Chapter Four
Four
Le Palais des Festivals et des Congrès
Cannes, France
Last year
The sun feels different in France. Richer, somehow, than in Illinois—more tangible, like melted honey.
I’m grateful Ava convinced me last-minute to pack a sleeveless dress, because it’s in the high eighties when we step out of a cab at the convention center.
A red carpet’s rolled out in a long line to the glass doors.
“Chic,” Dexter says, breathless. Even his rooted skepticism is no match for the allure of all this.
“You deserve this,” Iris says. It’s been her constant refrain since we left Chicago two days ago.
She said it as a flight attendant handed Dexter and me miniature croissants on the airplane and we looked at each other wide-eyed, giggling like children.
As we checked into our hotel, which had the ruin of an ancient building jutting through its stucco lobby wall.
As we unfurled striped yellow towels at Plage du Midi.
And last night, as we ate butter-basted seafood on a terrace overlooking the ocean. Dexter had said, “It feels unbelievable that we’re going to go back to Chicago and expense this meal.”
“You worked for this,” Iris replied. She took a sip of white wine, the glass delicate and frosted with condensation. “You deserve it.”
I wish Ava were with me to see it all. The campaign we’d run in the winter for a Chicago-based women’s health care company was a finalist for the Creative Effectiveness Lion—right next to Slater Faust, with If Not You for Lachausse.
When I’d learned the Art Room was sending us to France for the awards ceremony, Ava made a baked Brie and bought a cheap bottle of Bordeaux that we’d polished off on our living room floor while watching Chocolat and talking in terrible French accents.
She was the first person I told, the only one I cared to tell at all.
She was my family, the surest person on this earth to share in my joy every single time.
This was before Lev moved in, and neither of us had ever left the country.
I want to share every bit of this with her.
Being here now, the French sun baking down, makes my life feel less discrete than it did before.
There’s more than the southern Illinois town where I grew up, avoiding my parents scowling at each other in the kitchen.
There’s more than Chicago with its glittering high-rises and lake-effect snow.
I want more—want all of it. It feels, standing on the red carpet between Dexter and Iris, like the world has blown open around me, and I’m ravenous.
“Ready?” Dexter asks. His cheeks are sunburned from our day at the beach.
“Ready,” I say.
Iris walks slightly ahead, leading us into the cool, sparse lobby. Agency teams from all over the world mill around in the air-conditioning, flutes of champagne in hand. Unfamiliar languages float past like music.
“Wonder if Slater’s here yet,” Dexter says, taking it in. He turns to me on a smile. “Ready to finally put Campbell Porter in his place?”
My stomach lurches at Campbell’s name. “So ready,” I say, but the reality is I’m not confident our campaign holds up to his. If Not You is good. It’s better than good.
“I hope he cries,” Dexter says, and a laugh peals out of me.
“Be nice,” Iris says, tutting. But even she knows about my history with Campbell.
We’d been working late, a winter Thursday a couple years ago, when it all came tumbling out.
We’d hit that point in the night when things always start to get personal: when you’ve been at it so long your eyes are itchy and your pants are wrinkled and it’s past the hour anyone feels professional anymore.
Iris started to tell me how Hazel, her daughter, was going through a sleep regression.
“She’s miserable,” she’d said. It was just the two of us in the conference room overlooking the lake, which churned dark and navy fourteen floors below us. “We’re miserable. It breaks my heart to watch her wake up wailing, like the world is this horrible place to find yourself in.”
“She’s a baby.” I knew nothing about children, but I tried to meet Iris there anyways. “I don’t think crying necessarily means she hates it here.”
Iris’s head dropped to the table. “You’re right. I just want her to be happy, and find her place in the world, and do what she loves…”
I rested a hand on her forearm, and she looked up at me. “Iris. She’s one. There’s time.”
She groaned. “We’ve been at this too long. I’m losing it.”
“I think it’s cool you’re already thinking about those things,” I said.
There was an empty can of San Pellegrino on the table in front of me, and I fiddled with the tab until it snapped off.
“Her fulfillment. My parents only paid attention to me when I achieved something—got an article published in the school paper or whatever.” I waved a hand vaguely through the space between us and thought of the dust-covered box in the back of my mother’s closet.
Very deliberately, I pushed the image away.
