“I see,” Charlotte said. She pursed her lips and exhaled slowly, willing herself to keep it together. It was hard to get into character as a toady with Reece sitting right next to her, hearing every word of the conversation. “Aubrey is smart. But I’ve worked closely with her as her manager, and I—”
“About that,” Roger interrupted. “We may have rushed you becoming a manager. Aubrey expressed some frustration with your style.” He laughed, a pugnacious little snarl.
Charlotte’s throat tightened. The moment she left town, Aubrey took advantage of the opening and knifed her in the back.
Dental insurance. Isn’t it nice to have dental?
She pictured the glassy surface of Cobalt Pond, impenetrable and still. She was Charlotte Thorne, an integral Front End employee. She felt nothing.
Goddamn it, she would feel nothing.
The self-soothing mechanism didn’t work. She struggled to keep sarcasm out of her voice. “I’m sorry to hear that Aubrey has issues with the way I manage her.” Getting defensive wouldn’t undo whatever damage Aubrey had done, but she had to speak up for herself. She couldn’t just eat shit for the rest of her life, not when she knew she was right. “I met with Pauline last month for management training. She helped me set performance goals for Aubrey to meet—”
“Goals like perfect emails and fetching lunch?” He snorted. “Seems a bit trivial to me.”
“Sure,” Charlotte said dryly. “But assistants need to care about the details, and she doesn’t.”
“It’s not her fault that the work is below her, Charlotte,” Roger chided. “Her father’s on the board, you know.”
The insult smarted more than she expected it to. If he thought the work was below Aubrey, what did he think of her? Charlotte poured her heart into her work. Roger could at least pretend to respect it.
You don’t do this job for respect, you do it to pay the electric bill and the heating bill and the internet bill.
“Working for you isn’t menial labor, Roger.” The blatant ass-kissing rotted in her mouth. Reece’s eyebrows rose next to her, but still he kept quiet. She dug her nails into her palm as she debased herself. “I’m surprised Aubrey doesn’t see the value of learning from you.”
“Hey, now,” Roger cooed, mollified by her shameless manipulation. “Don’t go getting your feelings hurt. You know how much I appreciate you.”
Charlotte clenched her hands together in her lap, fighting the urge to gnaw at her thumb. Her feelings. If she were a man, Roger wouldn’t reduce this conversation to feelings. They were talking about her management style, her job. Three years of her professional life without a meaningful raise or a step toward a promotion.
“You’ll have more time to focus on your responsibilities without Aubrey underfoot,” he continued. “I transferred her to the art department.”
Wait, what?
Charlotte blinked at the road as the Jeep barreled toward campus. Shock spread through her body in waves of orange static.
Roger gave Aubrey the promotion. Roger gave her unreliable, disrespectful, product-of-blatant-nepotism assistant the job she’d been strategizing for.
Her exit strategy, yanked away and gifted to someone’s spoiled daughter.
It made no sense. Aubrey never expressed interest in the magazine’s visuals. She wanted to be an influencer. Her highest ambition in life was to get paid to endorse diet gummies.
Even if she did want to be a project manager, Aubrey wasn’t qualified. She had no patience for details. She missed the first five minutes of every meeting.
Charlotte wasn’t biased, she was the girl’s boss! Aubrey once asked her if Elizabeth Holmes was a SoulCycle instructor.
“I didn’t know Aubrey wanted to project manage,” she forced out.
Her shock must have been obvious because Roger stilled his fidgeting in the back seat. He returned her stare in the rearview mirror, his eyes narrowed. “Do we have a problem?”
She pursed her lips, willing herself to keep it together. Her temper bubbled and spat, brimming with righteous indignation and slowly mounting panic. She couldn’t lose her escape route into the art department, not like this. Not to Audrey. “I’m just surprised to learn about this after the fact,” she said. “As her manager—”
“I’m Aubrey’s boss,” Roger interrupted. “It’s my decision to make, not yours.”
“I just thought—”
“You thought what?” His tone brooked no disagreement. “That you’d get the job?”
Yes, she did, because he had given her every reason to think he’d give her the job as long as she did everything asked of her, as long as she sacrificed endlessly, as long as she behaved. Not that he ever put it in writing, no, of course not. Better to keep her unstable and dependent, unable to refuse.
Charlotte closed her eyes. She was the calm, smooth water of the quarry. Beautiful and unmoved, disguising her vicious chill underneath. She would not tear Roger’s sweaty head from his body. She would not scream.
“Is being my assistant not good enough for you anymore?” Roger pressed on through her silence.
“That’s not what I meant,” Charlotte said through gritted teeth. She searched for a professional way to push back against his slippery manipulation. “I just want to make sure I have…room to grow at Front End.”
Roger scoffed. “Room to grow? There won’t be another position opening up at the company for quite some time.”
Charlotte couldn’t help herself. “That’s why I’m surprised you gave that position to Aubrey.”
“Aubrey made herself essential,” Roger snapped. “You have not done the same.”
All illusion of self-control evaporated as Charlotte reached the end of her patience. She’d already used most of it up with the last-minute speechwriting and the fight with Jackie it had caused. She could only withstand so much. This wasn’t just a bad job, it was a toxic joke.
Jackie was right. Jackie was always right. No one deserved to be treated like this. This wasn’t the person Charlotte wanted to be.
She snuck a glance at Reece. He was watching her in his peripheral vision, his mouth closed so tight it almost disappeared into his face. When he saw her looking, he raised his head a fraction of an inch.
Chin up.
