23. Cara
CARA
The fact that Alastair was calling her at all was shocking.
He had been freezing Cara out for the last few days, not returning her emails or her texts.
She had itched to tell him about the way she’d reached out to the Lions and the response she had gotten, but apparently he didn’t want to hear anything from her.
And after a surprisingly short amount of time, she’d gotten over it. She hadn’t done it for him. He was going to fire her anyway, probably, she’d just wanted to be the one to initiate the conversation as a point of pride. But it didn’t matter, really.
Maybe that’s what this call is. Maybe he found out what I did and he’s ready to tear me apart for it. At least it would be over.
She answered the call. “Alastair.”
“Why are you and Liam having a press conference today?” he demanded without preamble.
She frowned. “What are you talking about? I didn’t schedule a press conference.”
“Well, someone did,” he snapped. “I just got sent the link for the livestream. Apparently it’s happening at a hotel conference room downtown. Do you mean to tell me you aren’t even with him?”
“Alastair, I don’t know anything about this,” she said. “Send me the address of the hotel.”
He scoffed. “Frankly, I can’t think of a single reason why I should help you, Cara. You’ve made an absolute mess of this whole business. I trusted you to handle it, and for a while I thought you were going to, but I can see now that trusting you was a mistake.”
“You didn’t trust me,” Cara countered. “This was never about trust, Alastair, admit it. You didn’t want to handle Liam yourself.
You didn’t want anything to do with him while his reputation was in the gutter, and you thought you’d pawn him off on the lowest-level employee you could find.
I know that, and so do you, so I don’t see any reason for us to pretend otherwise. Just admit it.”
She could practically hear him scowling through the phone. “I don’t know when you got so arrogant that you think you can speak to your superior that way.”
“We both know I’m not going to be working for you much longer, Alastair,” Cara told him.
“If there’s one thing you’ve got right, it’s that I did make a mess of all this.
I’m doing what I can to clean it up, but I don’t see a world in which you let me take another client under your name.
So that means I can say whatever I want to you now, and it won’t make things any worse for me than they already are. ”
There was silence over the phone line as Alastair took that in. He didn’t seem to know how to respond.
“You don’t have to help me,” Cara said. “You’re right.
And if you don’t want to, I’ll figure it out myself.
I’m sure this press conference has been publicized enough that I can just look up the location.
But just so you’re aware, you’re not doing anything but stalling me by keeping this to yourself.
You’re not going to prevent me from showing up there.
I don’t think you even want to do that. So why don’t you just tell me where he is? ”
There was a long pause. “I’ll send you the information,” Alastair conceded.
“Thank you.”
“You know,” he said, “I really did believe in you for a while, Cara. Maybe not all the time, definitely not when it started, but when I saw how far you were willing to go for this campaign, I thought I’d actually been right to choose you.
I thought, here’s a woman with more passion for this work than I’ve seen in a very long time.
I saw you leapfrogging over other people at the firm.
In my mind, you were on the fast track to success. And then you threw it all away.”
“I couldn’t have foreseen what would happen,” Cara pointed out. “I had no way of knowing that woman would break her nondisclosure agreement. The firm has a pretty strong case against her, by the way, if you feel like pursuing it.”
“I don’t know about that. She must have seen a way out of the document she signed.”
“No, those papers were good,” Cara said.
“I drew them up myself.” She had sat down and gone over them the other night, searching for a mistake like what Alastair was describing.
Some way to tell herself that this was her fault after all.
But she couldn’t find it. Her papers had been good.
“Show them to any lawyer you want,” she said. “They’ll tell you the same thing.”
“Why are you helping me?” His voice was suspicious. “I thought you were so sure I was going to fire you.”
“Oh, you’re definitely going to fire me.
” There was nothing to be gained by pretending otherwise.
“That doesn’t mean I don’t take pride in my work.
And I don’t wish harm on the firm. Technically, you were betrayed too, and you have a right to do something about it.
” She took a breath. “And I wouldn’t know about this press conference if you hadn’t made me aware. So for that, I do owe you a favor.”
She owed him for a whole lot more. If it hadn’t been for Alastair, she would never have gotten to know Liam.
