The Promise Read online

  Further, job hunting sucked.

  So a lot was riding on this meeting.

  If they said no, I still was going to quit. I just was really hoping I wouldn’t have to do that.

  “I’m fine,” I answered Tandy on a lie.

  “You seem weird,” she noted, walking in, eyes to me. She sat across from me and went on, “I know it’s nosy, and it’s cool if you don’t answer, but Friday you seemed to be in a really good mood. But you went back to your guy this weekend and now you seem, well…not in a good mood.”

  She was so sweet.

  It would suck if I had to lose her.

  Another reason for me not to be okay.

  “We’re fine, Tandy,” I assured her, and at least that was the truth, though it was an understatement.

  “Okay,” she replied, sounding like she didn’t buy it.

  “I just have this meeting with Lloyd on my mind,” I explained. “Once I’ve had the meeting with him, I’ll give you the full story.”

  She tipped her head to the side and I didn’t like the look on her face when she did it.

  “Should I be worried?” she asked, explaining the look.

  “No,” I said quickly, reaching a hand toward her and tapping it stupidly but hopefully comfortingly on my desk. “Absolutely not. It’s not about you.”

  She suddenly looked evasive (thus, clearly the desk tapping didn’t work) as she murmured, “I just thought you might have found out…” She trailed off, twisted her neck to look to my wall of window, then back to me, but she said no more.

  “Found out what?” I prompted.

  “Nothing. It’s stupid. It’s probably not anything,” she stated.

  “What’s probably not anything?” I pushed, not getting a good feeling about her manner, which wasn’t like her at all.

  She drew in a breath, then rocked her ass in her chair like she was settling in and leaned toward me. When she spoke again, her voice was lower, quiet, conspiratorial.

  “It wasn’t a big deal. I told Lloyd and he took care of it, so I really didn’t want to worry you, but Thursday, when you were taking a personal day up in Chicago, Mr. Bierman came and asked me to give him a copy of your schedule. He asked how many times you’d been up to Chicago on company business and how many days off you’ve taken.”

  Oh my God.

  “Why would he do that?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she answered. “And I didn’t give it to him. I told him to talk to Lloyd if he had questions about your schedule. He got kind of dicky, as is his way, and Heath saw it happening. He came out and intervened. Mr. Bierman backed down and took off, but Heath told me I should report it to Lloyd and went with me when I did. When I told him, Lloyd looked really pissed off. He promised me he’d take care of it. Then he and Heath were in his office forever and it didn’t look like the conversation was happy. Later, Sandy told me when Heath was in San Francisco last week, Mr. Bierman asked for the same kind of information about him.”

  Sandy was Heath’s assistant and Sandy was like Tandy in the sweet, smart, on the ball, and very pretty department.

  I also had a feeling Heath was nailing Sandy, which wouldn’t be good, dipping your toe in the company pool with someone who worked under you. But if he was, she wasn’t talking and, obviously, Heath wasn’t. If she was talking, Tandy would tell me.

  That said, they had a lot of closed-door meetings where you could see through the windows that they were smiling at each other and laughing a lot. In these times, Heath was not looking at her like he thought she arranged his flights to Seattle so well, it was worthy of a belly laugh but, instead, like he enjoyed having her in his office the same way that he would enjoy sharing a glass of wine with her later and getting a blowjob from her after that.

  However, at that moment, I couldn’t think about Heath and Sandy.

  I could only think that I was getting pissed at Randy Bierman, resident dick.

  “For freak’s sake, why?” I snapped.

  Tandy rubbed her lips together uncomfortably, then leaned further toward me and said, “Through the grapevine, he thinks you’re both underperforming.”

  “We’re both exceeding our numbers,” I pointed out.

  “I know that. Lloyd knows that. Mr. Berger knows that. But the girls have been talking and we actually think it’s not about you and Heath. It’s about Lloyd. He’s targeting you guys to undercut Lloyd.”

  I felt my eyes get wide.

