Chapter One #2
She loved devising fundraising strategies.
Collaborating with other museums to plan traveling exhibitions.
Hosting guest lecturers and authors. But mostly, she loved the wonder in children’s eyes when she shared interesting facts about the skeletons on display, like that microraptor likely had shimmery, iridescent feathers, or that spinosaurus had dense bones, kind of like penguins, that allowed it to submerge and hunt in the water.
She could so vividly remember being in the children’s shoes, knowing that she wanted to spend her life learning about dinosaurs.
And then one man had taken away that dream.
The arrival of Dr. Harold Davies from the UK was regarded as a real coup for the museum.
Internationally recognized, with multiple publications to his name, Dr. Davies was highly charismatic and was the go-to expert consulted by television programs around the world.
Handsome, charming, self-deprecating in just the right way.
When Andrea met Harold at a welcoming dinner that the museum threw for major donors, museum executives and local dignitaries, she’d been seated across from him, and was immediately pulled in.
At first, she’d resisted her feelings. After all, he was her new boss, and she was far from established in her role.
But late one evening after the rest of the staff had departed, Harold had paused in the doorway of her office and asked if she wanted to accompany him to dinner.
“I still haven’t gotten the lay of the land of the grocery stores here,” he admitted, in his posh British accent that added to his charm.
“So I’ve been dining out a lot. It would be nice to eat with someone, rather than alone. ”
In the moment, Andrea had felt for him. She knew he didn’t have a wife or partner, and surely it was challenging to move to a new country and start a highly demanding job, and also integrate into the community at the same time.
He’d taken her to Braggio’s, a fine Italian restaurant in downtown Denver, where they were seated at the best table, and where the gorgeous waitress seemed to know him by name.
But he only had eyes for Andrea, and over the course of the meal, he’d been attentive, funny and kind, and suddenly Andrea wasn’t thinking about him as her boss.
She saw him only as a potential lover, someone she connected with easily and she could easily see herself with.
They started dating, although they both agreed it would be in their best interest to keep the relationship a secret. For a few blissful weeks, Andrea got lost in the sweeping romance.
It wasn’t long before the perfect, charming, charismatic Harold started to show his true colors.
He became demanding, possessive and wanted to know where she was at all times, even going as far as to reassign her to a different project so she would no longer be working side by side with another male employee who was around her age, and was a decent and relatively attractive man, but whom Andrea had always simply regarded as a colleague.
Although she was concerned about what it would do to her job, she decided she had to break it off with him, and hoped he would behave as professionally as she intended to.
But that wasn’t Harold. He was vindictive and nasty, and found any opportunity to undermine her comments in meetings or brush off her ideas as uninspired or cliché.
On her one-year job performance evaluation, his comments were so harsh that HR called her in and shared their intention to put her on a performance improvement plan, which she knew very well was the step they needed to take before they could legally fire her.
Despite the hurt and embarrassment, Andrea pushed back. She revealed her relationship with Harold to the director of HR, who downplayed Harold’s actions and pointed out her involvement in the situation.
Then, after a new shipment of artifacts that Andrea was responsible for overseeing were discovered to be damaged after she’d unpacked and inspected them and given the green light, she got blamed for it, and was hauled back into the HR office, where the manager and Harold, with a sneering satisfaction on his face, fired her.
Andrea was unceremoniously led out of the museum, clutching the few items she was able to pack in a cardboard banker’s box under the supervision of HR, fighting back tears and staring straight ahead to avoid the confused and appalled expressions of her fellow employees.
While she couldn’t prove it, she was certain that Harold had figured out a way to damage the artifacts so that the museum could blame it on her.
With the help of her college roommate, who worked at a large downtown law firm, she hired a lawyer and sued the museum and, remarkably, after an almost two-year battle, not only won the case but was offered her job back by the museum’s board chair.
There was some vindication in this, but the idea of going back to work at a museum, at a job she loved but that was now tainted by the memories of gaslighting and humiliation, was not an option.
She’d given everything to that job, and the fact that the museum could so quickly dismiss her was completely crushing.
So, she’d accepted the settlement money as well as a generous severance check, sold her town house in the Golden Triangle and made the decision to leave behind her life in Denver, and seek the peace and tranquility of the rolling grasslands and prairies of eastern Montana.
It hadn’t taken her long to find the charming ranch right outside Tenacity, and since the property had been on the market for some time, she was able to negotiate a good price. Within a month, she was unpacking her belongings in her new home.
And now, not two months after moving in, she was already faced with the past she was trying to leave behind.
Andrea glanced around the mess of her front foyer that she was tearing down to rebuild something better. She had to believe that she could do the same with her life.
She picked up her crowbar, and wrenched off the final piece of drywall, which came off in large, satisfying chunks, and tossed it on the floor.
Just as she went to put away her tools, she noticed something between the studs, and peered down to the ground where a rusty old tool sat, covered in drywall dust.
Andrea picked it up and examined it in her hands. The device looked like a pair of pliers but made of rusted iron with long handles. It creaked as she pulled the handles apart, the grainy joint resisting moving from the position it appeared to have been in for several decades.
It was probably garbage, but rather than tossing it in the big black industrial waste bag on the floor, Andrea placed the tool on her workbench, then dusted off her hands on her pants.
What else she’d find behind these walls, she wasn’t sure, but she was resolved. Both the house and her life were about to be rebuilt, piece by piece.