Chapter 3
“Caroline.”
Brittany Vail came along the mezzanine with a coffee in each hand. She was in a cream sweater and gray wool pants, and her blonde hair was perfect, and her face was arranged into something soft and sorry. She looked like a woman arriving at a hospital to visit a friend.
“I’m so glad you came in,” she said. “I brought you an oat milk latte. I know that’s how you take it.”
Caroline stood in the doorway of her own office and looked at the coffee.
Brittany knew how she took her coffee. Of course she did. Connor knew how she took her coffee, and for two months Connor had told Brittany everything.
“I’m so, so sorry about last night,” Brittany went on, lower, stepping closer.
“It was a stupid moment. The light, and the crowd screaming, and nobody knew what to do. And the press is being disgusting about it. Honestly. I’ve been up since four trying to get the stations to pull that clip.
” She held the cup out. “Please. You must be exhausted.”
“Your coat is on my hook,” Caroline said.
Brittany blinked.
“Behind my door.” Caroline did not take the coffee. “Take it off, please.”
For half a second something moved behind Brittany’s eyes. It was quick and cold, like a fish turning under ice. Then it was gone, and she smiled a small, brave smile.
“Of course. I’m sorry. I got here early and just needed somewhere to put it.
” She set both coffees down on the little table outside the office, went past Caroline, and lifted her camel coat off the brass hook.
She folded it over her arm. “Connor asked me to come in and take the press side off your plate. Just for a few days. He’s worried about you. ”
“I heard.”
“I’ve already drafted a plan.” Brittany took out her phone.
“The main thing is keeping you off the floor while the cameras are here. I can walk the floor for you today. You can work up here, where nobody can get a picture. And his communications team is on their way. They’ve got a statement out already, and they have a couple of ideas to calm things—”
“A statement.”
Brittany turned the phone around.
It was on Bradshaw Freight letterhead, posted at seven that morning.
It was short. Last night at the Hadley’s mistletoe lighting, Mr. Bradshaw took part in a moment of holiday tradition that has been misrepresented in some media coverage.
Mr. and Mrs. Bradshaw ask for privacy for their family during this busy season.
Caroline read it twice.
Misrepresented. Nine hundred people had seen it. Three news cameras had filmed it. She had timed it on her own wrist. And a man in an office somewhere had typed misrepresented, and her husband had read it, and said yes.
Mr. and Mrs. Bradshaw ask. She had not asked for anything.
“It’s standard language,” Brittany said gently. “It gives the stations a reason to move on.”
“Thank you,” Caroline said. “I’ve seen it.”
She went into her office and shut the door.
* * *
Connor sent his people at eight.
There were three of them. There was his head of communications, a thin man named Barry in a quilted vest, who talked very fast and never finished a sentence.
There was a younger woman with a tablet who wrote down everything anyone said.
And there was a photographer, carrying a camera bag, who stood by the door and tried to look like furniture.
Connor came in behind them at eight-fifteen.
He had shaved. He was in a dark suit and a white shirt, no tie, the way he dressed when he wanted to look like a man who was handling something.
But his eyes were red at the rims, and when he looked at her across her little office, full of sketchbooks and fabric swatches, his face did something that made her look away.
“Caroline,” he said quietly. “You’re here.”
“It’s the first Saturday in December.”
“I know. I know it is.” He glanced at Barry. “We won’t keep you long.”
Barry stepped forward. Brittany had come in too. She stood near the door with her coat still folded over her arm, as if she might be needed at any second.
“So the thinking is,” Barry said, “and this is really about protecting you, Mrs. Bradshaw, getting ahead of—the story right now is the clip, and the clip is a problem, and what we need is a new picture. A better picture.” He made a frame with his hands.
“You and Connor. On the holiday floor. With Santa, ideally, or the tree. Ten o’clock, when the doors open.
Very natural. You don’t have to say anything.
Just be there together, and we release the photo at noon, and it tells people—”
“That the statement is true,” Caroline said.
“That the family is—yes. That there’s nothing to see.”
Caroline looked at her husband.
He was standing by her father’s old drafting table with his hands in his pockets.
He had not said a word. He did not need to.
