Chapter 3 #2
“You play by my rules, Miss Spence, and you could have everything you’ve ever dreamed of.” He stood. Smartened his suit jacket. As if everything was perfectly normal. “No photos on the island. I hope you understand.”
“On the island?” The cogs in Fletcher’s brain spun. Dyer vanished into the plane, but Fletcher stayed rooted right there on the tarmac, afraid that if she so much as flinched, he’d change his mind. “On the island. Lydell Island. I’m going to Lydell Island.”
Of course, by that point, she was talking to herself. The airport employees started glancing at her. Pull it together, Fletch.
She pinched her eyes shut and pulled in a long stream of air that smelled distinctly like jet fuel. And possibilities. Shania Twain’s voice punctuated her thoughts with a swift “Let’s go girls,” and Fletcher rushed toward the boarding stairs before Dyer reneged on her invitation.
All eyes settled on her in the cabin. Her coworkers’ hushed gossip fell silent. Rows of cream leather seats lined each side, each filled with a colleague. Suddenly, Fletcher was far too aware of the way her stomach clawed at the base of her esophagus like it needed somewhere to go.
Then an attendant guided a crystal flute brimming with something fizzy into her palm.
Fletcher sipped and sipped, praying for liquid courage.
As she paced down the aisle, every face was one she knew.
The Cartwright Media org chart had been seared into her memory.
Fletcher forced herself to smile, even if it meant biting her tongue.
The C-suite clustered together toward the front with Dyer at the helm.
Next to him, the CTO, Raul Diaz, typed furiously on a laptop after acknowledging Fletcher’s existence with a cursory glance.
Deepti Kaur, the CFO, leaned over her briefcase to whisper something to Jackie Caldera, who peered up toward Fletcher and offered her a red-lipsticked grin.
Then there was Melv Lexington, the company’s general counsel, dressed like he was caught halfway between running the New York marathon and breaking a case wide open—a three-piece suit paired with tortoiseshell glasses strapped to his head with a neon-green Croakie, skin tanned down to the dermis from hours jogging Hudson River Park.
Behind him, the Sales team took up the middle, flocking around their ringleader, Theo Groff.
For as long as Fletcher had been at Cartwright Media, Theo had sulked around the office, eyes glimmering with greed.
Several members of his team had been invited—and they all watched Fletcher, eagles hunting a field mouse.
“Look who showed up!” Rick Evanston had a gap-toothed grin and a knack for dropping things in front of women so that they’d pick it up for him. He was, unequivocally, an asshole, and Fletcher routinely daydreamed about volunteering him for the first manned mission to Mars.
Next to him, Opal Meena daubed lip gloss onto her full bottom lip. Over the last four years, she had easily become one of Cartwright Media’s top-producing salespersons ever. “Oh, Fifi’s here,” she said before going straight back to lip-glossing.
Of all the things Fletcher’d been mistakenly called over the years, Fifi was hardly the worst.
Opal turned and asked the intern, Sheila Day, to hold her compact mirror.
Sheila’s job description literally included selecting call-holding music and doing lunch runs for the Sales team.
How could she possibly be one of the company’s top performers when she spent half her hours picking croutons off Opal’s Caesar salad?
But she was Dyer’s niece, and a little nepotism went a long way.
The Marketing team was much less concerned with Fletcher’s arrival.
Two Paid Ads henchmen Fletcher knew best as Brian and Other Brian were in a heated debate about conversion rates, refereed by the SVP of Marketing and Publicity, Denis Bertram.
Between rounds of bickering, Bertram patted his round, bald head with a silk handkerchief, sweat forming on his dark skin.
“Fletcher Spence.”
Fletcher would deny under penalty of perjury the way her heart thumped around in her chest the minute Waylon spoke her name from the last row. It was purely adrenaline. A biological response to breathing the same air as someone she was clearly allergic to.
There was a tinge of bewilderment in Waylon’s tone. To the untrained ear, he almost sounded impressed by her arrival. He wasn’t. Surprised, certainly. Agitated, maybe. But impressed? No.
