The Billionaire From Atlanta

by Susan Westwood

  Celeste walked out of the office and went to the elevator to go down to accounting. All the while as the elevator sank slowly down through the floors of the building, her mind raced with the realization that she was about to meet Kevin at work. He worked in the accounting office. It seemed surreal that she was going to be able to see him there.

  She had promised him before she had even started that she wouldn’t go looking for him there at the office; that they wouldn’t see each other and that their clandestine affair would continue to be a secret, but with a paycheck five times the amount that she was expecting or that should be due to her, there was no way around it. She was going to have to go to the accounting office, and it was possible that she could see him there.

  She wondered what she should say to him if she saw him. She wondered if she should speak to him or ignore him; if she should act as though she didn’t know him at all and ignore him, or if she should pretend to meet him for the first time, or even if she should just be friendly and act toward him as if they were friends in front of the other people there.

  The elevator doors opened and she walked onto a very different-looking floor than the one she was accustomed to seeing. The style of the floor was open; wide open, with cubicles in a small square in the center of the room and offices all along the outer wall of the room, nearly all of them with doors that were open to the main central floor.

  There seemed to be computers everywhere, and in a strange correlation to that, there didn’t seem to be many people. In fact, the only people she saw were six people at the nine desks in the cubicles in the center of the room, and none of them were Kevin.

  Looking around, she wondered who she should talk to, but before she could take three steps, a larger older woman in a big floral blouse and a bright, colorful skirt, waved at her from one of the desks at the front of the cubicle set.

  “Come!” she called out, looking over her bifocals at Celeste.

  Celeste smiled and walked toward her. “Hi, I’m Celeste Everett. I was hoping to talk to someone about my paycheck.”

  The woman didn’t even blink. “Well I’m Arlita, and I’m the person you need to talk to, so have a seat and tell me what’s going on.”

  Celeste sat down and handed Arlita her paycheck. “It’s too big. Way too big. I wish I could keep it all, because that would be amazing, but it’s just too much money.”

  Arlita frowned. “Hmm. Well that’s one I’ve never heard before. Someone complaining because they have too much money.” She turned and faced her computer, resting her hot pink lacquered nails over her keyboard as she tilted her head back and peered down through her coral orange spectacles.

  “Let’s see what’s going on here.” Her fingers moved in rapid fire over the keyboard and then paused as she reached her forefinger to the enter key and tapped it slowly a few times, and then scrolled down a long screen.

  “This is a hiring bonus,” Arlita said, looking mildly impressed. She turned and handed the paycheck back to Celeste. “This is a hiring bonus that looks like it’s been broken up over every paycheck for your first year here. All of your paychecks will be this amount until your first year is over, and then the hiring bonus will have been paid, and your checks will be what you thought this one ought to be.”

  Celeste blinked in utter amazement. “A hiring bonus? But… I wasn’t supposed to get a hiring bonus. At least, I’m pretty sure that I wasn’t supposed to.” She thought back to her interview and tried to remember if Hector had said anything about a hiring bonus. The more she thought about it, the more she was absolutely positive that he hadn’t said one single word about a hiring bonus.

  “I’m pretty sure this is a mistake,” she said, eyeing Arlita worriedly. “I didn’t get a signing bonus.”

  Arlita lowered her chin, giving herself a few more chins in the process, and she looked over the top of her glasses at Celeste again. “Listen honey, I do all of the accounting for the big boys at the top. I know what’s going on there. I don’t make mistakes. This came down from there, and it’s not wrong. Now, I haven’t ever seen a hiring bonus this high before, not in all my thirty-five years working for this company, but it’s signed off right there, by the CEO and no one knows his John Hancock better than me. He signed it so it’s in the record and it’s staying there. It’s right, it’s not a mistake, and you can take the check to the bank and cash it and be done with this.”

  Celeste remained unconvinced. “But I’m just sure that no one said anything about a hiring bonus. Especially one this big. I would have remembered it! I would have remembered being told that I was going to get even a fraction of this kind of money.”

  “Well that’s what it is. If you have more questions about it, you can ask your boss, Hector. I’m sure he can answer any of your questions.” Arlita blinked slowly and her demeanor indicated clearly to Celeste that their discussion was at an end.

  Celeste stood up. “Oh, okay. I’ll go talk to Hector about it.” She wondered why he had sent her all the way down to accounting when he could have just told her right there in his office that it was a hiring bonus and then she wouldn’t have any more questions.

  But she did have one more question as she stood up and glanced lightly around the room. “Oh, um… since I’m here. Is Kevin in today?”

  Arlita furrowed her drawn on eyebrows. “Is who in?”

  “Kevin,” Celeste said, feeling a little strange that she had to repeat it.

  Arlita shook her head. “There is no one in accounting by the name of Kevin,” she said firmly.

