Shifting Gears

Chapter 1

The intercom on Eleanor’s desk crackles with her assistant’s voice for the fourteenth time today—Eleanor’s been counting, making a frustrated mental mark every time it interrupts her train of thought.

“MissCromwell?“ Your three o’clock is here.”

“Send them in,” Eleanor says absently. She doesn’t lift her eyes from the report she’s trying to focus on. She’s been trying to reread it since lunchtime in preparation for tomorrow’s board meeting, and with the frequency of today’s interruptions, her progress has been irritatingly slow.

Words like underdeveloped land and potential for growth catch her attention. Even as Kayla and Ashwin stride into her office, she keeps reading. They can wait a minute or two.

Manufacturing operations in Bracken County, Ontario, were closed by CromTech CEO Robert Cromwell in 1996 in favour of outsourcing. Land was not sold due to depreciating value.

Eleanor chews at her lip. Her father probably hadn’t thought twice about shutting down 45 percent of the jobs in a region in one fell swoop, causing widespread unemployment on a whim. It had saved him money. But now it’s presented Eleanor with the perfect opportunity. Underdeveloped land still owned by CromTech with potential for growth is just what she needs.

No surveying has been undertaken, but aerial maps show—

Kayla’s manicured hand waves in front of the page. “Earth to Eleanor?”

“Just a minute,” Eleanor mutters, batting it away.

She hears Ashwin’s low chuckle. “Even when we book a meeting as her executives, she doesn’t have time for us anymore.”

Eleanor sighs. It takes a concerted effort not to roll her eyes, but she tosses the report onto her desk for the moment, giving her full attention to her friends turned business partners. They’re standing on either side of her desk. Ash is tapping his foot anxiously. Kayla’s arms are folded like a disapproving mother.

It’s only when there’s no hope of escape that Eleanor realizes she’s being ambushed.

“Eleanor. Honey,” Kayla says in the kind of soft and careful voice a person might use when approaching a feral cat, “you’re working yourself to death.”

Ashwin has his worried face on, the one where his thick, dark brows almost knit together. Eleanor remembers it well, having seen it at least weekly in university when he’d tried valiantly to be the fake boyfriend she needed to convince her father she wasn’t a total disappointment.

It had benefited both of them, in her defense—he needed the cover as much as she did at the time, though his closet door had always been pretty transparent. His family had been ready to buy Eleanor a ticket to Mumbai for an engagement ceremony by the time she and Ash agreed the arrangement had run its course.

Eleanor’s affection for Ash’s expression—one as familiar to her as her own reflection—is tempered by her annoyance at the subject matter he and Kayla are bringing up.

“I’m fine. This really isn’t the best time to discuss it,” she says, pulling up the agenda for tomorrow’s meeting on her laptop while they continue staring. She might be giving the presentation of her career in the morning, and her friends chose today of all days for an intervention. Tomorrow needs to be perfect. She needs to get it right.

“I know for a fact that you’ve slept at the office three times this week,” Kayla fires back.

Eleanor slams her laptop closed. “How did you—”

“Even your assistant is worried about you.”

The distant whirr of the printer on said assistant’s desk is extra audible in the awkward silence the room has descended into.

“I’m fine,” Eleanor repeats, knowing even as she says it that her friends won’t believe her.

“Kayla is right.” Ash leans against Eleanor’s desk and crosses his ankles together. His coiffed hair is a little unruly, as if he’s run his hands through it. “Ever since you took over as CEO, you’ve been running yourself into the ground. Your blood pressure is high, you’re losing weight. You never stop working. You have no social life.”

“I don’t need a social life,” Eleanor interrupts. “I never have. You know that better than anyone.”

Ash and Kayla roll their eyes in tandem. Eleanor studiously ignores them.

It’s Kayla who finishes Ash’s point—he’s always had less stamina for arguments. Kayla is unmatched in her stubbornness; Eleanor’s known this since they were teenagers. She’d been the queen of one-woman protests back then, outlasting their private school administration over everything from inadequate course offerings to the gendered dress code. “You barely sleep, we never see you eat. You’re going to make yourself sick. Just like your father.”

Eleanor nudges her untouched salad container and three empty coffee cups to a less visible spot on the desk. She’s forgotten to eat lunch yet again, focused as she’s been today on preparing. Her friends might be right, but that doesn’t change the reality of the situation: Her father is gone. He passed the company to Eleanor, for better or for worse. When the options presented to her five years ago had been to either liquidate his shares or abandon her beloved position in Research and Development to take on his CEO role, Eleanor’s heart and mind had pulled her in opposite directions.