And across from him? The only empty seat.
Waylon kicked one ankle over the opposite knee, the picture of casual cool, but a muscle in his jaw strained like he barely refrained from sticking his tongue out at her. “A receptionist and a stowaway. Who knew you could be so multifaceted?”
Fletcher spared him the satisfaction of a response and melted into the buttery leather seat, becoming smaller and smaller as New York did the same outside the oval window.
Somewhere over the Atlantic, while blue surrounded them on all sides, even the caffeine and adrenaline couldn’t keep Fletcher awake.
Night navies yawned across the sky, and she dozed, off and on over Africa, until a particularly blinding ray of light seared her retinas.
With half a mind to draw the shade down and roll over, she propped herself up on her elbow and peeked out the window.
Sleep was suddenly out of the question. They’d arrived.
Tucked between Port Louis and Réunion island, Lydell was a thin strip of land shaped like the tip of a French manicure.
A steep mountain jutted up from the center, two ends curling down in spindles on either side.
At its base, thick swatches of green coated the landscape, fading to dried-brown chaparral and sagebrush the farther the land extended from the peak.
A swirling cerulean sea lapped at the craggy shoreline, clearer and bluer and deeper than any ocean Fletcher had ever known.
The landing strip eased into view, a short stretch of creased pavement at the center of the island in a clawed-out clearing among the forest.
Without warning, the plane’s nose tipped, pitching toward the earth. Landing gear rattled underneath, and the wings leveled. As the wheels touched down, slowing the plane to a grinding halt, some of the tension eased out of Fletcher’s shoulders.
Across the aisle, Waylon raised the last of his in-flight aperitif toward Fletcher and said, “Welcome to the wild.”
The wild, apparently, had white-glove service.
As soon as they deplaned, a flurry of staff in crisp yellow shirts whisked them onto a flatbed safari truck with an arched canvas roof. Fletcher squeezed onto the last seat next to Sheila.
“Oh my god, Fifi, this is going to be—so!—much!—fun!” Sheila’s voice was the human equivalent of a helium balloon.
Spiraled blonde curls had been tied into a knot on her head with a handkerchief, but it did very little to keep them in place.
“Opal told me last year she went zip-lining and snorkeling and—”
“What did I tell you about talking about me like I’m not here?
” Opal asked from Sheila’s other side. Her wide deep brown eyes hid behind a pair of pink bedazzled sunglasses that she somehow managed to make look couture.
(Were they? Opal’s commission was probably six times Fletcher’s salary.) Peering around toward Fletcher, Opal added, “Last year, I arrived as an associate and left as a team lead. Best week of my life.”
Hope thrummed in Fletcher’s chest, and her gaze landed on Jackie across the truck. Her first real photography publication was so close she could almost reach out and grab it.
The truck chugged into the jungle canopy, aiming down a narrow trail through the thicket. Instantly, the sun faded into a soupy green, determined to shine through the leafy mosaic. The air temperature plummeted enough to raise a chill on Fletcher’s arms as they carved through the undergrowth.
Here, everything was salt and earth, iron and the scent of something indistinguishably sweet.
Not a skyscraper or a streetlight or another soul in sight.
A wind, ancient and all-knowing but graciously soft, kicked a few strands loose from Fletcher’s braid, and they tickled the back of her neck—the way it felt when someone was watching you.
“Look! A monkey!” Sheila squealed.
Hanging from the vines, a primate swung through the jungle, all sleek black fur and impeccable upper-body strength. Then the monkey opened its mouth. Deep and guttural, the call shook through Fletcher, something primal coming alert inside of her.
The longer she looked, the more she noticed. Blinking yellow eyes stalked through the greenery. Vibrant birds flitted from one branch to the next—toucans and parrots and macaws. In a wide, murky river, an anaconda slithered.
“For some reason, I didn’t expect so many wild animals,” Fletcher said as diplomatically as she could, given the way her heart jostled around her ribs.
“Egbert Cartwright had them all imported,” Theo chimed in. His collared Ralph Lauren shirt was an aggressively pastel plaid that did little for his ruddy complexion. “The electric fence keeps them away from the buildings, but out here, they can get pretty close.”