  Celeste frowned slightly and shook her head. “Well that can’t be right. He’s in accounting. He works in accounting here.”

  The older woman turned her chair to face Celeste again, and she planted her hands on her considerable knees and leaned forward a little, looking over the top of her glasses at Celeste. “Honey, I’m going to say this one more time. There isn’t anyone here by the name of Kevin. I’ve been running accounting for thirty-five years, and there has never been a Kevin here as long as I’ve been here, and there isn’t one here now. I can let you know if we hire one, but as of this second, there is no Kevin in accounting.”

  She looked as if Celeste was tugging on her last nerve, so Celeste told her goodbye and thanked her, heading for the elevator with far more questions on her mind than she had had when she had walked off of the elevator.

  There were no Kevin’s in accounting. It was nothing short of confounding to her. She looked at her phone for a moment and tapped the dating app she had used when she met Kevin. She touched his profile and looked at the home screen for it. There it was. Accountant. It didn’t say what company he worked for, but the accounting part was definitely there, and she knew that he had to work for the company where she was because he had gotten her the job there.

  She rode the elevator back up to her office and walked back in to see Hector, who was still sitting at his desk. He didn’t look up at her right away, but instead finished typing something as she sat down in one of the chairs before his desk again.

  Finally, he turned and looked over at her. “What can I help you with?”

  Celeste laid the check before him again. “It’s a hiring bonus,” she told him, studying his face curiously. “You must have known that before you sent me down to the accounting department.”

  He didn’t reply right away. “I did know about it before you went down.”

  “Why did you send me down there then?” she asked, perplexed. “And why didn’t you tell me that you were giving me a hiring bonus?”

  “That bonus wasn’t from me,” he answered simply.

  She knit her brow. “What do you mean it wasn’t from you? If it wasn’t from you, then who was it from? Because you’re the one who hired me. It should have come from you.”

  He sighed and folded his hands in front of him on his desk, keeping his eyes set on her. “It came from someone else. I was told to hire you. The person who told me to hire you gave you that bonus. It had nothing to do with
me.”

  Celeste was even more confused than ever. She balked for a moment and then leaned forward. “What are you talking about?”

  “I just told you. Someone else told me to hire you, so I did. That was part of the reason that I wasn’t too keen on you to begin with. I did what I was told, thinking that you might not be the right person for the job, but you have worked very hard and you’ve more than proven yourself to me, and I know now that you are definitely the right person for the job, and I’m glad that you’re here.” He left it at that, but he continued to watch her.

  Anger began to build up in her. There were things she didn’t know. Secrets hidden away from her. Things that she would never have known if she hadn’t started asking, and Hector knew them. “What do you mean someone made you hire me? Who made you hire me?”

  “I can’t say,” he replied quietly, looking somewhat sympathetically at her.

  “You can’t say or you won’t say?” she asked, looking for clarification.

  “Both.”

  With a wry look on her face, she narrowed her eyes. “Was it Kevin?”

  He didn’t move or even flinch. “I don’t know anyone by the name of Kevin.”

  She could see by the look in his eyes and on his face that he meant it; he didn’t know anyone by that name. Besides, she thought to herself, if he was spilling the truth about everything else, it was no time to lie about a name.

  Celeste frowned deeply and looked downward, wondering who Kevin was, if he wasn’t in accounting and they had no idea who he was, and if Hector had been forced to hire her but he didn’t know anyone named Kevin either; it left nothing but a big hole filled with mysteries, questions, and doubts.

  Hector watched her and reached his hands up to his chin, tapping it slowly with his forefingers. “I wonder if you wouldn’t mind helping me carry a few files up to a meeting I’m going to upstairs,” he said quietly.

  Caught up in her own thoughts and worries, she blinked and tried to come back to the present and focus on her boss. “What? I’m sorry. Did you say files?”

  “Yes.” He stood up and buttoned his jacket at the waist. “I wonder if you wouldn’t mind carrying some files upstairs with me for a meeting I need to go to.”

  She was surprised. He’d never asked her to accompany him anywhere in the building before, and he had certainly never asked her to do anything as mundane as carrying files for him, especially files that he very well could have carried himself.

  “Yes, of course. No trouble at all,” she said distractedly, as she reached for the stack of files that he indicated at the corner of his desk. She picked them up and followed him out of his office and into the elevator.

  Nothing was said between them as the elevator rose upward two floors, and then opened onto another level of the business where enormous offices stood with glass and wood walls. There was a well-dressed receptionist sitting behind a large wooden desk just inside the room facing the elevators.

  She looked up at them and gave Hector a nod and a smile, which he returned to her. “Hello, Trudy.”

