Chapter 10
The next morning, Ellen was standing over a conference room table, with a seating chart and a list of fifteen hundred names in front of her. Three hours and four cups of tea later, she had them all wrangled into position. Half an hour later she was back, after some intel that the ex-wife of one of the CEOs was marrying one of the other CEOs, and so they definitely could not be at the same table, which meant that his entire party of six had to be put somewhere else. Then it was changing the name of one of the lead counsels for another company, who’d suddenly been given bed rest for the last three months of her pregnancy. Her female replacement, Ellen had been told in fervent tones over the phone, had a wife and two children in Brooklyn and would not appreciate being seated next to the notoriously homophobic director of a large hospital.
Then there was the tricky question of where to put the CEO of Fielding Paper and guest.
By three o’clock she’d lost all ability to focus on the little slips of paper. When Penny found her, she was flopped in one of the chairs, trying to make her back as horizontal as possible.
“Why don’t you just lie on the floor?” Penny suggested. “No one will see you there.”
“Oh, right. Like Bill Cohen wouldn’t get fodder for years from finding me on the floor of the conference room.”
“Point.” Penny held out a bag. “I thought maybe you’d forgotten to eat.”
“Do two Snickers bars and a handful of Skittles count as lunch? Actually, as breakfast, second breakfast, and lunch? No? Okay, what did you bring me?”
They cleared a corner and ate together; Penny’s shift had had her working through lunch that day as well.
“How was the gym?” Penny asked once they had a few bites in them.
Ellen stopped chewing. “Appalling. I nearly knocked Lucía out.”
“Ouch.”
“It was terrible. I’m lucky she didn’t lose a tooth. I forgot to pull the punch.” Ellen grabbed at her hair and pulled it to the side so hard she turned her head. “How do I forget to pull the punch?”
“Little distracted, maybe?” Penny shook her chip bag out. “Little focused on a certain hottie—”
“Oh God, don’t call him that, Pen, it makes him sound like a kid from a boy band.”
“Okay, a certain walking orgasm—”
“Oh yes, that’s much better,” Ellen said with high sarcasm.
“—who you insist you can’t stand but who gets you more worked up than I’ve seen you in four years.”
“I can’t stand him! He admits his whole lifestyle is geared toward getting cameras to take pictures of him!”
“You ever stop to think why he does that?”
He’d told her. She didn’t tell Penny. “It doesn’t matter why. He’s a public figure, in this town anyway. Now maybe in other places as well, because of the fires. I couldn’t bear to live that kind of life.”
“Really? Don’t you think he might be worth it?” Ellen opened her mouth to say no, but hesitated too long. Penny took out her phone. “Have you seen that first press conference?”
“Yes, and he was being his usual—”
“Not the one from the other day. The first one. After his father died.”
“God, no, and I don’t want to. No, don’t look it up—” But Penny was already searching for it on her phone. “I don’t want to know, Pen. What if that picture screws up my job?”
“Did you talk to Jon?” Penny asked, waiting for the video to load.
“Yes. He says it’s no big deal. But how am I going to face everyone at the ball on Saturday, with what they wrote under the photo ringing in my ears?”
“It’s the Herald, Ellen; your guests aren’t exactly that paper’s target audience. Here.”
Twenty-two-year-old Kane was gorgeous. And devastated. Seeing him like this, Ellen realized that the Kane she knew had a hardness to his face that was missing here. Kane’s throat closed up several times while he talked: when he said that the mill that had killed his father wouldn’t be rebuilt; when he apologized for the jobs that would be lost, and how determined he was that they’d hire everyone back when they could; when he talked about how many years he’d hoped to learn from his father, that were now gone.
Then the press had asked him question after question about the fire and the unions and the employees and what was going to close and what was going to stay open, and he stood there and took it all, while he got paler and paler. When it was over, he still remembered to help his mother carefully out of her chair.