“Doesn’t this break endangered-animal protection laws or something?” Fletcher dared to ask.
Too eager, Theo answered, “It’s a sovereign island. The rules are different when you’re a Cartwright. You don’t play by them—you make them.”
“There’s no place like Lydell,” Dyer said with a twinkle in his eye.
Seeing her boss outside the office felt like bumping into your first-grade teacher at the supermarket.
Here, the blue of Dyer’s eyes grew sharper, his posture straighter.
She’d always thought him synonymous with his penthouse office and steamed suit jackets, but the island brought out a different side of Dyer Cartwright entirely. Something wilder. Less predictable.
Fletcher tightened her grip on the railing as her stomach somersaulted. When the tree line broke, the high savanna unraveled before them. Windswept plains, covered in a tall-grass peach fuzz, stretched toward the cliffs.
Out here, the sweltering sun seemed less harsh somehow, as though it had been hung from the sky only to sweep across this scrap of land. Gauzy and bright, the sunlight cast spearing shadows behind everything it touched.
Acacia trees with their umbrella tops dotted the horizon, and the truck followed a grooved path across the untamed landscape. Giraffes plucked eucalyptus leaves straight from the branches. Zebras grazed in mesmerizing packs. Cheetahs raced through the grasses.
None of these species belonged to this Indian Ocean lava rock formation, but there they were.
Chartered in by greed and curiosity, a bone-deep selfishness.
Curated only for the Cartwrights’ pleasure for over a century by Dyer and his father before him and his father before him. A cruel caricature of real wilderness.
Up ahead, her oblivious colleagues discussed quarterly OKRs and SLAs with the passion of fraternity brothers defending their fantasy football leagues. Completely unfazed by the zoo they’d entered.
“Let me check the conversion rate on our last web banner,” Brian was saying. He had a swatch of dark hair, gelled out of his face, and thick-rimmed glasses nudged up his nose. His laptop teetered on his kneecaps.
Next to him, Raul’s heavy brows furrowed. Words without functional meaning to Fletcher spilled from his lips—cloud access point, authentication, encryption protocol.
“What would we do without you?” Other Brian said with a relieved sigh, since evidently his web page had loaded.
“Come on, everyone. We aren’t here to talk shop,” Dyer said. His arm rested easily on the guardrail despite how bumpy their journey was.
Joplin, with her hot-pink pixie cut and watercolor tattoos trailing down her warm brown arms, hung halfway over the railing, watching the horizon pass. “No, we’re here for the salt and tequila. Ain’t that right, Bubbles?”
Bubbles? Fletcher scanned her coworkers’ faces for anyone who could convincingly respond to Bubbles. Her eyes gravitated toward Sheila—arguably the bubbliest person here—when a deep baritone pulverized her every thought.
“More like whiskey and tobacco,” Waylon said. “You still smoke cigars, Raul?”
Waylon was…Bubbles?
A light danced in the CTO’s amber eyes as he glanced toward Dyer. “Only when there’s good news.”
It was subtle, a curled edge, but Dyer smiled.
The promise of opportunity.
A roar cut through the conversation. The driver jerked the truck left, and Fletcher clung to the guardrail as they skirted by a pack of lions. The pride male rose onto his haunches, sabered teeth snarling.
Holy shit.
Exhaust plumed as the truck raced off. A slow, hesitant laugh parted Fletcher’s lips. She clamped a hand over her mouth to capture it, but adrenaline pulsed through her with every heartbeat. If she didn’t laugh, she didn’t know what she’d do.
“The welcoming committee,” Dyer said, a smile splitting wide open across his face.
He laughed with her, and then Melv laughed, and then Jackie and Raul and Deepti, down and down the ranks until they were all hyenas howling.
An engine buzzed overhead as the plane shot back toward the airport in Madagascar where it would wait in the wings. Leaving them alone for the next seven days. No scheduled meetings, no Slack messages, no stapled memos.
Just a safari paradise.