Sure, Eleanor misses using her brain for more than just PR and profit margins, but she’s never been one to disregard the logical solution for the emotional. She took up this mantle, heavy as it is. She even managed to poach Kayla and Ash from their respective careers in corporate real estate and investment banking to shore up her executive team.

Though at times such as this, Eleanor occasionally regrets the choice to hire her friends.

“I’ve put everything into this company. I didn’t ask for this, but it’s my life now,” she says. “What do you expect me to do?”

Kayla’s answer is so quick and definitive that Eleanor is sure she and Ash have rehearsed this exact conversation.

“Take a break.”

For a few seconds, the sentence doesn’t fully process. When it does, it strikes Eleanor as completely ludicrous. “Very funny.”

“Every CEO I know besides you takes a summer vacation. Your father used to take several.”

Kayla’s point is one Eleanor must concede. While Robert Cromwell was the hardest worker Eleanor has ever known, five times out of ten, if Eleanor needed to contact him, he was working out of a villa on some Caribbean island with his wife du jour. He rarely seemed to be actually enjoying himself, though, instead spending the whole trip glued to his phone or computer deep into the night.

But the point stands.

“Executives are like schoolchildren,” Ash pipes in with a wry smile. “If schoolchildren got overwater bungalows in the Maldives.”

“You want me to go to the Maldives?”

“We want you to go literally anywhere that isn’t here,” Kayla says. “Leave us in charge and disappear somewhere for a few weeks. We can spin whatever story you need us to—just go take care of yourself for a change. Please.”

It’s the most earnest Eleanor has seen her best friends in a long time. Even Ash, the perennial jokester, is looking at Eleanor with an uncharacteristically serious expression. It’s almost enough to make Eleanor consider their proposal.

Almost.

“You’re both being ridiculous.” She pushes her chair out and brushes past Kayla, snatching her laptop and the abandoned report as she goes. She has a presentation to finish; with Kayla and Ash occupying her office, she’ll have to work in the conference room.

“Eleanor, you’ve only been running this company for five years and you’re going grey!” Kayla follows Eleanor to the door with Ash trailing behind. “You’re barely thirty! You can’t keep going like this. You’re going to burn yourself out.”

Eleanor runs a self-conscious hand through her long hair. She’s been noticing the occasional silver thread amongst the dark strands lately, but going to a salon is dead last on her list of things to accomplish. She pushes through the door, grabbing blindly at the paper waiting in the printer. “My hair colour really isn’t your problem, Kayla. I have work to do.”

“Think about it, will you?” Ash shouts after her.

Before the door swings closed behind Eleanor, she hears Kayla’s weary sigh and a snippet of their conversation.

“What are the odds on a nervous breakdown before the end of the year?”

“I’d say one in three,” Ash mutters.

* * *

Eleanor doesn’t sleep at the office that night. She’s not sure going home will give her any brownie points with Kayla and Ash, considering she ends up holed up in her home office over half-eaten takeout instead, but she makes an effort.

This presentation is more important than most. Though she’s been shot down and undermined by her own board of directors on the subject for as long as she’s brought it up, Eleanor has been wanting to branch CromTech into sustainable eco-technology for years. The problem, as always, is funding. Research and development are expensive in new and untested industries, as the board constantly reminds her.

Before she can push for this passion project, she needs a profitable venture to fund it—a distraction with a big enough profit margin that even her father might have approved.

Eleanor would much rather be on the design team she’s trying to fund than spearheading the funding effort itself, but if she can make this new project profitable enough, maybe she can at least get the satisfaction of finally watching her work blossom, though from the sidelines. She can make her mark in a CEO position she’s never felt she’s deserved, point the company in a new direction, and earn even a fraction of the respect her father commanded.

This presentation needs to be watertight.

Eleanor is putting the finishing touches on her PowerPoint when her phone starts to buzz. The name flashing across her screen is familiar, if perplexing.

“It’s been a long time since you called me in the middle of the night,” Eleanor says in lieu of greeting.

She’s met with a light laugh.

“Hello to you, too,” Lydia drawls. “I’ve always appreciated the way you skip the pleasantries and get right to it.”

“If you’re calling for the usual reason, I’ll cut you off at the pass.” Eleanor tucks the phone into her shoulder and continues to fuss with the wording of her bullet points. “I still don’t have time.”

“Not even for a quick backslide with an old flame? I heard you could use some stress relief.”

Eleanor’s fingers freeze over her laptop keys.

“Heard from who?”

“Ash might have sent me a message.”

