Chapter Five
Five
Watching OverComm present their pitch is like being back in college. Dexter could be Ava, sitting next to me in a lecture hall, mumbling little gripes into my ear. OverComm’s the only agency that sent two creative directors, no writer or designer.
“Bad look,” Dexter whispers.
“Maybe they feel threatened,” I reply.
“They should.” He fiddles with the Art Room place card on the table in front of him. “This work is untoasted white bread on a paper plate.”
He’s right—their pitch is clean and smart but entirely expected. It looks like every marketing campaign for every luxury hotel I’ve ever seen.
“Don’t say that. We need them to move on so we aren’t stuck traveling with Campbell for a month.”
“I’d much rather be on the road with Campbell and Soraya than these crusty creative directors,” Dexter says. “They haven’t cracked a smile once. It’s like they’re doing emergency surgery up there.”
Iris reaches over, pressing one palm onto the table between us. She doesn’t move her eyes from the front of the room, but her message is clear: Shut up.
I do, crossing my legs at the ankles. The Slater Faust team isn’t in my sight line, but I can feel them thrumming like an ant colony from the other corner of the room. I know without looking that Campbell’s knee is bouncing under their table.
We’re called up as soon as OverComm’s finished. Iris takes the podium while I plug in my laptop, already open to our slides.
“Good morning,” she says, looking down the panel line.
Lucia Perez sits in the middle, her hair in a sleek twist, hands folded over her open notebook.
Wicksteed Resorts’ chief marketing officer, and the person we need to impress most. The people on either side of her introduced themselves earlier: Suni Ma, communications director, and Alan Wending, strategic operations.
Only Lucia is smiling, and it deepens when Iris says, “Greg says hello.”
“We’re excited to be here today,” Iris continues, “and to be included in such talented company with our friends from Slater Faust and OverComm. I’m going to hand this presentation over to Mattie French, copywriter, and Dexter Jansen, art director. I’ll be in the back to answer any questions.”
Then she shoots Dexter and me a smile, and hustles back to our table. Dexter always gets anxious about presentations, but not me. I love talking about my work.
“When you travel,” I start, launching straight into the campaign write-up that’s on-screen, “it isn’t transactional.
It isn’t a set prize you exchange for a set price.
” The words are there on the slide, but I’ve already memorized them.
“Travel is the one thing we pay for that makes us richer. That we both give to, and grow from.” At the panel table, Dexter passes out the stickers we had rush-printed: the passport-style badges that are the heroes of this campaign.
“When you stay at a Wicksteed Resort, you aren’t just visiting.
” My eyes move across the panelists, who are shuffling through their stickers; to Iris, who’s beaming; to Campbell, who I shouldn’t be looking for at all.
He’s watching me so intently I nearly falter.
“You’re collecting. Experiences, memories, moments, and lessons that you’ll carry with you.
” Campbell ducks his head to whisper in Soraya’s ear, and I rip my gaze away before I get entirely derailed by imagining what he’s saying.
“All of us, all our lives, are collecting.” I draw a breath, and Dexter rejoins me next to the screen.
He nods at me: Yes, Mattie. We’ve got this.
“It’s time to add Wicksteed to your collection. ”
Dexter takes the next slide, introducing the passport stickers.
My heart thrums in my chest. I’m never a nervous presenter; usually, I’m most myself at the front of a boardroom.
But I can feel Campbell’s eyes on me like an arrow nocked to a target, like I’m a trapped animal in his crosshairs.
No one brings this out in me like he does.
This fear, a fight-or-flight response so acute it feels like a fever.
I glance back at him and he’s taking notes, his burnished blond head ducked over a notebook.
When he looks up, I swallow so hard it makes a sound.
I move through the presentation on autopilot, my muscle memory of every meeting before this one, all my years at the Art Room, carrying me to the end. By the time we sit back at our table in the corner of the room, I’ve forgotten every single thing I said.
“I think I just blacked out,” I whisper to Dexter. He knocks his knee against mine under the table.
“You were perfect. We nailed that.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
I reach for the water bottle in front of me and take a long, drowning drink. It’s unreasonable, Campbell’s power over me. He’s one person. One overconfident, inconsequential person. I think of Ava, just a few days ago: Don’t let this become about him.
But Campbell presses on a hidden part of me—a divot shaped just to his fingertips, the place where my skin is thinnest. A spot only he can reach.
He doesn’t know that I grew up in a quiet house.
No siblings, no pets, just a mother and a father who tried to be gone so they wouldn’t have to see each other.
The only times they looked my way—the only times I could reliably get their attention—were the times I used my words the best. When I managed to tell a good story over dinner.
To get the top grade on a creative writing assignment.
To write the essay that got me a full scholarship to college.
It was a transaction, one I knew didn’t exist in a tangible way but that felt indisputably real: that if I was a great writer, I mattered. And Campbell Porter’s always stealing my chance to be great.
I haven’t watched Campbell present since our summer at Slater Faust, but he’s gotten even better at it, if such a thing were possible.
