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A fist tightened around his heart. Losing Diana wasn’t an option. He would make this right. Somehow.
If he hadn’t lost her already.
Tracey, his director of PR, was waiting to do a final briefing with him before the press conference when he arrived.
“We have a problem. The victims’ families just issued a statement to hijack our news.”
She handed him her smartphone. He read the statement. Felt the color drain from his face at the astronomical settlement figure the group was putting forth. It would cripple Grant.
“It’s a bargaining tactic,” he told Tracey.
“So we treat it as one. We have thirty minutes to craft a response.”
Harrison was campaigning in California. The future of Grant lay in what he did next. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath and exhaled.
“All right, then. Let’s go.”
* * *
The scale of the press gathered in the briefing room when Coburn entered, flanked by his PR team, was breathtaking. Every major broadcast outlet in the country was there, each of them clamoring to turn a tragedy into prime-time news.
His rock-solid readiness of earlier that morning had been shattered by the preemptive tactics of the class action suit, leaving him raw and shaken. By attempting to do the right thing and win in the court of public opinion, he had exposed Grant to a well-orchestrated, perfectly timed opening salvo by the opposing counsel. One that could devastate it.
He scanned the room, his gaze moving over the far wall, where Jack Nieman and a couple of other board members stood. The sight of the stunning dark-haired woman standing to his right left his heart suspended in midbeat as his gaze locked with his wife’s.
She had come. She had kept her promise to be there for him, despite the rash ultimatum he’d thrown at her on Friday night. The discovery made his knees go weak.
Diana’s dark gaze was steady and clear as she stared at him across the sea of faces. Stay the course, her eyes said. What’s right is never wrong.
It reinforced everything his wavering brain needed to hear.
Tracey touched his arm. His heart kicked back into motion as he pulled his gaze away from his wife and he and his director of PR walked to the front of the room. Tracey stepped onto the podium, introduced him and indicated he’d give a short statement followed by a Q&A. The Q&A had been his decision. Tracey had warned him it might get ugly, likely would get ugly, but the only thing on his mind was total and complete transparency.
He read the statement. Watched the frown on Jack Nieman’s face grow as he took total responsibility for a tragedy that could have been prevented. The buzzing room went completely silent as he apologized to the families of the victims and vowed to do right by them. “It has not been Grant’s finest moment,” he finished, “but we will earn your trust again. I promise you that.”
Tracey stepped forward and began fielding questions. The first, from a national news reporter in the front row, had him closing his eyes.
“What do you think your father would say if he was here today?”
He opened them. “He would say we need to do better. And we will.”
The crucifixion went on for fifty minutes. Settlement numbers were thrown at him. Questions about the company’s safety protocols. The viability of Grant was raised.
If he’d thought it was going to be tough, it had been ten times worse. He could only hope for his legacy’s sake that it had been enough.
“The one-on-one with the Wall Street Journal,” Tracey prompted.
He flicked his gaze to where his wife stood, only the space beside Jack Nieman was empty now. Diana had left.
His heart plummeted. The urge to go after her, to dump the Wall Street Journal in favor of keeping his wife, saving the one thing that meant everything to him, was so fierce it took all he had to keep his feet firmly rooted to the ground and nod at his director of PR he was ready.
Diana had left a door open. He would have to wait a few hours to ensure it never closed again.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
DIANA WAS AFRAID to watch the news that evening, too terrified to see what that shark of a press corps would do to her husband following the public dismantlement of him that morning. Heart in her throat, she paced the hardwood floors of Beth’s tiny living room. When her friend still wasn’t home by six, she gave in and turned on the news. The recall was the top story in the broadcast.
She sat down on the sofa as the host introduced a panel of experts assembled to offer their opinion on what the recall would mean for Grant and the industry. The first question put to the panel was what they thought of her husband’s performance today. Her hands twisted in her lap, her heartbeat accelerating as the tough-as-nails head of a national industry organization took the question first. The graying official shook his head ruefully. “Undoubtedly one of the gutsiest displays I’ve seen in my fourteen-year career. The tide could have gone either way on this one. Instead, Coburn Grant pulled the public on his side with a magnificent, rock-solid performance that was a master class in brilliant crisis communications. He may just have saved an American icon.”
