Return Billionaire to Sender

by Annika Martin

  I have things to do.

  I’m disappointed to find only the barest of details underneath her photo. Stella grew up in rural Pennsylvania. Her bio notes that she’s passionate about helping executives achieve a synergy of excellence and reach their full potential as leaders and humans.

  Synergy of excellence? What kind of rubbish is that?

  From her background, it looks like she grew up in a small town. She spent time as a letter carrier before taking her degree in psychology and moving to New Jersey. So that’s where the letter carrier schtick came from.

  Not that it matters. Corman is paying her to punish me. It means she can be bought. That’s all I need to know.

  I’ll have to roll it out carefully, though. Maybe let her show the movie once or twice so that she can feel like she’s giving it a go, because she does have that righteous warrior thing going on. I will make her job as unpleasant and useless as possible, then make the offer.

  A text comes through.

  Walt: Where do you want your training block with Elle?

  Me: Stella?

  Walt: It’s Elle…

  I punch in the word “now” and hit send. Being that I’m already thinking about it, best to get it over with. I stand and head through the door. “Everybody out. Bar’s open,” I say. “Snacks. Kitchen.”

  People drift to the back. Except Elle. She stands uncertainly. “Is here good?” She motions toward the table.

  “Fine,” I say.

  She props up an iPad on the table in front of us.

  I take the seat next to her. “So it’s Elle? Not Stella.”

  “Yes.” She hits play.

  “Just going right into the movie?”

  “Yes,” she says, not taking her eyes from it. “We’re back with the people living at 341 West Forty-fifth Street.”

  “I see,” I say. “So is it supposed to be a documentary or something?”

  “It’s them telling how they feel about the building,” she says, stating the obvious.

  It switches between people. It’s not bad work, technically. Did the discombobulated residents hire some sort of filmmaker? And then they sent this footage to my real estate acquisitions group and Corman somehow got hold of it? And decided this would be the perfect torture device? And then they found this junior coach to lean on?

  That has to be how it came together. Because honestly—what else could explain this?

  Twin boys now, with some old man wearing a platoon hat. The boys call him John and tell the unseen camera operator that John taught them both to shave. They live on the same floor.

  I groan. Stella—or rather, Elle—shoots me a dirty look, and a strange trill of pleasure moves through me.

  After a few more touching Norman Rockwell moments with John the elderly army vet guiding the young boys, we get some twenty-and thirty-something actresses one-upping each other on their love for the place. The women here—good lord! If there was a video presentation tailor-made to annoy me, this is it.

  As if on cue, the old lady’s face fills the screen.

  “Oh, please, no, not her again,” I say.

  “Shh,” Elle scolds delightfully.

  Maisey’s telling about how she broke her hip and her neighbors rallied to help her. I try to catch Stella’s eye, but she’s glued to Maisey.

  After what feels like ten hours of Maisey and her hip, we return to John and his army-insignia hat. He’s on the roof of the building showing off his crop of flowers, spindly little things that grow out of rusty old coffee cans arranged all in a row.

  “Is this being filmed at the Buckingham Palace Garden, then?” I ask.

  “Shhh,” Elle hisses, annoyed. It’s positively delicious.

  Onscreen, a young actress goes into a long dramatic story about an abusive ex, and how she’d be alone in the world if not for her 341 West 45th family. It’s quite the maudlin little video, all in all.

  I study the slope of Elle’s nose, the freckle-dusted curve of her cheekbone, her fine, glossy hair. I imagine removing the clip and sliding a ribbon of that hair through my fingers; it would feel silky to the touch—of that I have no doubt.

  It’s actually more honey colored than butterscotch, I decide. And she herself is no confection. She’s straightforward and simple. Technically plain, but quietly beautiful. Most people wouldn’t recognize her quiet beauty, especially not out here with so much flash out there to catch the eye.

  Her tentative boldness adds to her attractiveness. The straight-up way she postures herself when she gives a command. How she sometimes seems to marshal forces from deep inside.

  I want her to stop the movie and talk.

  “Is there…literally four weeks of this footage?” I ask.

  She hits pause and turns to me. “We’ll see, won’t we?” she says primly.

  “Come on,” I say. “This isn’t real.”

  “It’s totally real,” Elle says. “A hundred percent real. That’s the point here. Now please save the rest of your questions for after the presentation.”

  “It’s not real,” I continue, “meaning, this is about making the settlement as painful as possible. This is not a real program.”

  “No, it is,” Elle says, jutting out her chin. “This is a program about empathy, with human stories about real people. You know, those two-legged things moving about on the streets below?”

  A sassy outburst from Elle. Another unexpected treat.

  Once again, she hits play.

  John is back, talking about how his neighbors remembered his birthday. “I thought my days of people remembering my birthday were behind me,” he says, holding up a brightly wrapped box.

  I slide my phone from the table to my lap and scroll through my texts. It’s all of five minutes before she notices what I’m doing.

  “Hey!”

  “What?” I say.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m reading an important text.”

  “Well…don’t.”

  “Just a quick look.”