“There’s nothing in this world better than being on vacation,” he begins.
He turns to the panel and it’s like watching an opera singer hit the high note, a figure skater stick the landing.
It’s the perfect balance he strikes: friendly and personable, but not affected.
He smiles at the clients like he means it, like he knows them, like they’re all in on this story together.
“You’re with your favorite people; you’re in a beautiful place; everything you were worried about back home has been left there.
And from where you are now, it feels so far away it might not even exist, right? ”
Suni Ma nods, her lustrous black ponytail moving like water. I don’t think we had anyone nodding. Campbell keeps talking, and his words plink against me like raindrops. Each one is the exact right one. The exact word I’d have chosen.
“Because the truth is, every vacation’s a good one.
But”—Campbell gives a conspiratorial smile to the panel—“some vacation destinations are better than others. And if Wicksteed Resorts stands for one thing, it’s that…
” He hesitates on the inflected cliff-hanger of his voice, his campaign line appearing on-screen. “Better is out there.”
Dexter actually squeaks. From the front of the room, Campbell’s eyes rake over us before lighting back on the clients.
“That’s your line,” Dexter hisses.
It had felt so right to me, when it landed: More is out there.
There’s a moment in every brainstorm when the right idea snags, a quiet nudge along my brain stem telling me to pay attention.
Iris calls them “truth nuggets”: the human realities that make a marketing campaign resonate beyond the ad.
That can make even a campaign about crackers sound meaningful.
It’s the insight, the one that makes you feel seen by an idea that came from a stranger’s mind.
For me, for this one, it was that way I felt in France last year. My first trip abroad, and the way it broke me open: everything was vaster than I’d thought, this gutting mix of terror and exhilaration. More is out there.
But Campbell—Campbell. In his blue suit and that signet ring, the tops of his cheeks just flushed. Campbell, who’s arrived at nearly the exact same place.
I cover my mouth as I duck toward Dexter’s ear. “If they move forward and we don’t, I quit.”
He shoots me a warning look. “Don’t ever say that to me.”
I feel too prickly to sit still. But there are fifteen more minutes to endure: Soraya’s gorgeous designs, and Campbell’s needle-sharp headlines, and the way he looks at her at the end of it, like he’s proud of what they did together up there.
He doesn’t look my way until they’re walking back to their seats, where Nolan waits with an unreadable expression on his face.
Soraya’s ahead of Campbell, nearly his height in her heels, and Campbell’s still smiling—the ghost of it soft and easy on his mouth.
I’m scowling when his eyes land on mine.
And he laughs. A breathy catch of his throat that I feel more than I hear.
When he lifts a hand to salute me, not breaking eye contact, I want to cross the room and pull his hair like a kindergartener.
Attack-y, I hear Ava say. He makes me feral.
“What an ass,” Dexter mutters, just as Iris says, “Well, that was interesting.”
There’s enough chatter in the room, now, to keep their voices from the other teams.
“A little familiar,” I echo, stiffly.
“Great minds,” Iris says, glancing toward Slater Faust. “I’m glad we went with the passport badges.”
“Same,” I lie. I could have executed that idea better than Campbell did; I know it. Iris checks her watch.
“They’re going to announce the second round at four. So if you need the bathroom, or a coffee, now’s the time.”
I’m out of my seat as soon as she’s finished with her sentence—I need as much air between Campbell Porter and me as possible. I don’t look at him when I pass the Slater Faust table. I can hear the gravel of his voice as I leave the room.
The bathroom is all marble and brass, high-ceilinged and echoing. A door swings open behind me as I splash cold water onto my cheeks.
“Nice work.”
Soraya steps up to the sink next to me and twists the tap. “Those badges are mint.”
I let out a rush of air. In the mirror, I look overheated and damp. “Thank you. Dexter’s super talented.”
“And you,” Soraya says. “Campbell told me, but I’m glad I saw it for myself.”
“Campbell told you what?”
Soraya glances at me, sudsing up her hands with the fancy almond soap. “How hard you’d be to beat.”
I blink at her. Too much time passes, and her eyebrows twitch. “What?”
It feels like a lie, maybe. Or something Campbell said out of pity—a misplaced kindness after that night in January.
“Nothing,” I say, rustling up a smile. “It’s just, you were incredible in there.”
She smiles back, reaching for a towel. “Thanks.” When she drops it into the wicker basket at our feet, I feel a rush of vertigo. “I’ll see you back inside. Good luck.”
I meet my own eyes in the mirror as the heavy door whooshes shut behind her. Campbell Porter, saying something nice about me in private? Surely, she misremembered.
I’m even more sure it was a miscommunication when, twenty minutes later, Lucia Perez stands up and invites Slater Faust and the Art Room to join her in Aspen for the next round of the pitch.
Incredibly sure when, as he leaves, Campbell passes me a folded scrap of paper with his neat block print scratched across it.
Entirely convinced, when I see the two words he’s written there.
Full send.