Chapter Thirty-Six
Thirty-Six
November
“Classic client behavior,” Dexter says. He’s looking at his computer screen, sitting next to me in the Chicago office.
“You’d expect better from an education company, but it’s the usual: ‘Can we combine both ideas?’ ” He tuts and reaches for the midafternoon coffee I got us at Downpour.
“Just pick one! If they went together, I’d have put them together. ”
“When do you think?” He shoots me a look. Lake Michigan glitters through the window behind him. “A week.”
I blow out a breath, pulling up my inbox. The pod divider between our row of desks and the next is decorated in a turkey-and-pumpkin garland; the Art Room’s Thanksgiving potluck is next week.
“Yeah,” Dexter says from beside me. “Yeah.”
I open my email thread with the account manager I’m waiting to hear from on something due tomorrow. She still hasn’t responded, but I feel a trill of satisfaction seeing my digital signature there on-screen: Mattie French | Senior Copywriter.
I asked point-blank for the promotion, in the end. Two weeks after we came home, and a week after we lost the Wicksteed Resorts business to Slater Faust.
Campbell told me in California that I’d already earned my place in this career. Wicksteed or not, I wanted to see if he was right. As usual, he was.
“It’s not always about the win,” Iris told me when she called me into her office to deliver the good news. “It’s about how hard I watched you work for it.”
I’d been across from her at her desk. My eyes moved over the framed photo of Hazel, Iris’s daughter, next to her computer monitor. She’d just turned four.
“I know it’s hard to lose,” Iris said. She pulled her gaze from Hazel’s photo back to me. “We all gave a month of our lives to that work. And it’s a bit extra painful to lose to those men at Slater, frankly—Nolan and, I know for you, Campbell.”
I’d nodded. Unsure I could trust myself to speak.
“But being a woman in this business—being a woman pursuing a creative life—is always valuable. I want to make sure you know that.” Iris lifted her eyebrows, and I wondered how closely she’d been watching me all these years at the Art Room.
All the small things she’d picked up on—the few times I’d mentioned my absent parents or my once-poet mother.
The sadness I’d brought home with me from the pitch. It’s what women do: notice.
“There are talented men on every agency team I’ve ever been a part of,” Iris said.
She gestured beyond her office. “Dexter, Greg. But the world’s been men’s voices forever, and our work here is important.
Soraya was on that team, too. Everything benefits from a woman’s perspective.
Everything.” She held my gaze. “Even when people discount us. I believe that, and I want you to believe it, too.”
“I believe it,” I told her, softly. I did. Do.
Iris nodded and dismissed me and I’d walked back to my desk thinking of Campbell—of that dusky Bodega Bay evening on his patio when he’d told me my mother’s choices were only that: choices. That she could’ve chosen differently. That I can choose differently.
I think of Campbell all the time, really.
The things I said to him in California, and the time he told me he needed at Josie’s wedding. I long for him and I’m furious with him. Every day that passes and I don’t hear from him, the fury grows in me like a weed.
Not only because he beat me, or because he turned me away when I flew to him halfway across the country.
Mostly because he did the worst thing of all: he made me fall in love with him.
My computer blips with a new email, but it’s not in the thread I’m hovering over. It’s not even in the inbox I’m hovering over—it’s in a different browser window, where I keep my personal email open. I click the new message and feel my face twist into a frown.
Slater Faust Associate Creative Director Position
from Felicity Graves
to me
Hi Mattie,
My name is Felicity, and I’m a Hiring Manager at Slater Faust Chicago. I was passed your portfolio by Campbell Porter and wanted to reach out about an open ACD position with us. Campbell recommended you highly.
Would you be open to an introductory call to discuss the role?
It’s based in our Chicago office, primarily helping to head up a number of our luxury travel accounts.
Slater Faust is an industry leader in strategic creative service—and was named a Top Place to Work by Chicago Tribune each of the past five years.
You can learn more about us and our recent work here.
I know it’s been a while, but you were a valued member of the Slater Faust intern class during your summer with us. Hoping to chat soon about the possibility of bringing you back on board.
All best,
Felicity
I stare at it. I stare at it so long my eyes burn.
“Mattie?” Dexter sounds like he’s calling to me from the bottom of a well. “Hello, did you hear me?”
“No,” I say. “No.” Then I keep repeating it, like my brain’s snapped in half.
