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I knew he worked his ass off. All the senior partners loved him. Rumor had it they even fought over who got to work with him.
So I should not be stung that he got promoted. For god’s sake, he deserved it. I was happy for him, I was. But for some reason, it made me feel even worse about my own situation being stuck with a bitchy boss who thought I could do nothing right.
There was no doubt in my mind one of the reasons she thought I was such a lowlife was that I hadn’t gone to an elite college. She was one of the many snobs at the firm, and let’s face it, in the whole of New York City, who thought that unless you went to the best schools—the Ivies and a few others they deigned to acknowledge—you were a total dolt. Never mind that you could be smart as a whip or the hardest worker they’d ever seen. In her eyes, you were always less than.
But that was okay. I’d show her. Somehow, some way.
I was the first in my fam
ily to even go to college, much less graduate. My parents hadn’t been what you would call the supportive types. They were just normal, middle-class people, working hard to pay the mortgage on our modest little house and to put food on the table for Sparkle and me. I never thought I’d done that badly. Until I moved to New York, that is.
I hadn’t realized until then what real advantages were. Like parents who helped their kids with their homework. Hell, my parents never even asked about my schoolwork, much less got involved with it. Parents who sent their kids to educational summer camps. My family hadn’t even known such things existed. And parents who encouraged after-school activities. I had to come right home and babysit Sparkle.
So in the end, I’d found myself at the mediocre local college. Considering where I’d started, I felt like I’d come a long way. But in the snobbery of New York, even that wasn’t enough.
My phone pinged with the alert I’d set up for emails. Then it pinged again. Several more times.
I was getting emails from the matchmaker!
And lots of them!
I knew there were plenty of guys out there and that it was just a matter of getting in front of them.
I opened the first email from the agency. It included photos and a write-up on someone named Al.
Hmmm. Al looked like he was about sixty years old, even though his bio claimed he was thirty-one.
And it got worse. Al, catch that he was, went on to describe himself as someone who believed he should be the boss of the household…
I clicked the no checkbox and moved on.
The next guy looked better. In his photo, he was good-looking, wore a suit, and appeared to be about thirty-something.
Holy shit. He’d already been married and divorced three times. How do you even do that when you’re only in your thirties? I had to give him credit for trying, though. He was definitely a marrying man. Pass.
It finally dawned on me why Cato acted a little weird when I asked him about his dates. The strange world of dating in the internet age was just a shit show.
I rang my sister.
“Spark, I don’t know about the guys from the matchmaker. They don’t look so good.”
“Oh, c’mon. You’re just being picky. There’s probably a good one or two in there. You just gotta look,” she said. “You know, Maiz, something looks off with Cher—”
“Oh, shit, here comes Eva.” I hung up the phone in Sparkle’s ear. She could tell me about her rat later.
“Maizy,” Eva called, as if I weren’t sitting five feet away from her.
“Hi, Eva. How’s your day going?” Like I really wanted to know.
“It’s going well. It could be better, though.”
Here it comes.
“How could it be better, Eva?” I braced myself.
“Well, if you’d finished up that work I needed you to do for Braden Darby, my day would have been great.”
What power I had, to ruin someone’s day. Like I was god or something.
