Chapter One #2
“Bless you,” I say, heartfelt. She actually laughs, the real kind that used to sneak out of her when we were too exhausted to be serious grad students anymore.
A knock interrupts us. A man in a hard hat opens the door, squinting at a clipboard. “Five minutes on the breaker,” he says. “You’ll lose power. Sorry.”
“Fine,” she says. “We’ll survive.” He nods and disappears. Her eyes go back to me. “Okay. Comps,” she says, back to business. “I like comping for strategy, not for sport. Opening month, we’re generous. But no random hemorrhaging.”
“Clear criteria,” I say. “Earned through play or through partnerships with an expected return.”
“Exactly. VIP policy will run through me.” Her tone is calm, casual, but there’s a firmness underneath. “Hosts will have discretion within a spend band. Anything above the band is my call.”
“Got it.” I make a box around the note. The lights flicker again, warning us.
“Security,” she continues. “You’ll coordinate with our team on event access. I want your guest lists clean and your vendors badged. No one wanders. No chaos.”
I nod. “Do you have a head of security already?”
“I do,” she says, and that’s all. She doesn’t go into detail, so I don’t push. The list of things I will ask her after the interview grows by one.
She flips to a page with brand mood boards with fonts and color swatches, photos of textured plaster and linen card stock.
“I want our marketing materials to feel tactile even when they’re digital.
Classic, readable type. Generous white space.
A sense that we are competent and generous and selective. ”
“Selectively generous,” I say, underlining. “Geography. We target NYC, Philly, Jersey, DC?”
“Yes. We’ll start with drivable markets and radiate. There’s a segment out of Boston that’s worth testing, too. And I want a small signal in Miami and LA. We have people who go back and forth.”
“You have lists?” I ask.
“Some,” she says. “We’ll build more.”
The power drops. The monitors go black; the air unit hushes. The sudden quiet is startling.
Caterina leans back in her chair and looks at me over the dead monitors. She’s still for a moment. Something I don’t see often. “How was the move?” she asks. “You didn’t have to jump this fast.”
“I wanted to,” I say, and it comes out too quickly. I clear my throat. “California was… it was home. Always has been until I went to Wharton, but it felt like a postscript. I wanted the next chapter.”
“Is this a next chapter or an ellipsis?” she asks.
“It’s a chapter,” I say. I didn’t realize I meant it until I said it. My eyes flicker to the photo on the desk. Us in our caps and gowns, ready to take on the world. I never considered that we would take it on together, but I love that we are. “And I wanted to work with someone I trust.”
She nods once, and that’s as much emotion as she usually shows. “I trust you, too,” she says. “I trust you to be good at this, and to tell me when something’s off.”
“I will.”
“You always did,” she says. She looks like she might say more, then doesn’t. The power surges back; the monitors blink awake in sequence. She makes a face at the one that takes longer, taps the tower with her knuckle. “There you are.”
“Let’s talk about your day-to-day,” she says.
“First thirty days: build the opening calendar and a straw-man budget; identify and secure anchor partners; draft and circulate the media list and the outreach ladder; write the first-pass brand copy for the launch series; and create the pitch deck we’ll use for sponsors and co-hosts.
At the same time, build the VIP event criteria and a clean comp policy document that host operations can apply without calling us every five minutes.
Oh, and hire two coordinators to start. A junior event coordinator and a social content specialist. You’ll be their manager. ”
“I’ll need job descriptions and a salary band.”
“I have the bands. You write the descriptions. We’ll post by end of week.”
I jot that. “That’s not a huge team for marketing a hotel-casino of this size.”
“We start here and decide as we go.”
“In-person meetings with local stakeholders?” I ask. “Hospital foundation, tourism board, county commissioners?”
“Yes. I’ll go to the foundation with you; you go to tourism and bring back their calendar. For county, I’ll make the introduction; you handle the meeting.” She pauses. “I’ll tell you who not to meet without me. If I say no, it’s no.”
“Understood.” I don’t question further. It’s not my business why some meetings are a no. It’s my business to ace the ones that are a yes.
She pulls a key card from a desk drawer and slides it across the glass. “Office access. The security team will badge you properly this afternoon. You’ll set your own hours for now. Use them. Don’t kill yourself.”
“Copy,” I say, trying not to look too elated. The opportunity I’m being presented here never comes along for someone my age with my experience. It’s the golden goose, and I better not fumble it. “What about housing? I’m at a hotel tonight, but I’ll be at a sublet while I look.”
She nods. “HR has a list. I bookmarked it in your onboarding doc.”
“Do I get to see the onboarding doc?” I ask, and she smirks.
“I was going to make you beg. But yes.” She turns the monitor back toward me.
The doc is there, a nested outline of everything from IT to espresso machine instructions.
The level of detail is absurd and beautiful.
“I built this last night,” she says. “Don’t read it all now.
You’ll dream in bullet points and wake up angry. ”
“I already dream in bullets,” I say. She laughs again, a little less guarded now.
There’s another knock, and a woman with a cart looks in. “Coffee?”
“Please,” Caterina and I say at the same time, then exchange a look. The woman wheels the cart in: two silver urns, a row of mugs, a plate of biscotti lined like soldiers. “You’re the first to get coffee on this floor,” she tells me proudly. “We’re testing the lines.”
“An honor,” I say.
