Chapter Thirty-Three
Thirty-Three
When we get to the conference room to pitch on Friday morning, all the trappings of the month fall away. There is no timer, like at Aspen’s headline-off. There is no micro-campaign that we have to improv without our slides. We aren’t on a boat, or in a yoga class. It’s just this: work.
Greg had set a video call with the three of us for eight o’clock, ninety minutes before our pitch time.
He’d looked small and half-real framed by his office back in Chicago—a desk I sat at just a month ago, promising him I’d play nice with Campbell Porter.
It feels like a different life, and when he says, “Go show Campbell and Soraya and Nolan what we’re made of,” I have to close my eyes against it.
We’re pitching first, just like in Chicago. That ballroom in the Four Seasons. And just like then, Slater Faust sits at the back of the room to watch us.
Campbell wears the blue shirt. If he did it on purpose, to make me hurt, it works.
He sits on Soraya’s right, closest to the window and farthest from Nolan. I wonder if it’s intentional, what the past few days have been like for him with the things Nolan knows about us now. With all the ugly words Nolan said hanging there between them.
Campbell’s hands are folded on top of the table. His signet ring is just visible. When Lucia calls us up to the front of the room, he swallows.
“First,” Iris says, “we need to say thank you.” Dexter fiddles with the laptop on the lectern, clicking into our presentation.
The cover slide is a photograph he took on the West Terrace in Aspen: towering mountain, marbled yellow-orange aspen trees, two dream-white clouds.
The Art Room logo is there next to Wicksteed’s.
“In a career where we see a lot, this month has shown us something entirely new. The care that this team has for the Wicksteed Resorts brand is tangible, and it’s been a real honor to have you share it with us.”
Between Suni and Alan, Lucia smiles.
“I’ll let Mattie and Dexter walk you through the work.” Iris steps toward the conference table. “But I may jump in along the way, and I’m here for any questions or builds.”
“Thanks, Iris,” I say. I practiced every word of this presentation for hours last night.
Repeated it in front of my bathroom mirror all the way through, barely pausing at the end before starting back at the top.
Before this month—before the past couple days—I loved presenting.
The energy of it, and the read of the room, and the real-time adjustments in response to every expression that passes over a client’s face.
It was never memorization, to me. It was a dance that I learned as I went.
Today, though, I’m reading from a script. It’s burned on the backs of my eyelids. I know it so well even my breaths are rehearsed, down to every um and you know. I can’t leave anything to chance, not with a client this big. Not with Campbell in the room.
“We travel to seek escape,” I say. I let my eyes track between Lucia and Suni and Alan, never to Slater Faust at the far end of the table.
“To experience newness, and to break from our known world. Our routines, our worn patterns.” I click to the next slide.
I’m wearing a black wrap dress and slim black heels.
I feel very cold. “But what if vacation was more than a break from our lives? A brief, beautiful departure that—eventually—ends?”
I glance at Dexter, who smiles. He looks so handsome in his maroon suit and bolo tie, clean-shaven and straight-shouldered.
“At a Wicksteed Resort,” I say, turning forward, “vacation is more. When you travel to Wicksteed, you come to a place that doesn’t just break you from your norm; it sends you back there better.
A place where every detail—from our mulberry silk bedding to our organic ionized cucumber water—is chosen with the sort of care that changes you.
The impact of a Wicksteed vacation isn’t just something that benefits you here; it’s something you bring home with you.
At the busiest time of year, why not book an experience that helps you make cherished holiday memories—and refill the well as you do it? ”
I click to the next slide, where Dexter’s campaign logo lockup animates on-screen. “Reserve your stay at Wicksteed Resorts,” I say. “Where vacation hits home.”
Dexter and I move through the rest of it in a coordinated tango.
The campaign collateral with lines about returning home a better version of yourself.
About restoring something at the center of your life.
The video we made, just yesterday, about how the well-being you find on a Wicksteed vacation percolates into everything else.
