Page 5 of Summer Longing
“Will she be visiting this summer?”
“No, she will not.” She didn’t have the heart to tell the woman that the last time she had spoken to her daughter was months ago, and that had been just a perfunctory conversation. Her daughter did not even know she’d moved to Provincetown.
Ruth’s phone buzzed with a text from Clifford.I’m bringing over your keys. Meet me at Shell Haven.
Well, there was no time for sentimentality. Or further conversation. She pushed the bench out from the table and stood up to leave.
She had a house to move into.
Chapter Three
Olivia Cooperman pushed through the heavy doors of the Tribeca art deco office building just after eight o’clock in the morning. She swiped her ID card in the turnstile and smiled at the security guard.
For the past eight years she’d spent more time at 32 Sixth Avenue than in her own apartment. She still got a thrill out of the commanding lobby with the tiled map of the world, the mosaic ceilings, the bustle of all the people coming from and going to the twenty-seven floors filled with businesses ranging from radio stations to fashion labels to PR firms. Olivia was headed to the twenty-second floor, home to HotFeed, one of the biggest celebrity social media–management companies in the country. Olivia oversaw a team of twenty people running the accounts of movie stars, athletes, reality-TV stars, and musicians.
Last week HotFeed had won the business of a breakout star from a Netflix show. The actress, barely out of her teens, had appeared at the office for one meeting with her army of publicists and agents. Now Olivia and her colleagues were waiting to see which HotFeed account manager would get to take the reins of the plum account.
Olivia wanted the assignment. Badly.
At thirty years old, while many of her friends were planning weddings, moving to the suburbs, and having babies, Olivia devoted herself to work.
“You can have a personal lifeanda professional life, you know,” a friend had told her recently over drinks. A friend with a newly acquired diamond on her left ring finger.
“I think the myth that you can have it all has been debunked,” Olivia replied. The myth had certainly been disproven in her own life experience. The most recent casualty of her demanding career: her two-year relationship with a banker named Ian Brooks. Just last week, he’d broken up with her in the middle of dinner at Blue Hill.
“I hope you and your phone will be very happy together,” he’d said before he walked out.
The impossibility of a work-life balance had been painfully clear to her from the time she was a child. She’d always resented her mother’s preoccupation with her business. Ruth Cooperman had spent long days at the office; she’d never made it to any of Olivia’s school plays or baked for a single fund-raiser. She hadn’t even given a thought to dinner half the time. Her father had managed all that. Olivia had promised herself that if she had an intense career, she wouldn’t make the mistake of adding a child to the mix. For Olivia, it wasn’t just careerfirst. It was careeronly.
She’d thought she’d made that clear to Ian from the start.
“Good morning, Dakota,” she said to her assistant, who was already settled in her cubicle outside of Olivia’s glass-walled office. Olivia had hired Dakota just over a year ago, fresh out of NYU. Dakota had a communications degree, a tattoo of Dorothy Parker on her left shoulder, and the ability to produce endlessly creative hashtags.
“Hey,” Dakota said, biting on the end of a pen. “There’s a delivery there for you.”
Olivia had already spotted it, a long rectangular vase filled with exotic flowers twisted into a train of petals that seemed to float on the surface. She began humming softly to herself, some pop song she’d listened to during the subway ride to the office. It could only be congratulations from someone. Someone who knew she’d landed the account. Or, more likely, the person who had granted her the account.
It was happening. Her hard work, the sacrifice of her personal life, was paying off. It didn’t matter what other people thought.
She closed her office door and smiled as she opened the small white envelope.
No hard feelings, xoxo Jessica
What? She looked through the walls of her glass office to the cubicles just outside. There, next to Dakota, was another assistant, Jessica. Jessica was young, Jessica was cool, Jessica was…getting the new account?
Heart pounding, Olivia texted her assistant.Can you come in here, please?
Dakota scurried in carrying a razor-thin company-issued laptop and her phone.
“Close the door,” Olivia said. “What have you heard about Jessica?”
“She got a promotion. And the new account,” Dakota said. “I thought you knew.”
Olivia shook her head. “This doesn’t make any sense,” she muttered.
“I mean, it kind of does,” said Dakota.
“How do you figure?” Olivia asked, her mouth dry. She’d put eight years into this company; Jessica had been there eighteen months.