She had watched him run meetings for nine years.
She knew that when Connor Bradshaw wanted a thing done and didn’t want to be the one who asked for it, he brought in a man like Barry.
“Did you ask for this?” she said.
“Caroline—”
“It’s a yes or no question. Did you ask for a picture of me standing next to you?”
He took his hands out of his pockets. “I asked them how we make this stop. For you. How we make the cameras go away so you can do your job. This is what they said works.”
“It’ll take two minutes,” Barry said. “Three, tops. Then they leave you alone.”
Caroline set her pen down on her desk.
“You put out a statement,” she said to Connor, “that says the city misunderstood what it saw. And now you want me to stand next to you under the tree and smile, so that people believe your statement instead of their own eyes.”
“That’s not—”
“That’s exactly what it is. You want me to be your alibi.”
The woman with the tablet had stopped typing. The photographer looked at the floor. Barry opened his mouth and closed it.
“You’re not protecting me,” Caroline said. Her voice was very even. She could hear her own heartbeat. “You’re managing me. I’m a problem that came up at work, and you brought in your problem people. You didn’t even call me. You called my father. You called her.”
She did not look at Brittany when she said it. She didn’t have to. Brittany went still by the door.
Connor’s face had gone pale again. “I called you forty times.”
“You called me to talk. You called them to decide.” She stood up. “I’m not standing next to you for a picture, Connor. Not today. Not for the store. Not for your board. Not ever.”
It was so quiet in the office that the gift-wrap ladies’ laughter carried in from the mezzanine.
“Okay,” Connor said at last, roughly. “Okay. No picture.” He turned to Barry. “No picture.”
Barry nodded fast. He looked relieved to be told anything.
That should have been the end of it. Caroline sat back down and picked up her pen, and she thought for one second that it was.
Then Brittany stepped forward.
“Can I say something?” she said. Her voice was soft and hesitant. “As someone who’s been dealing with the press all night?”
Nobody told her no. Caroline noticed that. Her husband did not tell her no.
“Caroline, nobody here wants to put you through anything,” Brittany said.
“Honestly. That’s the last thing anyone wants.
But there are four trucks outside, and it’s the busiest month of the year, and every time you walk across that floor, somebody is going to lift a phone.
” She put her hand on her chest. “I just think—why put yourself through that? Why not take the season off? Take some time. Be with your family. Let me carry the floor through Christmas. I know the operation. I’ve sat in on the planning for two years.
You wouldn’t have to face a single camera. ”
She said it so kindly. She said it like a gift.
The anger came up through Caroline’s body like heat through a floor.
It started in her feet. It came up her legs and through her stomach and into her face, and for a moment she couldn’t see anything except Brittany’s hand on her own chest, and Brittany’s hand flat on Connor’s coat, and Brittany’s hair under his fingers.
Let me carry the floor.
She had wanted the floor for two years. She had asked for it. Twice. And Caroline had said no, politely, both times.
“That’s a very generous offer,” Caroline said.
Brittany smiled.
“No,” Caroline said.
The door opened behind Brittany, and her father came in.
He was out of breath from the mezzanine stairs.
He had his cane in one hand and his hat in the other, and his bow tie was crooked.
He looked around the crowded little office at all of them, at Barry and the photographer, at Brittany, at Connor, at his daughter, and his face went uncertain in a way that Caroline had seen too many times in the last three years.
“I heard voices,” Richard said. “Is everything—the board called me again. Connor, they called me again.”
“It’s fine, Richard,” Connor said. “We’re just talking.”
“Brittany thinks I should take the season off,” Caroline said. “Let her run the floor. So I don’t have to face the cameras.”
Her father looked at Brittany. He looked at Connor. He did not look at Caroline.
“Well,” he said slowly. “Sweetheart. It might be kinder. Just until it all dies down. Just for a little—you’ve been through a terrible—”
“Dad.”
“I’m only saying it might be kinder,” he said, and his voice cracked in the middle. “To you. I don’t want to see you out there with those people pointing their phones at you. I don’t want that.”
Caroline looked at her father, standing in his own old office, with his crooked bow tie, agreeing with the chairman.