Page 1 of Level With Me
1
CASSANDRA
There arethree things I never thought I’d do:
Take over as CEO of my family’s resort—alongside all four of my siblings;
Take up running—and not just for the subway;
Get rescued by a random fisherman after going ass-over-teakettle into the Quince River.
And yet all three of these were true by eight AM this morning.
Today had started out just fine. Great, in fact, considering how deeply stressed I’d been this past year since I’d come home to Quince Valley to run The Rolling Hills resort. Most mornings I woke up with a sense of dread, thinking about my to-do list before even opening my eyes.
I’d stepped into the Chief Executive role of our family business eight months ago, after discovering our mother didn’t leave the operation of the family business she’d run for the past 30 years to our father like she’d always said she would. She’d left it to her five children.
Together.
It was my middle brother Griffin who’d read the letter over the phone to me, only a few days after Mom passed. “You sure you’re ready to hear this, Cass?”
“I’m fine, Griff.”
I wasn’t fine, but as the oldest, I didn’t like beingnotfine for my siblings.
Griff paused—he always knew when I was lying. Then his grumbly voice began to read the pertinent parts of the letter. “‘I have left the Rolling Hills resort in the hands of my five children. While I understand it may not always be possible to drop the important things you have going on in your own lives, know that it is my deepest wish that you operate the hotel together, as a team. Consider this the grown-up version of us throwing you children together to play nice.’”
Mom knew that we’d drifted apart. This was her way of trying to pull us back together.
I’d hardly been able to breathe as he read the rest of it. I could tell Griff was trying to contain his emotion too. “‘Your father, bless his darling heart, was always the caregiver of this family. He volunteered, of course, to put himself at the helm of this company, but I know he only said it to appease me. We agreed that saddling him with this task wouldn’t be fair given his age and inclinations.’”
I could feel Mom’s heart bleeding through those words. By the time Griff got to the end, I was sobbing.
“‘Your father never had any interest in running my sixth baby. But I hope my babies might.’”
“The lawyers said the letter’s not legally binding,” Griff said.
“But it’s what Mom wanted.”
“Yeah. It is.”
That had been right after she’d passed. Back then, the only thing the five of us agreed on was that there wasn’t a chance we were going to do it. We were all doing our own thing: I was living in Manhattan, working grueling hours as the CEO of a major hedge fund. My twin Eli was flouting his business degree and working as an electrician in Jewel Lakes County, New York, while trying to start a family with his college sweetheart. Griffin, meanwhile, had been doing whatever Griffin did at his cabin up in the woods a half-hour drive from here. Jude was in extended mourning over the end of his pro-tennis career in France, and Chelsea was partying and planning weddings in Martha’s Vineyard.
But while we all carried on pretending like none of this had happened, Dad quietly booked a one-way ticket to Spain. He said he was going to ‘find himself’ on some wilderness trail. Worse, we discovered that the employee who’d been left in charge of operating the hotel in the short term, George, had nearly driven the place into the ground. George had canceled all the required unsexy maintenance on the rooms, like replacing furniture and reinforcing plumbing, and instead had launched a major renovation without doing any due diligence on the companies he’d hired. The company that built the elaborate spas in the hillside had triple charged, and the other company hired to upgrade the hotel itself had gone bankrupt. A whole wing of the resort was now cordoned off. The lost income on those rooms alone was staggering, and our accountant told us point blank that we needed to either up the income fast or sell now before we were left bankrupt.
After a deeply heated, tearful meeting, we decided selling the hotel we’d grown up with would not only be a disservice to Mom, but it would also be like selling a part of our family. For the first time ever, we all agreed on something: we had no choice but to take over operations.
But ever since I’d taken over as CEO, I’d felt like I was in completely over my head trying to figure out what to do to save this business. Yes, the last manager had screwed us over. But over my first few months at the helm, I’d learned that the business had been slowly atrophying anyway; that the spas and other upgrades were his way of trying to refresh the place.
But today that was all going to change. This morning, I woke up filled with optimism.
It wasn’t just the sun streaming in my windows after several weeks of gray clouds and torrential rain, either. Today the Harringtons were coming, and they were going to save the Rolling Hills resort.
It was Eli who’d first mentioned Harrington Consulting.
Blake and Lila Harrington were a husband-and-wife business consulting company whose specialty was resurrecting flagging or outright failing companies. They were so good at what they did, they were dubbed Mr. & Mrs. Fixit. Or sometimes Mr. and Mrs. Shark. Eli had gone to school with Lila Harrington. He’d even been at their wedding—an elaborate New York City Society affair. Eli said they hadn’t kept in touch since school, but I knew if my brother mentioned them, it was because they were solid.
My siblings thought today’s meeting with the Harringtons was going to be to discuss the results of a remote review we’d hired them to do. It had been the cheapest item on their menu—a light-touch analysis of our financials, business plans, and related documents, after which they’d give us recommendations for getting the resort back on track.