  She frowns. “You can’t be looking at your phone.”

  “I can’t be looking at it?” I ask, mirroring her, just to draw her out. Will she enforce even this?

  Her nostrils flare. “You need to watch the program.” Then, as if there might be some confusion on the issue, she adds, “This is a court-mandated program.”

  “But these are extremely important texts. How do I assure my team on the ground that I’m here for them whenever they need me if I can’t respond to their texts?”

  She frowns, thinking.

  Negotiation 101: make your problem their problem.

  I add, “How am I to give this movie my full attention when I know deep down that I might be missing important communications? How can we work together to allow me to stay in touch with my team?”

  “You can’t,” she says.

  I’m surprised, to say the least. I expected her to fold on this one. She’s some kind of low-level worker who has presumably been paid a bonus by Corman to make the program extra annoying. What does she care if I look at a text? She gets her money either way.

  My last court-ordered coach gave in on the occasional phone checking with no problem at all. By the end of three days, our sessions lasted all of a minute and a half—just long enough for him to give me an assignment that I could pass off to my assistant. It was perfect. Plausible deniability all around.

  “You’re asking me to be incommunicado for a full hour?” I ask. “I’m never unavailable to my people—not even when I sleep.” The fact is, this text bit is one of the little battles I need to win.

  She looks back and forth between my eyes—the left, the right, the left. We’re close enough that I can see that the army green of her eyes is cut with pale gray striations. Like light shining through the cracks. Close enough that I can smell her coconut-berry shampoo. Close enough that I can almost feel her thinking.

  She says, “No interruptions.”

  I tried to hide my surprise. “But all
executives keep tabs on multiple things. What if there were an emergency?”

  “Wouldn’t Walt get you? He’s your PA. Or your admin, Lawrence?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  She blinks, unsure what to do with my resistance.

  I wait, aware of this strange, excited energy in my chest, a sort of enjoyable lightness. What will she do now? What will she say?

  She straightens up. “Can’t you make it so? Like...one of those messages that says if there’s an emergency, contact my assistant Walt? Just for the hour that we’re in a session?”

  “I really can’t do that,” I say. “I can’t simply go dark.”

  “But my program requires your full attention,” she says.

  “Does it, though?” I ask.

  “Yes, my program absolutely requires your full attention,” she says.

  “It’s not complex material, Elle.”

  “I mean it. You have to watch it with your full attention.”

  I blink. Why fight me over such a small issue? Everybody checks their phones—even during the most important meetings.

  She holds out her hand, palm up. She wants my phone.

  Everything seems to slow.

  I grin. It’s not in any way funny, but I can’t seem to help myself—it’s just all so unexpected. I look from her slim hand to her eyes. Her suit is candy-apple maroon; the sky beyond her shoulder is a brilliant blue, but even those bright colors are curiously desaturated next to her flashing green eyes.

  “You want me to hand over my phone?” I ask, incredulous.

  She nods.

  She was interesting before. Now she just got a hundred percent more fascinating.

  “I can’t do that, Elle.”

  “Then you have to turn it off.”

  “That’s not something I can do, either.” I’m addressing her in my best negotiator’s voice. Laid-back. Downward inflection. Nothing to be done. Too bad, so sad.

  The silence drags on. No coach pushes back against me. No employee of any kind pushes back against me. In fact, I can’t remember anybody outside of a business rival pushing back against me, and even that tends to be weak.

  She straightens even more and juts out her chin; this is her power stance, I realize. I find that I love knowing that. Her and her prim little bow tie and her power stance.

  “If I catch you on your phone again,” she says, “I won’t be able to check the box for today.”

  I narrow my eyes. “What does that mean?”

  “The box in the online form that is shared between Bexley Partners and both law firms involved in the suit?”

  Is she joking? I give her an easy smile, the kind I reserve for a difficult negotiation session. “You wouldn’t be able to tick the box? Even if I can tell you everything that happens in the movie?”

  She shakes her head.

  I say, “Contrary to what you may have heard in the media, some people can multitask, and I’m one of those people. Business leaders who have gotten to my level are typically among the small percentage of people who can multitask very effectively.”

  She sucks in her lips. She’s debating something. What is she debating? She says, “Do you know what happens when one of the boxes isn’t checked off? Or ticked off, as you put it?”

  “What happens when one of the boxes isn’t ticked off? You’re asking me, do I know?”

  She hesitates, then, “Do you know what happens?”

  I stiffen. Is she really going there?

  “Do you know?” she asks.

  I cross my legs. “This sixty minutes has already taken ninety minutes,” I say.

  She puffs up a bit. In negotiations, as in poker, everybody has a tell. Is this puffing up part of her tell? Trying to occupy space? For some reason, I’m thinking back to our earliest meeting. You’re very kind, she’d said, labeling me with a positive emotion, proposing a preferred reality. Is she a wilier adversary than I’m giving her credit for?

  “What happens if you don’t get all the boxes checked?” she asks again.

  “I presume we’ll have to repeat that lesson.”