  “What? Why? Lloyd is awesome.”

  This time, she scooted forward on her chair so she was leaning into my desk when she whispered to me, “A while back, after Dr. Gartner was murdered, Lloyd asked for some details about Tenrix that he couldn’t find on the servers, the usual stuff that he as a director should have access to. Important stuff, I guess, though I don’t know what it is. But it wasn’t there. He needs it, seeing as he has to guide you and Heath in guiding your reps to sell the product so he should have access to it. Mr. Bierman told him he’d find it and give it to Lloyd. He didn’t. Lloyd’s asked, like, a million times. Before Miranda took off to production, she told Jennie who told me that she heard Mr. Bierman and Lloyd arguing in one of the back conference rooms, Lloyd telling Mr. Bierman if he didn’t provide that information in twenty-four hours, he was going to Mr. Berger.”

  “Did he provide it?”

  She nodded. “Yes, but this is where the weird comes in.”

  Oh shit.

  More weird.

  “What weird?” I asked.

  “Kathleen said that the dates on the computer files were that day.”

  Kathleen was Lloyd’s secretary, but even so, Lloyd got his email directly and confidential documents would not go through her.

  “How did she know that?”

  Tandy started looking uncomfortable. “She, uh…kinda looked over his shoulder and saw it.”

  I let that go and pushed, “This means…?”

  “Frankie, those files should have been saved by Dr. Gartner, like, months ago. Some of them years. They were all saved on the same day and that day was that day.”

  Oh no.

  I had a feeling I knew what that meant and there was no way it was good.

  “Someone amended them?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. It didn’t escape Lloyd’s attention and Kathleen told me he went to Mr. Bierman about it. Mr. Bierman explained it, but, Frankie, it’s fishy. Everyone thinks so.”

  I did too.

  What I also thought was that perhaps the assistants were sticking their noses a bit too far into something that might not be real healthy.

  So I advised, “You need to be careful, honey.”

  She looked to her knees.

  “Tandy,” I called and she looked back to me. “You need to be careful. I get he’s a dick, he’s being more than his usual dick, office politics are getting nasty, he’s acting weird, and you guys are curious. But I’m not thinking any of this is good, so whatever you do, you gotta do in a way I can protect you. Lloyd or Bierman or anyone finds out you guys are nosing around this, bottom line, it isn’t any of your business and this information is probably confidential. Because of that, what you’re doing will be hard to explain and might be grounds for, at best, a written warning, at worst, dismissal. It also means, if you’re found out, those are serious transgressions and I can’t protect you.”

  What I didn’t tell her was that Dr. Gartner, whose files had been amended, was dead, something she knew, but she might not know what that could mean.

  And what it meant was that if one had to do with the other, I really couldn’t protect her.

  “Let it play out,” I said to finish it. “I’m lookin’ after you when I tell you to do your job, stay safe, and let whatever’s gonna happen, happen. Lloyd isn’t stupid. He’s been with this company for six years. He’s invested. He’s not Bierman’s biggest fan. Let the big fish prove who has the sharpest teeth.”

  She rubbed her lips together in a way that didn’t give
me warm fuzzies. These feelings turned downright prickly when she avoided my eyes for several seconds. But I felt better when she looked back to me and nodded.

  “Okay, honey, share that wisdom with Sandy and Jennie and whoever and be smart, okay?”

  “Okay, Frankie.”

  I smiled at her.

  She gave me a small, weird smile back that also didn’t give me the warm fuzzies and left my office.

  I looked back at my computer and saw I had seventeen minutes until my meeting.

  This meant I snatched up my cell, found Benny’s number, and connected.

  He answered with, “Yo, cara, I thought your meeting wasn’t until four?”

  “Ben, Bierman is targeting me and my colleague Heath in an effort to make my boss look bad, and the way he’s targeting me is by trying to get information on my trips to Chicago and my personal days.”

  Ben was silent a minute before he muttered, “Fuck.”

  “Uh-huh,” I agreed.

