by Susannah Nix
The first thing Olivia had done after her encounter with Adam in the break room was send Penny an SOS text to let her know she’d be needing some wine and BFF therapy tonight after work. Penny worked from home as a patent examiner, so by the time Olivia showed up at her apartment door that evening, she was ready and waiting with not only a bottle of rosé, but also a batch of freshly baked cookies.
Penny was truly the best of best friends.
Over a plate of her favorite sea salt chocolate chip cookies, Olivia blurted out the whole humiliating saga of her conversation with Adam.
“I can’t believe he said no!” Penny exclaimed when Olivia was done. “What kind of person says no to something as simple as giving a reference?”
“Apparently this guy,” Olivia said around a mouthful of cookie.
“I thought the rule was that you just sucked it up and tried to write something generically nice no matter how you actually felt. I mean, maybe you could plead that you don’t have time if you really don’t want to do it. But to flat-out refuse because you don’t think someone’s worthy? Only a sociopath would come right out and say that.”
“Thank you for validating my outrage.”
“Have another cookie.” Penny pushed the plate toward Olivia as she leaned forward to top off both their wineglasses. “I’m right, aren’t I, Caleb?”
Penny’s boyfriend looked up from the cookie sheets he was hand-washing in the kitchen. “You’re asking the wrong guy. I’ve never written a reference in my life.”
Ever since Caleb had moved in with Penny last year, he’d become a de facto participant in Olivia’s BFF therapy sessions too.
It had taken some time for Olivia to get used to Caleb being a fixture in her life. The last guy Penny had dated hadn’t really been around all that much—because he’d been cheating on her, it had turned out—so he’d never gotten in the way of their one-on-one BFF time.
But when Caleb came into Penny’s life, everything had changed. He wasn’t anything like Penny’s shitty last boyfriend. He was nice, for one thing, and treated her like she was a queen and he was her loyal subject. The two of them were pretty much inseparable. But also, Caleb actually seemed to like Penny’s friends and enjoy spending time with them.
Which was sweet, but also a little weird for Olivia sometimes. It meant he was suddenly a part of everything. Olivia didn’t get Penny to herself anymore. It was always Penny and Caleb. Together. A matched set.
Which was great. Good for them. It was just…for years, Olivia had been the number one person in Penny’s life, and now Caleb had come along and usurped her position.
She wasn’t bitter though. At least, she was trying really, really hard not to be bitter. Caleb made Penny happy, and Penny deserved to be happy. You’d have to be a real festering shitbag of a human being to be resentful over your best friend’s romantic happiness.
Caleb was a great guy, which was all that really mattered. Olivia genuinely liked him, but more importantly, she liked the way he treated her friend.
“I’m right,” Penny said, turning back to Olivia. “That guy’s a dick.” Penny hardly ever swore, so her calling Adam a dick meant she’d gone full-on angry mama bear.
“I can go kick his ass if you want,” Caleb offered casually. He could probably do it too. He was even more muscular than Adam, and he’d grown up in a military family with two brothers, so he probably knew how to throw a punch.
Penny shot a disapproving look in her boyfriend’s direction. “No one’s kicking anyone’s ass. Even if he is a big, honking jerkface.”
“It’s very sweet of you to offer though,” Olivia told Caleb. “You’re like the big brother I already have, only much nicer.”
Her own brother had never once risen to her defense, even when they were kids. When Cody Briggs had called her a booger-eater on the playground in second grade and teased her until she’d cried, her brother had laughed along with his fourth grade friends, then told her she needed to grow up and fight her own battles.
Olivia would trade her brother for Caleb in a hot second. But she’d also probably trade her brother for a handful of fake magic beans and an expired Bed Bath & Beyond coupon.
Penny reached for her wineglass and looked at Olivia. “Who else can you ask for a reference? I’m sure there are loads of other people who would be happy to do it.”
“I don’t know.” Olivia couldn’t stand the thought of extending herself all over again. She wouldn’t be able to deal with another rejection. Her soul would probably depart her body, leaving the empty husk of her earthly vessel behind to crumble into dust, and it didn’t seem fair to make the janitorial staff clean that up.
“It won’t be this bad the next time,” Penny said, reading her mind.
“Yeah, because maybe there won’t be a next time.”
“But you still need a reference for the leadership program.”
Olivia’s stomach tightened. “I don’t know if I can go through this again.”
Penny leaned forward and patted her on the knee. “Sure you can. You just happened to pick the biggest butthead in the office. Which, admittedly, is bad luck—but now you’ve gotten all your bad luck out of the way. No one else is going to say no to you. How could they? You’re awesome.”
“What if he’s right though, and I have no business applying for this?” Olivia sagged forward and pressed the heels of her palms against her forehead. “Maybe I’m fooling myself thinking I’ve got a chance.”
“He’s not right. He doesn’t know anything about you. I do, and I’m telling you you’re going to make an amazing manager.” There was steel in Penny’s voice. Mama-bear mode was still in full effect.