  They continued to walk past her desk and down a hall to a meeting room that was walled in on two sides with glass, including a glass door that led into it. There was a group of people inside the room, all of them dressed in business suits or very nice dresses. When Celeste walked into the room with Hector, he walked to one of the seats positioned at the center of the table and stopped, pulling the chair back so that he could sit in it.

  He then turned and reached for the files in Celeste’s hands, which she gave to him, and then she looked around the room at the other people and when her gaze reached the head of the table they were at, it stopped, and she was frozen in place.

  She could barely breathe or blink, she couldn’t move, and she couldn’t speak for a moment. She could not believe who she was looking at. Her faculties began to come back to her slowly and she shook her head ever so slightly.

  “Kevin…” she said in a surprised voice. He looked up at her and stared. He had been talking to someone at his side, his eyes on a file, his attention only on that file, and he had not seen her come into the room.

  Someone immediately to her left; an older man with silvery hair and blue eyes turned to look at her. “That’s not Kevin. That’s David Carson. He’s the CEO of the company. Didn’t you know that?” He gave her a funny sort of sympathetic smile.

  Everything in her began to rush; her heart, her blood, the adrenaline in her system. Everything felt as if it had broken free from a dam and was careening around inside of her going totally wild.

  He had lied to her. He had lied to her about everything about him. David Carson. She didn’t know anyone by that name. She wasn’t friends with anyone by that name. She certainly wasn’t lovers with anyone of the name David Carson. The words that Keisha had thrown at her came back to her.

  ‘You don’t know anything about him, you don’t know if he has a white wife and kids over there on the other side of the tracks.’ Or if he was the CEO of the company that she was just hired at.

  Hector’s words from a few minutes before came back to her as well. He was forced to hire her. Kevin or David, whoever he was, had promised her that he would help her get a job at his company. She thought about that… his company. She thought he had meant the company that he worked for, not the company that worked for him. She realized then that when she demanded of Hector to tell her who authorized the signing bonus, he said he couldn’t say. He meant that he literally couldn’t say. It was his boss. It was the CEO of the company. It was a man who Celeste was so sure that she knew, and didn’t in reality seem to know at all.

  David looked at her and panic filled his eyes and his whole face. She turned away from him, facing Hector. She couldn’t look at David. She couldn’t see him standing there in his fine suit at the head of the table and know that he had lied to her about everything; lied to her about who he was and what he did. She couldn’t bear to look at him, or even breathe for that matter.

  Hector touched her elbow with his fingertips. She blinked and looked into his eyes, and she saw there finally that he had fully meant for her to find out. He had asked her to carry the files into the meeting with him not so that he wouldn’t have to carry them, but so that she would see just who the Kevin was that she was talking about.

  He knew. Her boss knew that she thought David was Kevin. She wondered what David had told him and how much else he knew. She wondered if he knew that they were lovers, or at least had been. She wasn’t going to be associating with a liar, particularly of that magnitude, at all.

  She spoke quietly to Hector. “Thank you.”

  It was all she said and he gave her one nod and looked downward, away from her. Then she turned and walked out of the room without another look back. David called out to her, but she kept going, practically running to the elevator, where she jammed her finger on the button several times, hoping that in doing so it would somehow arrive faster.

  The doors slid open and she hurried inside and pushed the button to close the doors. She saw David hurrying toward the elevator with an expression of deep sorrow on his face, and he called to her again, but the doors closed and the elevator descended back to the floor where she shared an office with Hector, and that was all that there was.

  Chapter9

  Celeste went to the women’s restroom and wept, letting out tremendous heartbreak at the knowledge that the man she was falling in love with had lied to her about every single thing about him. She released a great deal of her pain, confusion, and anger, and then washed her face with cool water and determined that she was not going to see him again personally, and that she was just going to focus on her work and block romance and men and especially him from her mind completely. It was the safest way to go. It was the only way to go.

  She tried to sit at her desk and work, but everything seemed to fade behind the moment when she had seen him standing in the meeting room, and that moment was on instant replay in her mind, tormenting her, hurting
her over and over again, and she could not face it. She needed to get away. She had to get away.

  Celeste worked through the few files that she had to do that day and then she left a note on Hector’s desk, telling him that she needed to take the remainder of the day off as a personal day, that she was sorry about it, and that she would be back in to the office in the morning.

  With that, she picked up her purse and her abnormally large paycheck, which was no longer a mystery to her, and she left the office. She dropped the check in her bank and then went to work at the grocery store, refusing to talk to anyone about anything, except for her customers that came through her line.

  She hated thinking that Keisha was right; that the rich white man from across the tracks was a complete façade to her; that he had a whole life that she didn’t know about, probably with a wife and kids. It was probably just the way that Keisha had said it was. Celeste was his brown sugar candy on the wrong side of the tracks; someone to have some fun with when he wanted to pretend to his wife that he was working late at the office or something like that.