Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
Andrew
Didn’t people understand that I wanted peace? I cancelled the call from Tristan flashing on my mobile and minimized my email screen, turning back to the Financial Times and the article about Goode Publishing.
For the most part, Bob Goode was good at what he did. He was managing to buck the trends with rising profits and increased circulations with most of the magazines he owned, but Verity was the exception.
My phone started to buzz again. Fucking Tristan. I stood—what I always did when I wanted a call or a meeting to be as short as possible. Just as I was about to accept Tristan’s call, there was a knock at the door.
I ignored it. My first meeting didn’t arrive until one and my team knew better than to bother me before midday.
I pressed accept. “Andrew Blake.”
“Honestly, Andrew. I’m calling you. I know it’s you. You know it’s me. Have you ever thought of starting a phone call with a simple hello?”
I had no intention of replying to Tristan’s bullshit, but even if I’d wanted to, I wouldn’t have gotten a chance. Despite me ignoring the knock on the door, another one followed, and then the girl from this morning appeared with papers in her hand.
I cancelled the call with Tristan and watched as the woman grinned at me, marched over to my desk, and put two sets of papers down.
“The older gentleman with the hat asked me to bring you these,” she said, pointing to the papers on the left. “And this is your mail.” She pointed to the papers on the right. “Which I’ve opened and put in order of priority.”
Why was she still here? And why was she acting like she worked for me?
“Get out,” I said, my tone low and serious.
“No,” she replied. It was like she’d hit me with a hammer.
“Excuse me?” Bloody Americans.
“No, I won’t get out.” She folded her arms and looked me square in the eye. “I’m going to stay and be your new assistant. I don’t expect a better package than the last assistant you had, and I’ll work just as hard and be just as dedicated.”
“Dedicated?” I asked, skipping past the fact that not only had the woman in front of me refused to leave, she was now demanding I pay her. “My last assistant left. If you can’t be more dedicated than her, you should definitely leave.”
I sat and brought back up my email account, clicking open the folder on Verity and scrolling through to bring up last year’s financial results.
“She quit because you’re difficult to work with. Not because she’s not dedicated.”
I didn’t say a word. There weren’t many people in my life who spoke to me like that. Certainly no one who worked for me. They didn’t need to. I worked with a talented, dedicated team who got paid handsomely.
“I’ve got a thicker skin than her,” she continued, lifting her chin.
That sounded like a challenge. I didn’t deliberately try to run off my assistants, but they couldn’t handle the pressure.
Since Joanna retired, they’d all been sacked or left before they hit the six-month mark.
Some hadn’t even lasted six hours. They obviously wanted handholding and platitudes, while I just wanted to get on with my job.
I wasn’t interested in office banter and chat about whatever watercooler show was on Netflix.
But according to Joanna—who I’d called on average once a week to try to persuade her out of retirement—that’s what I needed to be doing.
She called it “soft skills.”
I called it bollocks.
“I’m way over-qualified for this job. I have an MBA from Columbia. I’m clever, organized, and not afraid of hard work. You’re lucky to have me.” She was speaking as if she already worked here.
“Then why do you want the job?” I asked, intrigued despite myself.
Getting accosted outside my offices before six in the morning wasn’t new.
I’d made a lot of cuts in my career, fired a lot of people.
And although I’d done it so a business could survive and so not all employees lost their job, some people didn’t see it that way.
Some people blamed me rather than the incompetent management who’d brought me to their door.
All I did was clean up someone else’s mess.
But I hadn’t ever been accosted in the street because someone wanted to work for me.
“I’ll be excellent at it. Just you see. If you disagree, you can fire me.” She hadn’t answered my question about why she wanted the job.
“How do you even know there’s a vacancy?” I’d not yet called the recruitment agency. I hadn’t even so much as thought about finding a new assistant.
“I’m Natalie’s roommate.”
They shared a room?
“I’m sleeping on her couch. She thinks you’re an asshole. I think I can handle you.”
It took a little effort not to laugh. At least the woman in front of me spoke her mind. It was an essential component of a good working relationship in my experience. Maybe she’d make a decent assistant after all.
If she had an MBA from Columbia, why on earth did she want to be my assistant? She must be bullshitting. “What was your favorite class at Columbia?”
“Favorite or most useful?”
“I said favorite. I don’t say things I don’t mean.”
“Globalization and Markets. Joseph Stiglitz and Bruce Greenwald’s class.”
Okay, so she was either very prepared with her lie or she’d legitimately studied at Columbia. I’d read some stuff by Stiglitz and knew he taught there.
“What’s the worst that can happen?” she asked. “Give me a shot. You won’t be sorry.”
I supposed she was right. It wasn’t as if I had anyone on hand to replace Natalie, and finding someone else would take a few weeks at least. I didn’t have a lot to lose.
“Don’t talk so much. Don’t disturb me before noon, and make sure no one comes into my office unless my door is open. Which it never is.”
A grin unfurled on her face. “I’m Sofia,” she said.
I ignored her and sat back behind my desk.
“Is there anything you need?”
What I needed was for Bob Goode not to be such a dick. But that wasn’t going to happen any time soon. “Leave me alone.”
At least Sofia had the sense not to argue.
She turned on her heel and left. I pulled out the latest copy of Verity, Inc.
from the top drawer of my desk and felt the temperature of the blood in my veins rise as I read the headline asking, yet again, Is Tom Cruise an Alien?
My grandmother would be turning in her grave at the sight of her once-respected publication talking about potential celebrity aliens.
There was a time when the magazine she’d led had reported on women finally being allowed to have mortgages without a male guarantor at the beginning of the seventies, the coal strikes and gerrymandering in the eighties.
Verity, Inc. used to be a magazine that cared about the rights of ordinary people, and keeping the people in power in check.
Now it cared whether or not Tom Cruise was from outer space, and whether Taylor Swift was secretly also Nicki Minaj.
And now the magazine was losing subscribers and readers, which meant that it was losing money. The entire justification Bob Goode had given me when he started the spiral of ridiculous tattletale gossip stories was that he couldn’t make money covering “issues,” as he described it.
Well, he wasn’t making money now either. Why couldn’t he just take my advice? Let me and my team behind the wheel. I could get Verity back on track, and when she was healthy, I could put a new, better team in place.
Bob called me a meddler but I was just trying to help. He was just a stubborn old goat who didn’t like it that the two women before him—my mother and grandmother—had done a better job running the magazine than he had.
I stuffed the magazine back in the drawer and looked at what Sofia had put on my desk.
Verity’s latest financials, which I’d already seen but no doubt Douglas wanted to make sure I didn’t miss.
They were diabolical. Any other company, I’d be content to sit back and watch it burn, but I couldn’t do that with Verity.
It would destroy my mother to lose my grandmother and the publication she founded within a few months of each other.
I had to save Verity, Inc. I just didn’t know how yet.