I try not to think, as I say all of it, about what my time here’s done to me. The thinned-out person it’s reduced me to.
When we finish, everyone applauds.
I shouldn’t, but I look right at Campbell: his elbows propped on the table, his palms together. He doesn’t smile at me, and I don’t deserve it.
It’s over, I think, when I sit down. Dexter exhales with so much relief I know he’s thinking it, too.
But then there’s the shuffle of the room, the swapping of computers on the lectern, Nolan clearing his throat. And I know it’s not over—that maybe the hardest part’s still left.
“Tough act to follow,” Nolan says. It’s so insincere I have to fight not to make a face.
This is how a man like him rises to a place like this: faking nice.
You don’t get to rooms like these by leading with your cruelty; you get here by swallowing it down.
I can’t bring myself to look at him as he speaks, but when my gaze floats to Campbell, that’s even worse.
He’s pulled himself together: he looks like he got some sleep, and his gold-threaded hair is carefully finger-combed above his forehead, and his expression is neutral and pleasant.
If it weren’t for the bruised ridge of stitches at his hairline, he’d be the picture of corporate composure.
The cobalt placket of his shirt draws my gaze to his throat, down his chest. He opens his mouth to speak, and I close my eyes.
“Sometimes, life gets hard to romanticize.”
My eyes snap open, but Campbell’s not looking at me. He’s speaking right to Lucia. Nearly smiling through the husky drawl of his words.
“There’s a lot of boredom in the real world. There are taxes to pay, and mail to pick up.” Campbell shifts his weight. “There’s a rug to buy for the kitchen—and not just that, but first you’ve got to consult your partner to see if they like the one you like.”
Immediately, I’m next to him on the beach that first day we arrived in California. Everything that comes with committed partnership, I’d said to him. Am I making any sense?
I’m having trouble drawing a full breath, but Campbell isn’t done.
“Maybe then you even need to collect their dry cleaning for them,” Campbell says. Lucia laughs, and Campbell smiles at her. “And maybe then the dumb rug is covered in cracker crumbs and you’ve got to vacuum it. Maybe your kids run inside and get their sticky Popsicle hands all over you.”
Dexter looks at me. He hadn’t heard the rest of it, that evening on the beach—the rug, the dry cleaning. But he heard me during the boat ride with Soraya and Campbell: A life with one man forever and a yard full of weeds to pull on weekends and a kid wiping their Popsicle hands on me.
I swallow, and it takes effort. Campbell’s throwing it all back at me. Right here in front of everyone.
I don’t want it, either, I can practically hear him saying. Through the veil of this presentation, through the frozen smile he offers the clients. I don’t want any of that with you.
“But when you’re at a Wicksteed Resort,” Campbell says, “you aren’t worried about the crumbs on the kitchen rug.
There is no kitchen rug. Your boring life ceases to exist.” I’m staring openly at him, frozen in the hard-backed desk chair.
He meets my eyes, finally, and says, “Here, you’re someone else. ”
Soraya flips the slide. The Wicksteed logo appears, along with their campaign line: You’ll love who you are when you’re here.
I can’t leave the room, like I did when Nolan found us.
I can’t turn my ears off, or distract myself on my computer, or get away from this in any way at all.
I just have to watch for the next twenty minutes as Campbell and Soraya share the rest of their work, a campaign that feels purpose-built to shred every layer of tissue on the way to my heart.
When it’s finally over, I’m an exposed nerve. Campbell closes the laptop at the front of the room, and even that small sound is enough to make me jump in my seat.
There’s clapping. A clatter of people standing up, shaking hands, saying thank-yous. I think Campbell’s going to ignore me all the way to the door, down the hallway, to the airport, and on to the rest of our lives.
But when Dexter and I pass him as we make for the business center, Campbell says, “It was a mistake, focusing on the after.”
Both of us stop short. I turn back to him, and that placid expression from the presentation is gone. He looks wrung-out and exhausted, his eyes dark on mine. “No one wants to think about the end of vacation.”