“They’ve never cared much what I’m up to. Too busy avoiding each other.”
Iris made a clucking sound. “That’s shitty, Mattie. They should be so proud of you.”
Ridiculously, inexcusably, my throat constricted. “Thanks.”
“Are they close by?”
I rotated the metal tab on the table with one fingertip. “Couple hours away. They haven’t been to the city since they dropped me off for my internship when I first moved here.”
Iris blew a big raspberry, and I smiled at her. “My thoughts exactly,” I said.
“Remind me where you interned?”
And that’s how we got into it: Slater Faust, Campbell Porter, that summer I spent trying to best him only to fall short.
“It’s my white whale,” I’d told Iris. “Proving that I can make something as good as Campbell can.”
It was the most professional way I could articulate it. What I meant was: He’s insufferable. I meant: It tortures me, that I have to try so much harder than he does. Showing him up had become a career milestone that meant so much to me it edged on humiliating.
Iris studied me across the conference table, biting the inside of her bottom lip.
Eventually, she said, “ ‘White whale’ implies you can’t, though.
Chasing that whale dooms Ahab, right? He never stands a chance?
” She paused, like she couldn’t remember how the story ends.
The whale kills Ahab, of course, but I didn’t offer that up.
“Campbell’s just a person, Mattie, like you. And you’re talented.”
My face flooded with heat. “I promise I wasn’t fishing for a compliment, here.”
“I know that,” Iris said on a laugh. “I’m just saying: He edged you out for one job, one time. Okay.” She shrugged. “This is a long career. Of course you can make something as good as this Campbell guy.”
Of course you can.
I tucked it into my pocket like a talisman, something I could come back for and hold on to.
“Speak of the devil,” Dexter mutters. The Slater Faust team is wearing color-coordinated outfits, which strikes me as unbearably dorky. Joaquin and Campbell are side by side, a man I don’t recognize—presumably their art director—bringing up the rear. All three of them hold glasses of champagne.
“Art Room,” Joaquin says. I always liked him, mild-mannered and calm. He never acted like what we were doing at Slater Faust was a matter of life or death. “Nice to see you, all this way from home. Congrats on the short list.”
“You, too,” Iris says. “Loved the campaign.”
Joaquin squeezes Campbell on the shoulder. “Mostly this guy.”
Campbell doesn’t do what I’d do: Deny it. Say he couldn’t have done it without his team. He just beams, lighting up like a Christmas tree.
“What’s your campaign?” he asks, looking right at me. Like he didn’t have the decency to look it up beforehand, or the time to care. My spine feels like glass as I straighten—sharp and breakable.
“The Valentine’s Day program for Panacea,” I say, as lightly as I can manage.
Campbell smirks. I know that he knows; I know he’s doing this to get a rise out of me.
And when Joaquin asks Iris about our flight to France, I can’t help myself from turning toward him and adding, “It was described right there on the short list next to yours.”
My voice is low, so only he can hear. Campbell leans closer as his eyebrows rise. “Was it?”
I feel my face pinch. This day is supposed to be the highlight of my career so far, and one thirty-second interaction with him has already managed to make me feel like I have to prove my place in it. “Are you struggling with your reading comprehension?”
“Illiterate,” Campbell says as his lips twist. His voice catches on the vowels, that faint Southern accent stretching them long. “That’s right.”
I startle as Dexter’s voice rises beside me. “Did you also get those cute mini croissants on the plane?”
“And the baby jam jars,” Joaquin says. He holds up a pinched finger and thumb as I turn myself bodily away from Campbell, trying to slot back into this conversation. “Best plane food I’ve had in a while.”
“That’s France for you,” Iris says, glancing across the hall. Suddenly, the crowd around us has started filing toward the auditorium. “Should we head in?”
Campbell’s still watching me when I make the mistake of glancing in his direction, his lips settled in that smirk.
In the shuffle of all six of us crossing the lobby, I let myself glare at him openly.
This is the closest we’ve been to each other in a while, and he looks different than I remember; that trenchant optimism isn’t hanging from his features quite right.
His face is leaner, and there are faint circles under his eyes.
He looks older, I decide. And tired.
“Not sleeping well?” I ask under my breath as Iris chats with Joaquin ahead of us. “You look exhausted.”