At this hour, Lydia is probably leaving a party downtown. Fitting Eleanor in between social commitments, as usual—Eleanor’s condo is close to her usual stomping grounds. Heels are clicking on expensive floors in the background of the call, and Lydia covers the receiver to call out to someone in Vietnamese while Eleanor considers how best to punish Ash.

She presses her fingers to her temples. The slowly forming headache she’s been fighting for a few hours is worsening, and she grasps for the nearest bottle of ibuprofen. “Of course he did. What did he offer you to show me a good time?”

“Nothing. It was more a gentle encouragement. He’s worried about you.”

“You’re not going to start caring about my feelings now, are you? After all this time?”

“No. I appreciate our relationship for what it is,” Lydia says with a low chuckle. “But I can’t stop them from worrying.”

Eleanor takes a swig of cold coffee to accompany the painkiller, wincing at the bitter aftertaste. “Ash needs to learn that not everyone fixes their problems with sex.”

“It’s a winning strategy in my book,” Lydia says. Eleanor has always valued her matter-of-factness, along with her discretion. “It’s not serious, Eleanor. Just a night of fun. That’s what we do.”

Eleanor sighs. Her casual, businesslike arrangement with Lydia is the closest thing to a steady relationship she’s had since university, and yet even such a simple and strings-free physical agreement had been too much of a demand on Eleanor’s time. They’d decided amicably to take a break months ago, though Lydia had assured her that the bedroom door was always open.

As satisfying as a bit of uncomplicated sex might be right now, the last thing that Eleanor needs on the night before her presentation is a distraction.

She lays her head down on the desk, closing her eyes and waiting for the faint imprint of her computer screen to fade from her retinas. “It’s tempting, truly, but I have a lot going on. I really don’t have the energy.”

“Can’t say I didn’t try.”

“This is getting ridiculous,” Eleanor mumbles. “I’m fully capable of managing my own stress.”

“You should talk to your friends if you want to scold someone,” Lydia says, reliably disinterested now that sex is off the table. “Just let me know if you want to hook up, okay? You know my number.”

The line cuts out, and in the ensuing silence, Eleanor decides that it’s high time she went to bed.

* * *

The board meeting is just shy of catastrophic.

It’s been this way since the beginning, in fairness. Eleanor’s father had shocked everyone when he left his majority shares in CromTech not to any of his trusted business partners or even his newest wife—all of whom sit on this very board—but to his daughter. He’d encouraged Eleanor to pursue an advanced degree in business when his health started to decline, but he’d given no other indication of his intent.

Five years later, Eleanor has fought tooth and nail just to get her father’s group of disapproving middle-aged men to listen to her. That fight has always been an uphill battle against tradition and profit, and it’s only been getting harder.

“Since when are we an electric car manufacturer?” Renée Cromwell snaps the moment Eleanor’s pitch ends. While she’s technically Eleanor’s stepmother—the last in a line of six such women over the course of Eleanor’s life, each more distasteful than the last, and still clinging to her married surname—the fact that Renée is only a few years Eleanor’s senior has always made their relationship difficult.

She’s been Eleanor’s biggest adversary at every board meeting since the beginning. Renée had tried to buy her late husband’s shares early on, and Eleanor’s decision to keep them and take on the CEO position herself had cracked a rift between them that has only grown over the years. In contrast to some of her father’s previous wives, Renée is ambitious and sharp, armed with a business degree, and backed by a worryingly large section of the board; Eleanor isn’t sure how Renée managed it, but she suspects a combination of blackmail and pure force of personality.

“Not vehicles,” Eleanor explains with as much patience as she can muster given her lack of sleep last night. “I’m proposing we branch out into more sustainable transportation and fuel solutions. Carbon reduction. Biostimulants.”

Renée scoffs. “The environmental sector in Canada is a money pit.”

“But it has potential,” Ash says. “There are tax benefits and subsidies. We’ve entered into new markets before. Diversifying is an important—”

“There’s diversifying, and then there’s throwing away time and cash on electric cars.”

Eleanor breathes out slowly through her nose. “Like I said, cars are only one corner of the market. I’ve been working on new types of recycled biofuels, as well as on integrating other sustainable energy and transport solutions.”

“ You’ve been working on it?” Renée sneers. “Another one of your vanity projects?”

“A joint effort with the R&D department,” Eleanor says sharply.

Kayla’s voice cuts through. “Maybe you can’t come up with an original idea to save your life, but Eleanor has every right to present her own projects. She’s a fully qualified engineer.”