“You don’t know what I’m like at work,” Olivia protested. “I’m a different person there than I am around my friends.” Penny probably wouldn’t even recognize the fake, friendly, positive person Olivia pretended to be in her professional life. She was such a fucking fake, she made herself nauseous.
“Well, duh. I’m sure you don’t walk around the office calling people dickweasels or buttnuggets—even when they probably deserve it.”
“They do deserve it. And I never say anything.”
“Of course you don’t. You have to get along with people at work, and from everything you’ve ever told me, you’re really good at it. Don’t let this miserable jackass undermine your confidence in yourself. You’re smart, kind, and professional.” Penny reached out and squeezed Olivia’s hand. “People love you—a lot more than you think they do.”
Whether that was true or not, Olivia was going to have to gather the shattered remnants of her dignity and face Adam Cortinas at work on Monday. Pretending he didn’t exist wasn’t an option. The two systems they managed needed to interface, which meant so did they.
But hopefully not too much. As long as their interactions were kept to a minimum, she could handle it.
Maybe.
“What do you think’s going on in there?”
Olivia swallowed a sigh of irritation as Trevor, one of the other junior analysts on the commercial systems team, perched his ass on the corner of her desk.
Trevor was always coming over to chat whenever he didn’t feel like doing his own work. Which wouldn’t be so bad, except his idea of chatting too often involved him explaining stupid internet memes to her, as if she didn’t have her own Facebook account and hadn’t already seen the same jokey photo in her feed a dozen times already.
The thing about memes was that they weren’t nearly as funny when someone was describing them to you—assuming they’d even been funny in the first place.
“In where?” she asked, offering Trevor a false smile.
“Conference room.” He gestured with his coffee mug, which featured a cartoon of a bear pooping into a bucket for reasons that Olivia had never understood and did not care to ask about. “Gavin is in there with Cortinas and the CIO, and he doesn’t look happy.”
All the men around the office called Adam by his last name, like he was so
me kind of hero in an action movie. It was a physical effort not to roll her eyes.
“Which one doesn’t look happy? Gavin?” She refused to turn and look.
“All of them. Well, except Cortinas, who looks the same as always. Nothing ever fazes that guy. He’s like a robot.”
Yeah, an evil robot, Olivia thought to herself.
“The CIO looks pissed, and Gavin looks like he’s about to wet himself.”
“Really?” That inspired her to turn around for a peek.
Sure enough, Gavin was pacing around the conference room with that constipated look he got whenever things were going badly. Brad, the CIO, was seated at the head of the table looking annoyed as fuck, which was never a good sign.
Olivia told herself she wasn’t going to look at Adam, but her eyes slid over to him of their own accord. He was kicked back in his chair, either listening intently or on the verge of falling asleep. It was hard to tell from his bland expression.
As she was turned around in her seat watching them, Gavin suddenly stopped his frenetic pacing and looked right at her. Brad and Adam immediately followed suit, so all three of them were now staring directly at her.
“What the fuck?” Trevor whispered as Olivia snapped her head around again, turning her back on the conference room. “Why are they all staring at us?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Are they still looking?”
Trevor stared at the conference room with the self-preservation instincts of a possum that had wandered onto train tracks and been hypnotized by the light of an oncoming train. “Yeah. Totally.”
“Are they looking at you or are they looking at me?” Olivia asked.
“You, I think. Did you fuck something up?”
“Not that I know of.” Not since that fiasco with the Tulelake plant, anyway. Christ on a tricycle, could that be what this was about? The one thing she’d fucked up in her four years at the company. And it wasn’t even her fault. The head of the west desk was the one who’d insisted on the three-by-eight generator configuration.
Olivia had tried to talk him out of it, knowing that configuration wouldn’t work with that plant, but he’d waved her concerns away. What was she supposed to do? Refuse to follow a directive from the head trader? Of course, then his way had backfired, just like she’d known it would, and the company had been fined by CAISO. But because he was a trader who made the company millions of dollars, culpability had magically bounced right off him and onto her.
“Okay, they’re not looking anymore,” Trevor said.
Olivia exhaled. “What are they doing?”
“Gavin’s talking to Brad and Cortinas now.”
“Okay.” Hopefully the danger had passed. Maybe it was just a coincidence that they’d all been looking this direction. Maybe it didn’t have anything to do with her.
“Oh my god, my high school buddy posted this hilarious video on Facebook this morning,” Trevor said, and Olivia girded herself. “There’s this little kid, and she’s trying to get Alexa to play that baby shark song. You know the one, it goes like—”
Olivia’s phone vibrated loudly on the desk next to her. A feeling of cold dread sank into her bones as she read the notification. It was a text from Gavin:
Come join us in the conference room.
What in the pluperfect hell was going on? Had Adam said something about her?
Trevor peered over her shoulder. “Guess they were definitely looking at you, then.”
She pushed herself to her feet. “We who are about to die salute you.”
“I’ll pray for you.”
“Thanks.” When she turned toward the conference room, all three of its occupants were staring at her again, and none of them looked happy. Even Adam looked like he’d swallowed a wasp.
