Page 22 of The Wrong Boss

She’d been attending the school since Pre-K, but this was the first year that she’d be out of the modular classrooms and in with the big kids. I looked down at her dark head of hair, trying to ignore the tugging in my chest.

Seven years had flown by—but I could feel a change in the air. Today wasn’t only my daughter’s first day of school. It was potentially the first day of our new life.

If I made it through the probation period and succeeded at this new job, I’d step onto solid ground for the first time in a decade or longer. The salary was enough to let me build up a solid emergency fund as well as enough cash to move out of Hailey and Seth’s place. For the first time since Evie was born, I’d be able to give her her own room. Her ownhome.

I couldn’t mess up. My future—my daughter’s future—rested on me nailing it. Ineededthis job. I needed a steady, long-term contract with a company that could afford to pay top dollar for my skills. Otherwise, I’d have to stay with Hailey and Seth, and no matter how much they insisted that I could live with them, I knew our time was limited.

We shared a three-bedroom, two-bathroom townhouse between the four of us. It was sandwiched in a row oftownhouses and was a little worse for wear—rickety stairs and tiny rooms, and windows that had been painted shut decades ago. Evie and I were in one room, Hailey and Seth in another, and the third was Hailey’s home office. She said she was happy to have the baby in their room and eventually convert the office into her daughter’s bedroom, but I knew that as soon as her screaming infant came into the world, she’d realize that she needed more room. She neededourroom.

So the clock was ticking, and the pressure was on. Today was my only chance at making a good impression on my new boss to make sure that I could repay Hailey and Seth’s generosity by finally standing on my own two feet and letting them start their family in peace.

The school came into view, and my daughter’s hand clenched around mine. She glanced up at me when we reached the gates.

“You want me to walk you to your classroom?”

Evie bit her lip, then straightened when she saw her best friend, Zara, on the far side of the playground. “No,” she said. “Me and Zara can walk in together.”

Right. Rejected by my own six-year-old. What else was new? There was no need for me to get emotional. Maybe if I repeated it to myself, I could pretend that her words didn’t make me want to cry. “Give me a hug,” I said through a tight throat, forcing a smile onto my lips as I kneeled in front of her.

Evie wrapped her arms around my neck, then pulled away. “Okay! Bye, Mom!”

“Bye-bye, honey. Remember, Aunt Hailey is picking you up from school today, because I’m starting my new job.”

“Yep!” she called out, already grinning and waving at Zara. “Bye!”

And with that, she was sprinting across the schoolyard, her backpack banging against her body with every elephantlike step. I watched her get swallowed by a small mass of kids, took a deep breath, and commanded my tears to stay behind my eyelids.

Then, with nothing else to do, I turned in the direction of the train that would take me across the river and into Manhattan. I had a half-hour commute, which would give me enough time to gather my wits and prepare to blow my new boss’s socks off.

Anything less would be a failure of disastrous proportions.

EIGHT

COLE

I pinchedthe bridge of my nose and tried to ignore the mounting frustration climbing up my chest. “We have an SOP for this,” I finally said, pleased that my voice was relatively neutral. “Why wasn’t it followed?”

The standard operating procedure for travel arrangements had been in place for years. I had a list of preferred airlines, flight paths, and seat choices. Everything was spelled out in detail so that I could fly wherever I needed to in comfort and most importantly, without losing any productivity.

The itinerary in my inbox had me landing at LAX just a few minutes before my meeting was supposed to start, and it had a connection in Atlanta. I’d lose hours of valuable work time with the extra layover, and I wouldn’t even be able to close the deal when I got to my destination. Wooing a bigwig producer in LA to hand over his wealth for us to manage didn’t work so well when you missed the only meeting you’d been able to secure.

“I’ll fix it,” Kaia assured me. She was the senior executive assistant at Hearst, Inc., in charge of the entire assistant pool that served the C-suite executives. “I’ll have the new itinerary sent over by the end of the day, and I’ll make sure your meeting with Mr. Trews is rescheduled.”

“Kaia.”

“Sir.”

“This is the third time Ms. Bronson has messed up in two weeks.”

Kaia straightened. Her dark-brown hair brushed her chin in a sharp line, swinging slightly as she dipped her chin. Her face was expressionless, features hard and sharp as she met my gaze. She’d worked for me since I’d moved over to work for my father’s company five years ago, and she ran the EAs with an iron fist. The company would be in shambles without her, and we both knew it. But that was no excuse to let standards slip. She swallowed and said, “I’m aware. It’s been a rough start, but Alison came highly recommended. I still trust?—”

“It doesn’t matter what you trust if she can’t live up to the standards we set here,” I interrupted, the frustration making another desperate bid for freedom as it pressed against the bounds of my control. “Thank you. Now send her in.”

Kaia’s eyes flared with panic, and her lips dropped open. “Sir. We’re short-staffed already, and Alison can still provide value if I task her with?—”

“She’s had her chances.”

“Her mother is sick, and she needs this job?—”

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