Campbell exhales a laugh, his chin dipping. “Thanks so much.”
“Is it keeping you up at night?” I whisper as we stop inside the auditorium doors. There’s a line for the usher, everyone clumped up in the wait for their seats. “Worrying I’ll beat you?”
Campbell’s eyes rise to mine, catching and holding. “Something like that,” he says. Even in the dimmed auditorium, I feel every shift of his gaze as it moves over me. I fist my hands in the effort not to fidget. “I’ll be the bigger person and tell you that you look nice.”
I roll my eyes. “Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Pretend to be civil.”
Campbell slips one hand into the pocket of his slacks. “I’m not pretending.”
“ ‘What’s your campaign?’ ” I echo, tipping toward him and hiking my eyebrows. We’re standing close enough to Iris and Joaquin that if they turned back, they’d hear all of this. It’s more mouthing than sound when I say, “Fuck off, Campbell.”
He grins, like they’re his favorite words. The exhaustion fades from his face when he smiles like that. “Just messing with you, French. You make it so easy. It’s a great campaign.”
I press my lips together, clamping them between my teeth. It’s a great campaign? Here, in this side conversation that only the two of us can hear. But when it’s in front of our teams—in front of my boss—it’s What’s your campaign?
I know Campbell. I know he does this, and I still always let him get the best of me.
“Wow,” he says softly, almost reverent. Campbell leans back on his heels like I’ve blown him away. “Mattie French, at a loss for words?”
I want to strangle him, and then maybe myself for allowing him to mar this moment for me.
“I can’t stand you,” I hiss, and he laughs. Three minutes with him and I feel too overstimulated to hold still. Mercifully, we’ve reached the usher.
“Slater Faust,” he says, reading off the ticket Joaquin hands to him. “Right this way.”
Suddenly, Campbell’s face is a millimeter from mine. “May the best man win,” he murmurs, right into my ear. I catch the heat of his skin, the cool snap of his mint toothpaste.
I’m thrown so unforgivably off-kilter by Campbell’s sudden proximity that he’s almost out of earshot by the time I have the wherewithal to reply, “Woman.”
But this is Campbell Porter, so of course he wins. I knew it before they announced it; I knew it before we got on the plane to France; I knew it the minute the short list came out. It was always going to be Campbell.
Joaquin gives a speech while Campbell and his art director stand off to the side, passing the gold trophy back and forth between them and marveling at it in a way that makes my stomach ache. I’d give a pinky finger to be up there with Dexter.
“Like everything we do at Slater Faust,” Joaquin says, “this was a group effort. Not just Campbell and Alex—this honor is a testament to our account team, our strategists, our video producers, and everyone else who touched the If Not You campaign from brief to launch.”
Dexter snorts under his breath. “Where was that energy in the lobby?” He claps my shoulder in an imitation of Joaquin. “ ‘Mostly this guy.’ ”
I sigh sharply, and Iris shushes us.
“We’ll get him next time,” Dexter says, even quieter, ducking close to me. “I want to wipe that smirk off his pretty face.”
“He’s not pretty,” I say, though in the stage lights Campbell practically looks holy.
The glint of his eyelashes and the freckles on his nose.
The full slant of his mouth. I think of his lips at my ear in the usher line, and my stomach twists with something that might be nausea, or might be a different ache entirely.
“Oh, sure,” Dexter mutters. “Horribly disfigured.”
“You two want to say anything?” Joaquin asks, up on stage. He turns to look at Campbell and Alex over one shoulder. Alex—man of few words, apparently—shakes his head. But Campbell steps up to the microphone.
“Here we fucking go,” I whisper.
“I just want to say thank you.” Campbell’s scraped voice fills the auditorium. I expect him to go on and on, a real Oscars speech, the moment he’s been waiting for. But he only says, “This means so much to me. So, just—”
Campbell breaks off, then. There’s an uncomfortable pause, a few beats too long, as he looks around the auditorium. I stop breathing when his gaze lands, definitively, on me. “Thank you.”
Something odd passes between us in the brief silence that follows. It’s so bright where he is, and so dark in the audience, but his eyes hold mine. I feel myself going hot all the way through to my bones. Because Campbell doesn’t look right. He doesn’t look smug—he looks sorry.
And I hate that even more.