“An experiment,” Caterina says, pouring. The coffee smells good, rich without the burnt edge. She takes a sip and gives the woman a thumbs-up. The woman beams and leaves with her cart.
Caterina sets a mug in front of me. “Tell me what I’m not asking that I should be.”
“Approval chain,” I say. “What I can sign, what you sign, and what goes above you.”
She hesitates the smallest fraction, a pause that another person would miss if they didn’t know her.
“You sign contracts up to twenty-five,” she says. “Above that, you bring it to me.”
Twenty-five is a little lower than I expected. I wonder why, but try to shrug it off as a precaution for a new business.
I roll the pen once between my fingers and decide to let it fall. “Okay.”
“Anything else?” she asks.
We spend the next half hour in the trench of details. I ask questions, she answers, and vice versa.
At some point, my stomach growls. Loudly. I press a hand to it, mortified.
“Have you eaten?” she asks.
“I had pretzels on the plane,” I say.
“That’s not food.” She stands, crosses to a drawer, and pulls out a wrapped package. “Bianca sends these because she thinks I forget to eat too often.” She unwraps a loaf of something golden and dense. “Lemon ricotta. No one leaves this office hungry.”
“You were right. I do love her,” I say, meaning it more than I expect. She slices pieces with a plastic knife and hands me one on a napkin. It’s perfect. Bright and soft and not too sweet. I nearly moan at how delicious it is. “If she cooks half as well as she bakes, I’m already obsessed with her.”
Cat leans in. “Better,” she whispers.
“Impossible,” I say. She just nods and sticks another bite in her mouth.
When the crumbs on my napkin are the only proof there was ever a lemon ricotta loaf, she taps her watch. “Walk?”
“Yes,” I say, and stand, shoulders loosening. I go for my carry-on out of reflex; she waves a hand.
“Leave it. You’re not getting mugged between here and the elevators.” There are two men stationed at either end of the hall who look like security even out of uniform. A little odd for a hotel that’s not open yet.
We step into the hallway. The plastic over the carpet crackles under our soles. She points out offices as we pass: legal, HR, accounting, a conference room currently housing a stack of chairs and a single plant that someone put there to make it homey, I assume.
“You’ll have your own office in the marketing department down the hall,” she says.
“It’s fine if you hot-desk on the floor in the early days.
But you’ll have paint choices and a stipend for furniture.
Those decisions have to be made soon. I can’t have management worrying about paint samples leading up to launch. ”
We reach a set of glass doors. The sign says CASINO — UNDER CONSTRUCTION. A man in a fluorescent vest opens it for us. “Watch your feet,” he says. “We’re still laying.”
Inside, the space is huge and raw. Even unfinished, it has presence: the ceiling high, the lines clean, the sightlines purposeful.
The floor is a grid of taped squares with chalk notes—PIT HERE, LIGHTS, HOST. In one corner, a team is unspooling wire.
In another, someone is measuring out steps with a counting motion that reminds me of choreography.
She moves easily among them, nodding, stopping to take a question. A foreman asks about a service corridor; she gives him the answer and a deadline. A designer hovers near color samples; Caterina takes two and says, “Warmer,” and he nods.
I watch her work and feel it click into place in my head. Coming here, I was worried this was just a favor to a friend. But it’s not that. Cat isn’t messing around here. This is a job that fits, a person I respect, and a place that already feels right.
We stop at the edge of what will be a bar.
An L-shaped expanse of plywood holds a water bottle pyramid and a paper blueprint weighted by a screwdriver.
The blueprint is a neat overlay of lines and notes.
Her index finger lands on a rectangle. “This is the main bar. You’ll build a service plan with F you can see the ocean beyond in strips.
This is where all the big things happen. This room will be more than half my job.
“This is where we put the hospital gala,” she says. “This is where we make them feel cared for. They’ll bring the right people. They always do.”
I walk the perimeter slowly, imagining tables, sightlines, photograph angles, speeches before dinner. “We need acoustic panels,” I say, listening to the way my voice dies. “And a good mic.”
“Agreed.” She looks down at her watch again. “Time.”
Back in her office, she hands me a stack of papers and a pen. “Offer letter,” she says. “Everything we just said, in HR language. Salary, benefits, start date: today.”
“Today,” I repeat, and grin without trying to hide it.
“Today,” she says, and there’s the friend again, the girl from the photo for a second. “Sign it. Make me proud. Then go down to HR and get your badge before they go to lunch. Come back after, and we’ll start calling people.”
I read the offer while she answers an email. The numbers are what we discussed on the phone last week. The role is what we just covered. The tone is dry and official, and good. I sign.
She takes the paper, checks the signature with a tiny, happy fussiness, and slips it into a folder. When she looks up, her dark eyes are bright. “Welcome to the team,” she says.
“I’m glad to be here,” I say. “I’m going to make this place sing.”
“I know you are,” she says. She stands, and so do I. The hug is a little less professional, filled with giddiness, but we step back and compose ourselves.
At the door, I pick up my carry-on, which feels lighter even though nothing inside it has changed. “I’ll be back after HR,” I say.
“I’ll be here,” she says, already sliding back into her chair, already reaching for a pen. “Liv?”
“Yeah?”
“Welcome home,” she says, not looking at me. The word sends a little jolt through me, then settles warmly in my chest.
I take that warmth with me to the hallway, where the glue smell is strong. The drill starts up again. The door swings shut behind me, and I’m smiling as I walk toward the elevators, already building a calendar in my head.