And she’s doing all of it while studying part-time for her MBA. For someone who started just six months ago, she’s doing incredibly well.
I take a sip of my coffee. “This project hit us fast.”
“It did,” she says. “Do you know if we’re going up against another consulting firm for it?”
I shake my head. “Not that I’ve heard. Apparently there’s a family connection, or some sort of friendship, with Victor St. Clair.”
“Ah,” Jenna says. Our CEO at Exciteur prefers to be heard and not seen, hands-off but omnipresent. But he sure is well-connected, and he expects the best. Always, and with no exceptions. His response has been… severe, in the past, when teams failed to deliver.
“Yes,” I say. “That means we need to nail this meeting.”
She nods, face settling deep into thought. Jenna is second-generation Vietnamese, positive to a fault, and loves dressing in lemon-yellow blouses. I’ve never worked better with anyone than I have with her. “Toby is coming with us today?” she asks.
I nod. “I want you two to be my support on this project. We’ll see what the client says today, but… this could be major.”
“Major,” she repeats, and turns back to her computer. With a few quick clicks she’s pulled up the hotel’s website.
Our potential new client.
The Winter Corporation.
It’s the single biggest client I’ve ever been assigned to run point for on a project, and yet I can’t quite look at the name without remembering.
The Winter Hotel, my own private salvation and my own private hell, all in one. The place I learned the truth after months of suspecting, of questioning Percy’s unusually late nights and wandering eyes.
“Is the attendee list up to date?” she asks, and pulls up our internal briefing for this meeting.
We have names and pictures of everyone attending from Winter. Background research is expected from consultants like us.
I need to make sure we walk into that meeting today and kill it… And I need it for so many different reasons.
“Yes,” I say, and narrow my eyes at the list of names… including the one at the very top. “They’ll all be there.”
A few hours later Toby, Jenna and I file into the taxi ready to take us to the imposing stone structure that is the Winter Hotel. It’s an institution in the city, one of the first great hotels, filled with history that dates back to the Gilded Age.
As old and storied as the family itself. Although Percy’s parents consider themselves firmly enmeshed in the world of the Upper East Side, the Brownes’ place is nothing compared to the Winters. They’re woven into the fabric of society itself. Hell, they probably wove it themselves.
I knot my hands tightly together and look out the taxi window, away from Jenna and Toby’s pre-game warm up. Nerves rise up like hummingbirds inside my chest.
It had taken me a while to figure outwho,exactly, had helped me that fateful evening at the Winter Hotel.
He wasn’t a receptionist or a cleaner or a security guard. Not that he’d looked like any of those. He’d had eyes too sharp, a bearing too straight, and a suit far too expensive. There’d been something faintly familiar about him, too, with a face I could have sworn I’d seen before in a crowd.
But I’d just had my world destroyed, and the details had faded, mixed with the emotional whirlpool of that night and all the screaming conversations that followed with Percy.
So I’d almost forgotten about the man who lent me a tissue until the Winter project landed in my newly promoted lap at Exciteur two weeks ago.
The client is a special friend of the CEO.Give it everything you have, and make it fast.
So I’d done that, and it had involved a fair amount of research about the Winters, both the institution and the family that still owns and manages the century-old hotel chain.
It’s one of the few companies that has gotten stronger, and not weaker, under the stewardship of the third and fourth generations.
It took me three minutes into my research to find the name and picture of the current owner and manager of the Winter Corporation. His face had stared back at me from a professional photograph, taken at the foot of the stairs in the Winter Hotel lobby, his dark hair brushed back and eyes looking into the camera like he’s telling the photographer to hurry up.
It was the man from the lobby who I’d so embarrassingly overshared to, who had gotten me a cab and given me a tissue.
I’d been a hairsbreadth away from passing on the project. But I’d just been promoted, and my apartment still felt too big and too lonely to return to in the evenings. So I’d taken the Winter job and decided I’ll just swallow my pride when the time came.