Chapter 5
Amber
I want to beg Daniel not to go. I want to beg him to stay and help me. I want to beg him to not leave me. But I am an adult, and I am a professional, and I can handle this.
I tell myself this, even as I smile at him, and he walks away. And fear crawls all through my head.
This is a job that would have taken me at least a week. At least. I would have estimated two if I had been bidding on the job. And that’s just for this ballroom.
There is a table set up in the corner, and I assume that they’re going to be using it somehow tomorrow.
I take a deep breath and look at the boxes around me. I assume that the miles and miles of tinsel that last year’s decorator used to transform this room into a magical wonderland are in those boxes. They’re huge; they must be three feet tall.
I shove my phone in my pocket, deciding that I’m going to look at the decorations I have to work with, while I let the pictures I just studied sit in my mind, and give my brain time to work things out. I’m not sure how to hang things, and I don’t want to put any holes in the walls. Obviously they got put up last year somehow, and I can figure out how if I put my mind to it.
I’m still thinking about those things as I open the box, and I don’t realize right away what I’m looking at. But then it strikes me.
Daniel had said that the decorator from last year had left in a huff.
It looks to me like he left in an angry huff if this tangled-up tinsel has anything to do with it.
Oh my goodness. Please don’t let all the boxes look like this.
I hurry to open the next box, praying the whole time that this one was put away neatly.
But it’s a jumble as well. All I can see is a crisscrossing of tinsel and what feels like endless miles of mess filling the entire box. I can’t even find an end.
Could it be possible that all the other boxes are just like this?
I don’t want to think so, but I’m guessing...yes.
Regardless, I’m hoping against hope that despite the odds, I opened up the two worst boxes first. But that turns out to not be the case. Every single box looks like someone ripped the stuff off the walls and ceiling and threw it in, without the slightest bit of care for anything.
Of course, if the last decorator left in an angry huff, he knew he wasn’t going to be back this year and didn’t give a flip how the stuff was put away. And he knew he wouldn’t be found out either. Who was going to go through the boxes to check to make sure he did a good job before they gave him his final paycheck?
I press my lips together, knowing that what I have just discovered has made my job even more impossible than what I already thought it was.
I think about texting Daniel. He told me I could. He said he would help. But I don’t want to take him away from anything that might be more important. I mean, these are just decorations, and Samuel runs a billion-dollar business. Surely there are things that are more important than having the ballroom exactly perfect.
As I think that, I wonder if there’s any way I could tone down the decorations and not use the tinsel.
But Daniel said that Samuel wanted it to look exactly like it did last year. He went so far as to send me pictures, and pretty much the only thing I see in those pictures is tinsel everywhere. It’s artfully arranged and does not look overdone at all. In fact, it makes the room look magical, and my fingers are itching to be able to recreate that vision. Even while my mind is screaming that there’s no way I’m going to be able to get this stuff untangled and put up in time to make it look even half as good.
I thought this was my big opportunity, but I didn’t realize I was only setting myself up to fail spectacularly.
Well, I’ve never allowed something like this to stop me before, and I’m not going to allow it now. I feel like rolling up my sleeves, except I have a sweatshirt on, so I push them up to my elbows, take one more look at the first box of tinsel, and then decide that I’m going to get it out, I’m going to start untangling it, and I’m going to conquer this tinsel and this room, and it is going to be gorgeous by the time I am done.
I will not allow myself to think anything less.