  “You covered on that?” he asked.

  “Time off isn’t accrued very quickly in your first year, but you do get some. I have three sick days and another personal day accrued so that’s kosher. My reps are producing so that’s kosher. And there isn’t a trail to find where I was incommunicado while I was in Chicago because I was never incommunicado when I was in Chicago. That said, Bierman is moving from dick to total asshole. I don’t know how total assholes act and office politics can get ugly. It’s not unusual for team members to get targeted in order to take down a higher up, and those team members are the first to fall.”

  “So you think it’s not a good idea when he’s lookin’ at your time in Chicago to ask to work from Chicago,” Ben surmised.

  “No. I think that you and I both need to be prepared for this to get ugly. And the you part of that is, if this gets ugly, you’re gonna have to listen to me rant and put up with me regularly freaking out. Because I work my ass off for this company, and if they say no to me workin’ from Chicago, so be it. But if I get targeted by an asshole with a vendetta against my boss, I am not the kind of girl who goes down without a fight.”

  There was a smile in his voice when he said, “That’s my Frankie.”

  Yeah. That was what I was.

  Benny’s Frankie.

  Suddenly, I wasn’t nervous anymore.

  “There’s more,” I told him.

  “The way you say that doesn’t sound like you wanna tell me you’re in the mood to call me tonight after I get home from the restaurant so we can have phone sex.”

  At this, I made a mental note to set my alarm so I could wake up and call Benny when he got home from the restaurant so we could have phone sex.

  Then I said, “No, babe, that’s not the more. The more is, my assistant, in cahoots with several of the other assistants, found out there’s more weird shit goin’ down to add to the seriously weird shit already goin’ down with Bierman.”

  “Stay out of it, Frankie,” Ben ordered, and my back went straight.

  “I am,” I hissed. “But my assistant isn’t and I like her. I told her to drop it, but she assured me she would in a way that didn’t give me warm fuzzies.”

  “She puts her neck out there, that’s her problem, not yours.”

  “Ben—” I started.

  “It’s not yours, Francesca,” he interrupted me. “You told her to stand down. She doesn’t, her decision, her consequences.”

  When he said the word “consequences,” my stomach started to turn.

  “Babe?” Benny called.

  “What?” I asked.

  “You with me on that?”

  “She’s a good gal, Benny. I like her. And what’s she’s uncovered is not good.”

  “So report it to your boss,” Benny advised.

  “If I do, he’ll know she and her crew have been snooping around.”

  “Her consequences,” Benny repeated. “If it’s not good, you report it to him and let him deal with it.”

  “He already knows it, I think,” I muttered.

  “Right. Then that’s good. Let it lie.”

  I drew in breath and looked down at the clock on my computer.

  Fourteen minutes until go time.

  “I gotta go,” I said to Ben. “I need to mentally prepare for the possibility I’ll be instigating a job search tonight, something that’s on my list of favorite things to do just above having all my hair pulled out by the roots.”

  There was laughter in his voice when he advised, “Eyes to the prize, babe.”

  Yeah.

  Eyes to the prize.

  “Okay, honey,” I said softly.

  “Call me when you get out of the meeting,” he ordered.

  “I will.”

  “Good luck, tesorina,” he said softly.

  “Thanks, Ben,” I whispered.

  “Love you, babe.”

  “Right back at you.”

  I heard his chuckle before he said, “Later,” got my “Later” in return, and we disconnected.

  I was able to concentrate on replying to two whole emails before I sucked in breath, got out of my chair, and headed to Lloyd’s office.

  * * * * *

  It was past five by the time I got out of Lloyd’s office.

  Not because we had an in-depth strategy meeting about how I could continue to do my job but from a home office. Instead, because Lloyd took our meeting as an opportunity to get briefed about absolutely everything I was doing.

  He was checking up. Not because he had any issues with my performance. So he could get his ducks in a row because he was bracing for impact.

