waste so much of everyone’s time and resources, including his own.

The sign-up fee at Charmed was a hefty seven figures, not to mention the level of initial commitment our programs required. The company catered to the top one percent of the one percent, and if there was one thing our clients had in common (apart from their incomprehensible wealth) it was that they didn’t like wasting their own time. That was why they hired us in the first place—to do all the vetting and hard work for them.

“Why?” Vivian asked, her sharp gaze snapping among the three of us. “Whyhaven’t they been able to secure a second date with him?”

“Your guess is as good as ours,” I said.

“What does that mean?”

I edged forward in my chair. “The feedback we’ve been getting from his team has been vague and confusing, so we really only have the women’s version of events to work with. But that doesn’t help since we need to know whyhedidn’t think the dates went well.”

His matches never voiced any complaints about the experience, and most of them were quite upset after being told that Jackson didn’t want to pursue anything further with them.

Another thing a good portion of our clientele had in common? They weren’t used to rejection, and some of them did not know how to handle it.

Vivian nodded again, and for the first time since we’d been assigned this hellish nightmare of a case, it felt like she was maybe hearing us.

“Okay,” she said. “So then, there you go. That’s your next step.”

I frowned. “What is?”

“You need to figure out what’s really happening on those dates.”

There was only one way I could think to do that, but she wasn’t going to agree to it. “Could we maybe sit in on one of your meetings with Minerva and see if she has any insight?—”

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