Kayla and Ash are usually Eleanor’s only backup in these meetings. Kayla has always been the ambitious one in their little trio, pursuing her degrees voraciously and fitting into the business mould more easily than Eleanor ever did. Ash always sat in the middle, mostly relying on charisma and good connections, and Eleanor has always been the brains, the quiet one. She’d never wanted to get tangled up in the kind of corporate hell that’s become her day-to-day. Even though Eleanor practically sprinted away from Ash and Kayla yesterday, she’s grateful for their presence now.

A few suits in the room shift in discomfort, but only Renée speaks up.

“And how are you suggesting we fund this?” Renée asks, not even bothering to open up the folder on the table in front of her where she might have found that information. “Saving the environment is very noble and all, but how are we supposed to absorb those costs?”

“If you’ll turn your attention to the presentation I’ve provided,” Eleanor says, gripping the remote with a tight fist, “I’ve outlined a possible solution.”

Eleanor’s PowerPoint flickers to life.

“CromTech used to operate nickel mines and manufacturing plants in Bracken County, Ontario,” Eleanor continues slightly more loudly as Renée opens her mouth again. “The region experienced an economic depression after we started outsourcing instead. We still own a large parcel of property there. It’s worth next to nothing right now, but with some work, we could buy up the cheap land around it, develop it all to increase value, and sell at a major profit. Those gains would easily fund the R&D projects I’m proposing.”

“Rural real estate development is your solution?” Renée interrupts yet again. “We’re a tech company. In Toronto .” But the rest of the room seems to have perked up at the words major profit .

“Kayla was one of the best developers in the city before she came to CromTech. She’s been instrumental in the planning phase,” Eleanor says, confident at least in this part of the proposal.

“And how do you think the locals will respond to us swooping in? Do you think we’ll be welcomed with open arms?”

“There are, of course, potential issues if the locals still hold a grudge, but I think it’s at least worth looking into. Surely the betterment of the county will be their priority, no matter who’s responsible.”

“How do we determine that? Are we sending someone to do street interviews?” Renée says snidely.

This meeting is turning into a one-on-one duel. Eleanor gathers what remains of her patience.

“I’m proposing a motion to conduct a feasibility study,” she says through gritted teeth. “We send someone to the area for a few weeks to do a preliminary survey and a cost/benefit analysis of renovating the property. They’ll draw up a development proposal and create a report to present in quarter four.”

“Seconded,” Ash says quickly, before Renée can attack. “All in favour?”

Just over half the board raises their hands. Renée looks sour, but the numbers speak for themselves.

“Seven for, and six against,” Eleanor says wearily. “Motion passed.”

The meeting wraps up soon after. Everyone files out, Kayla and Ash included, but Renée takes her time gathering her things. Usually when she dawdles, it’s because she wants to scold Eleanor for something—last time it had been a critique of her clothes, the time before, a short and insufferable lesson about presentation etiquette—but this time Renée simply swings her purse over her shoulder, knocking Eleanor’s coffee cup across the table.

Eleanor doesn’t move to clean it up after the click of Renée’s heels has faded. Instead she leans forward on the table, hands planted, and watches the dark liquid creep across the lacquered wood. In it, she can see her own wavering reflection.

Ash and Kayla are right, to Eleanor’s chagrin. She does look tired, even under a layer of makeup. Whether caused by stress or by pure lack of sunlight, her pale skin is pastier than ever, and the contrast with her dark hair throws the bags under her eyes into stark relief.

She looks uncomfortably similar to the way her father did in the last few years he headed this company. Run-down. Exhausted. Miserable .

Eleanor should be thrilled that her proposal was approved, even if only by a slim margin. The first step in her plan is complete. Instead there’s a lump in her throat as she stares down at the physical proof of her stress. It’s an insistent ball of tension and anxiety, rapidly threatening to turn into the breakdown Kayla and Ash predicted, and she’s running out of energy to swallow it down.

“Well, that was painful,” a voice rings out.

Eleanor jumps, whirling around and finding Kayla. She’s standing in the doorway, offering Eleanor a handful of napkins.

“More so than usual,” Eleanor admits. She clears her throat, tossing the napkins onto the coffee and letting it absorb. “But I know my green-tech projects are a hard sell. I need to throw the board a financial bone first.”

“Development takes time. A lot of time. You won’t be seeing profit for years.”

“I know,” Eleanor sighs. “Right now the bigger problem is finding someone willing to go to the middle of nowhere to do this feasibility study.”

Kayla sweeps the soaked napkins off the table and into a garbage bin. Her smile is far more confident than Eleanor feels.

“About that: Ash and I have an idea.”