No, no, no, no, no.
I stand, jerking wildly around for my phone. I send a stack of Post-it notes careening to the carpet. My wrist hits my near-empty cup from Downpour and it ping-pongs across my desk, spitting coffee droplets. I open my messages and scroll back—back, back, so far back—to find Campbell’s name.
Where the fuck are you, I send.
The last message hovering above it is from California. Intolerable in its simplicity. Find me at 8 if I don’t see you before?
I hadn’t responded to it. Five minutes later I’d walked into that conference room across from Campbell; I didn’t need to find him at eight, because I hadn’t been planning to let him out of my sight. Then Nolan. Then everything that came after.
“Mattie, what’s happening?”
Dexter’s standing now, too. He steps toward me and holds out his hands like he thinks I might whirl straight into him.
“Look at this,” I hiss, pointing to my computer screen. The email is still open, glaring at us, as Dexter ducks to read it.
My phone buzzes. Campbell’s said, My apartment?
Address, I hammer out. I throw my phone into my bag. I shove my Downpour cup into the trash beneath my desk. I snap my computer shut and unplug it, though it’s not even five o’clock.
Dexter sounds well and truly gobsmacked when he says, “What is he doing?”
But I don’t answer, because I have no idea. I don’t know what Campbell’s doing, or what he’s been doing during these awful, silent weeks, or what he’ll do when he sees me.
I only know I need to find him.
Campbell sends me an address in Streeterville, barely a block off the lake.
I walk the mile from the office, dodging crews with ladders hanging string lights along Michigan Avenue.
His apartment complex looks brand-new and hideously expensive, with a locked door he has to buzz me into and a doorman who smiles serenely when I bullet past him for the elevators.
Campbell lives on the twenty-second floor. Every time the elevator slips up another level, I feel the ding reverberate in my throat.
He’s waiting for me in the hallway—the very first thing I see when I step onto the carpeted landing.
“Hey,” he says, angling further through the frame of his door. He’s wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt. His hair is longer, which breaks my heart. That so much time has passed between us, he’s changed.
“What the hell is wrong with you?”
Already, I sound on the verge of tears. I’m so mad at him and I’m so relieved to see him and it’s swirling in me like a horrible, electrical storm. He’s in the third unit from the elevator, and his eyes go wide as I close the distance between us.
“Um.” He backs into his apartment and holds an arm into the entryway. “Come in.”
I clatter inside, heat and fury. I have no idea what to do with my hands. When the door clicks shut behind me, I say, “You won’t talk to me, but you’ll put me up for a job as your boss?”
“I don’t—” Campbell’s eyes are scraping over me, like he can’t take me in fast enough.
I want the exact same thing: the healed, pink line at his forehead, and the stretch of his shirt over his shoulders, and the ring glinting from his right hand.
My entire body is echoing with the shock of being this close to him.
Of looking at him. “I don’t work there anymore. ”
“You—” My mouth snaps shut. I think of him in Aspen, that very first day, mimicking me in the lobby by lifting one hand to close his mouth. “What?”
“I quit,” Campbell says. It shudders through me: Campbell home at four thirty on a weekday.
Campbell of the Wicksteed-red suit and the horseshoe shirt, wearing sweatpants.
I glance into his apartment and it’s nearly barren.
I was too far gone on my way through the door to notice, but the only things in here are boxes.
I turn back to him. Something very heavy has settled like a threat in my chest. “Are you leaving?”
“This apartment,” he says. “Not—” He stops, studying me like he’s trying to decipher what I think of this. “Not Chicago.”
It makes me bolder. “Why?”
“Because I can’t afford it without—”
“No, why’d you quit your job?”
He swallows. It’s very, very cold in here. We’re in a small entryway off the kitchen, which is all modern white cabinets and black granite counters. It opens into the living room, where a wide window looks over the city and lets in the late-autumn sun.
“I want,” Campbell says, slowly, “to feel how you feel about your work.” He watches me as he speaks, hesitant.
With so little inside the apartment, our voices racket from every surface.
“I couldn’t watch you like that for a month and come back to this, knowing there’s something else I want to do more.
You—” He stops. Breathes in, then out. “You made me realize I should be doing something I care about. And it took me so long to write last time, working at Slater with those hours and everything creative they needed from me. I took a job at a restaurant.” His voice quiets. “I started another book.”