  Tandy was gone by the time I got back to my office. I checked email, sorted some stuff on my desk, then I closed down, grabbed my cell, and took off. I didn’t hit Go on Benny until I was in the elevator and I only did it because I’d entered the elevator alone.

  “What’d he say, babe?” was his greeting.

  He wanted good news for me. He also wanted my ass in Chicago.

  That made me happy.

  My news did not.

  “He said he has no problem with it, but it’s unprecedented, no one has done it, and he’d have to talk to Mr. Berger,” I told him. “He also said he’d do that this week and get back to me.”

  “With his ‘no problem,’ did he really seem like he had no problem with it?”

  Ben’s question said Ben wasn’t stupid, but I knew that already.

  “He wasn’t exactly doing cartwheels and congratulating me on the progression of my relationship with the man I love.”

  I heard the smile in his voice, even if what he said next was serious. “So you have no idea if he’ll back your play.”

  “I only know he likes me and doesn’t want to lose me. How that’ll be communicated when he approaches Berger, I have no clue.”

  “So no answers, just a step closer to them,” he muttered.

  “Yeah,” I answered.

  “You gonna wait it out or plan ahead?”

  “Tonight, I’ll be trolling through online want ads while eating my Lean Cuisine.”

  Ben sounded surprised when he asked, “You eat Lean Cuisine?”

  I grinned at my phone as the door to the elevator opened. “No, honey. I’ll probably stop at Arby’s.”

  There was a moment of silence before he murmured, “Need my baby home so I can feed her better.”

  Now, that gave me the warm fuzzies.

  “Minute by minute, Benny,” I said softly, walking through the parking lot to my car.

  “Minute by minute, babe,” he replied. “Gotta get back to the kitchen.”

  “Okay, Ben.”

  “Later, cara.”

  “Later, honey, love you.”

  “Back at you.”

  I grinned as I disconnected. Then I opened my car door, maneuvered myself in, holding my phone in one hand, purse over my shoulder and my computer bag in my other hand.

  I got settled, put the key to the ignition, and looked unseeing through the windshield.
But at what I saw, I focused and didn’t turn the key.

  This was because Tandy, Sandy and Jennie, with freaking Miranda (who was supposed to be at the production facility) and the IT geek guy, who came up and set up my computer on my first day (his name escaped me), were all standing in a huddle beside a blue Honda CR-V.

  And the huddle didn’t look like Tandy was letting things go.

  I had half a mind to get out and go have a chat with them, but that half a mind was taken when my phone rang. I looked at it, sitting on the top of my purse in the passenger seat, and saw it said Cat Calling.

  Cat was back, though that didn’t mean we had girlie chats every day about what we wore, what hot guys we’d seen, and how our men were treating us.

  Still, hearing that she and Art had dried out and why, I was glad for her and I’d always be glad to have her back. The family was growing like crazy, but Cat and Art not drinking and giving a shit about their marriage, their future, and the kind of future they could give their family made me a lot more excited about the possibility of them bringing more Concetti blood into the world than the tangled webs my brother and father were weaving.

  I grabbed my phone, took the call, and greeted, “Hey, babe.”

  “Welp, it happened. Dad’s bitch popped out our little sister. Get this, her name is Domino.”

  I blinked at the windshield, then asked, “Domino?”

  “Affirmative,” she answered. “Dom…in…fuckin’…o.”

  Oh God. I couldn’t even begin to enumerate how many ways mean kids could make fun of that name.

  What were they thinking?

  Cat cut into my thoughts. “You want more?”

  What I wanted was to know why Chrissy hadn’t called me to share the good news, and more importantly, why she hadn’t consulted with me on names.

  I didn’t get the chance to tell Cat that.

  Cat kept talking.

  “Ma’s latest dude dumped her and she’s out fifteen thousand dollars because she bought the dress and can’t get any of her deposits back on all the other shit.”

  My mouth dropped open, and for a few seconds, I didn’t say a word. This was because I couldn’t believe it. None of Ma’s other men bailed on her pre-wedding. Post, yes. Pre, never.