Olivia wended her way through the maze of cubicles and pulled the conference room door open. Maybe if she didn’t actually step across the threshold, she could remain uninvolved. Maybe they just needed to ask her a quick question. Something simple she could answer quickly and then go back to work.
“You rang?” She hovered just outside the door, pointedly refusing to look at Adam or acknowledge his presence.
“Come in.” Gavin waved her to the chair across from him. “Close the door.”
Fuck me sideways. Olivia mustered all her resources to paste a pleasant expression on her face as she obeyed.
Brad offered her a strained smile. “Thanks for joining us. Gavin, you want to bring her up to speed?”
She’d only had occasion to speak to the CIO a handful of times before, and he always put her on edge. There was a briskness beneath the surface of his politeness, like he wouldn’t hesitate to cut you loose as soon as you stopped being useful to him.
“Sure.” Gavin shifted in his seat and ran a hand through his thinning brown hair. He was only in his mid-thirties, but with his pleated pants and unfashionable haircut, he looked more middle-aged than Brad, despite being almost twenty years his junior. “We’ve finally inked the deal on our acquisition of the Walhalla plant in Texas,” he told Olivia.
“Great.” It had been in the works for months, but these things had a tendency to move slowly.
“The original plan was to have the plant onboarded within thirty days,” Gavin said, shifting his eyes to Brad.
It was an aggressive timeline, but not impossible for a smaller acquisition. Olivia nodded, confused why everyone seemed so worked up about it.
Brad’s smile became even more strained. “Unfortunately, it’s taken three weeks to do our due diligence and get the deal cleared by the regulators. But in the meantime…” He winced like he’d stepped on a Lego. “A commitment was made to the board of directors to have the plant fully integrated with our systems and operating as part of our fleet by the end of June.”
The end of June was only a few days away. There was no way they would be able to make it.
Olivia couldn’t help noticing Brad’s use of the passive voice, which implied the commitment had somehow made itself, magically. It certainly wasn’t because he had made an unrealistic commitment to the board of his own free will.
“Which only leaves our teams a week to do our thing,” Gavin added with a grimace.
So Brad was holding them to the deadline? No wonder Gavin looked like he was going to piss himself. A week was insane. That was faster than their team had ever taken on any plant before.
“I see,” Olivia said, trying to keep her expression neutral. “How can I help?”
Gavin cast a guilty look in Brad’s direction before answering. “Normally, I’d go out there with Cortinas and handle the commercial systems side of the integration myself.” Gavin’s eyes darted briefly to Adam, whose face was utterly blank. He might not even have been listening. For all Olivia could tell, he was composing a grocery list in his head or silently reciting the Animaniacs nations of the world song.
“The thing is,” Gavin went on, “my wife’s due date is in two weeks, and the doc thinks they might need to induce early. Which means I can’t leave town right now.” His gaze settled on Olivia. “So I’m sending you to Texas with Cortinas instead.”
She felt her eyes widen. Everyone was staring at her—including Adam now. She swallowed and forced herself to take a slow breath through her nose before venturing to speak. “When?”
“Tomorrow,” Gavin said.
“And we’re supposed to have the plant online when?”
It was Brad who answered this time. “Friday midnight.”
Four days. Not even four days. With travel time, it was more like three and a half.
She considered her words carefully before speaking. “I’ll need to do some research before I can say with any confidence whether—”
“Look, I’m briefing the board in an hour,” Brad said, drumming his fingers on the tabletop. “I just need to know if this can be done or not.”
Olivia tried again. “Sorry, that’s what I was about to say. I’ll need to know more before I can make that commitment.
Can we wait a half day before talking to the board?”
“It’s feasible,” Adam said, speaking up for the first time. “I’ve done it this fast before.”
Olivia shot a glare at him. “Yes, but we don’t even know the characteristics of this plant, or what shape its gear is in. We need more information before we can—”
“Sure, and you can do that research on the plane,” Gavin interrupted. “Cortinas is the one with the most experience here, and I trust his opinion. If he says we can do it, we can do it.”
Of course. The rock star had just declared they could do it, which meant no one was going to listen to Olivia or her concerns. Why should they? She’d never done this before. Adam was the expert, and he was confident.
Brad looked pleased. “Exactly what I wanted to hear! Thank you all. Keep me posted on how things are progressing, Gavin.” He stood, sweeping his phone and tablet off the table, and exited the conference room before anyone could say anything else.
“Great,” Gavin said, looking relieved. “Glad that’s settled. You two will fly out first thing tomorrow. That’s not a problem, is it?”
“Nope,” Adam said, and lifted a quizzical eyebrow at Olivia.
“Not a problem at all.” She forced a smile, trying to project more confidence than she felt.
Gavin pushed his chair back and headed for the door. “Good luck, you two. You’re gonna need it.”
Olivia’s guts churned as she watched him walk away. A commitment to the board of directors that she wasn’t even sure she could meet, and daily reports to the boss that would be relayed to the CIO, if not higher—she’d wanted more responsibility and exposure, but this felt more like an ambush than an opportunity. Like she was being set up to fail.