  “What if I don’t want to repeat it?” she asks. “What if I have a timeline that I have to stick to? And the box would never get checked off?”

  I feel this sudden and strange aliveness. “What would happen?” I ask.

  “There would be an X there instead of a check mark,” she continues. “Can you tell me what that would mean?”

  My pulse races. An X in one of the boxes is the nuclear option. I narrow my eyes. My lawyers wouldn’t agree to working with a firm or an executive coach with a history of playing hardball, but Elle seems to be doing just that.

  Why play hardball? And I can’t even check my phone? It’s not like Corman and his lawyers have hidden cameras here.

  She folds her napkin into a tiny triangle, and then runs a fingernail along one side, creating a straight edge.

  She appears to be waiting for my answer, even though we both know exactly what an X would mean. It would mean I’m in breach of our agreement. If I refuse to comply with the terms of the agreement, I’m in breach, and Corman’s lawyers could haul me back to court.

  A judge in a certain mood could throw me in jail.

  Corman’s lawyers would work overtime to get such a judge. They’d call in every favor. Sending me to jail would be beyond Corman’s wildest dreams.

  I feel a smile spread over my face. “Are you…threatening me?”

  She looks surprised. “I’m just asking if you know what happens.”

  I can’t believe it. She is threatening me with possible jail time. She has a tiny little sphere of power and she’s using it like a cudgel. It’s so…unexpected.

  I sit up. I wasn’t taking her seriously before, but I am now.

  10

  Noelle

  * * *

  He wears a wolfish smile—gorgeous and darkly dangerous, like he’s biding his time, dreaming of a someday attack. “Let’s get on with the training, then, shall we?”

  Inwardly I sigh. Will I never find out what happens if he gets an X instead of the check mark?

  I really want to know!

  I turn the video back on. Jada promised me that she’d edited out all of the parts where I appear, but this part is the group of us painting the top floor community room and I nearly have a heart attack when my arm appears in the frame. My hand. My ring. I fold my hands in my lap. I think the ability to recognize an acquaintance’s hand and arm is quite rare, but I wouldn’t put it past Malcolm—he sees things, eagle-eyed predator that he is.

  I risk a quick glance. Malcolm’s lounging in his chair, an annoyed prince on his mile-high throne, legs carelessly crossed.

  He seems to feel me watching, because he looks over at me just then, eyes sparkling. In a confiding, almost conspiratorial tone, he says, “Surely you don’t have twenty hours of this.”

  “No conversation,” I say.

  “Can’t I ask questions? Isn’t that how a student learns?”

  “Save your questions for the end.”

  “You’re honestly telling me you have twenty hours of this footage?”

  I stop the video. “My lesson materials are not your concern.”

  “What does a documentary on some people in a building have to do with executive emotional intelligence?”

  “It’s important for you to see the lives that your project is affecting.” The absolute truth.

  “Why?”

  “Because it matters,” I say, perhaps too strongly.

  “How does that affect my executive emotional intelligence?”

  I swallow, unsure how to answer that, being that I have no knowledge of executive coaching whatsoever. I need to get a book or something.

  “You can’t be asking questions,” I say. “We’re not two colleagues discussing training methodology here. In this part of the program that I, as an accredited coach, have designed, you are going to learn about the lives that your project is affecting.”

&nb
sp; “What possible lesson am I to draw from footage of people painting a run-down building that will soon be torn down?”

  “Why not try to look past that? It may not be the fanciest place, but don’t you see how hard they work to make it beautiful?”

  “Is that a line from Oliver Twist?”

  I frown, chest raging with frustration—and something more that I can’t define. “Are you ready to resume your lesson?”

  “Is it just about torturing and punishing me?” he asks. “If that’s the goal, you should’ve shown footage of vintage golf clubs being run over by busses. That would hurt me a lot more.”

  “You’re telling me you would care more about golf clubs being destroyed than people’s lives being torn apart? This beautiful building that they’ve put their hearts into? The loss of this close-knit community, a group that’s almost like a family?”

  “Depends on the golf clubs,” he says.

  I glare at him, stewing.

  Something flashes up on his phone just then. He looks down, then back up at me.

  “You just checked your phone.”

  “You can’t ask me to go dark. You just can’t. I thought we’d established that.”

  Can I really not ask that? I need him to pay attention. I need him to learn about my friends. I want him to feel like he knows them, and then maybe he’ll come to care about them a little bit. God, why did I think this would work? He’s so powerful and so busy, and what do I have?

  I suck in a breath. “You were mandated to undergo a program to be designed by an accredited executive coach, were you not?”

  “Yes, yes, yes.”

  “This program must be viewed without multitasking. That is part of the program. If you look at your phone even one more time, I won’t be able to give you your check for the day.”

  He watches me for a long, silent moment with that hard-sparkle gaze.

  My heart thunders. What is he thinking?

  But then—suddenly, miraculously—he turns off his ringer and sets his phone on the table. His phone is dark and sleek like him. “Take it.”

  I pick it up. It’s cool, heavy—more heavy than it should be, somehow, the way I’d imagine a loaded gun might feel.