Even though things had ended terribly between them, Cara couldn’t regret the time they had spent together.
It had been brief but beautiful, like a firework, and someday—after the pain faded—she was sure she would look back on it fondly.
So she was grateful.
Grateful that Alastair had introduced them. Grateful that Liam had trusted her, and that she had given in and allowed herself to be unprofessional with him, even if only for a short time. It had been worth it. It had all been worth it.
“I’ll text you the address of the hotel,” Alastair said. “But I don’t know what you think you’re going to do about it, Cara. If you run over there right now, you might make it in time, but he clearly set up this whole thing without consulting me or you. Do you even know what he’s going to say?”
“I have a guess.” The timing was too convenient for it to be anything but the deal she had arranged with the Lions.
He was going to tell the press he had decided to take it.
He didn’t need her there for that, of course.
That was why he’d arranged this without her.
But she wanted to be there. She cared enough about him to want to be a part of this moment.
It would be his triumph, even though it was no longer a triumph for her.
She wanted to see the look on his face when he told the people who had doubted and discarded him that they had been wrong.
I really care about him. He really does mean so much to me. I wish this could have happened differently. But I can’t blame him for wanting to put a distance between the two of us now. Everything that went wrong is my fault. He played his role perfectly. I’m the one who let us down.
Still, she wasn’t going to miss this opportunity.
She dressed quickly in a cocktail dress and threw her hair into a simple updo. By the time she had finished pulling on her heels, the address to the hotel where the press conference was being held had materialized on her phone.
It was a nice hotel, in Liam’s part of town. Eight blocks from here. Cara didn’t have a car at his house, but she might be able to cover the distance in time if she hurried.
There was no more time to sit and think about it. Before she could second-guess herself, she was out the door.
After three blocks running in heels, she knew she’d made a mistake.
She should have switched to sneakers for the journey over.
Her feet ached, and she had already stumbled more than once.
She’d come too far to go back, though. Glancing at her phone, she saw that she only had five minutes until the top of the hour.
It was possible that things would delay a bit—press conferences often did—but she couldn’t afford to waste any time.
She reached down, pulled off her shoes, and broke into a run. She’d make it the rest of the way barefoot. She just couldn’t miss this.
Seven minutes later, she came to a halt outside the front door of the hotel. She pulled it open and sprinted across the soft carpet of the lobby, wondering if her bare feet had been noticed by anyone else. Nobody made an effort to stop her, so maybe not. Maybe she was getting away with it.
I just have to make it to the conference room.
The sign outside the elevator bank told her the room was on level two.
Waiting for the elevator seemed unbearable, though, so she went to the stairs and took them two at a time.
At the top, she found herself in a long hallway with a sign on the wall pointing her in the direction of the conference room.
She kept running.
Somehow, this press conference had taken on a whole new meaning in her mind.
It felt as if, by getting there, she could set things right between herself and Liam.
She could rewrite what had happened, make him see that she knew she’d made a mistake by not being there for him when he had needed her most.
Of course, he didn’t really want to see that.
That much was obvious. How many chances had she given him to find her in the house and mend fences?
She hadn’t made it difficult. And now, this press conference…
She’d emailed him the offer from the Lions.
If he’d had any interest in reconciliation with her, he would have taken that opportunity to seek it.
He would have asked her to arrange the press conference rather than doing it himself.
The fact that he hadn’t confirmed what she knew. He was done with her. What happened today wasn’t going to change that fact.
She knew, and still she ran. Because she couldn’t help the feeling of hope that was blossoming within her. She couldn’t seem to keep it at bay.
The doors to the conference room were already closed, but Cara had no intention of letting that stop her.
She pulled them open just wide enough to allow passage and slipped into the back of the room.
There were a couple of seats still open and she slid into one of them, reaching down to ease her feet back into her shoes.
Liam was already standing at the front of the room, ready to address his audience.
Cara looked down at her phone. It was ten minutes past the start time. She’d made it just in time.
And no sooner had that though occurred to her than Liam took a step forward.
The crowd around her noticed too and immediately fell silent, waiting to hear what he had to say.