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Nope, not one second more.
There was a boat she needed to catch.
* * *
Nora Ruben.
Of course her name would be at the top of his goddamn list.
Alex had stepped into the hall to get some air, after Hedstrom sucked the room of it with that horrible news. And why had the guy looked directly at the stunner in blue and black when he announced it?
Alex didn’t bother looking at the rest of the names before stashing the paper back into his pants pocket. Was it coincidence the CEO had led him right to Employee One and introduced them?
Sheila, his ex-girlfriend who had been raised on a farm, once told him you never named the animals intended for slaughter.Name them and you form a connection with them.
Easy for her to say – not so easy when your ancestors were tattooed with numbers and herded into cattle cars.
Wow, Alex. Life of the party here.
Even without a business degree, Alex knew certain jobs and departments overlapped and became redundant during M&As. And as his uncle had reminded him before he boarded the plane: “This kind of thing happens all the time in the private-sector, Alex. Employment ‘at-will’ is Business 101 stuff.”
They had disagreed on how to handle the layoffs from the start. Marty was focused on the numbers – specifically, how the gross salaries of the twenty-seven New York employees who’d landed on the list conveniently matched with his projections for next year’s budget, once erased.
Alex wanted to see the inner workings of the office come Monday, and make determinations without the bias of such a list.
Then again, he had once taken apart an entire piano because he wanted to see how it worked. It had been a bigger job than anticipated.
And bloodier. Piano wires were sharp.
You’re in and out in one day, kid. Numbers. Hand over the list and no one gets hurt.
He didn’t need his Uncle Marty in his head right now. He needed to get back to the holiday party, make those connections. Because even he could tell something didn’t add up when it came to Britesmith.
And he definitely didn’t want to think about the list. Not when Nora Ruben was making a beeline out of the party and right toward him.
ChapterThree
“Hey, you want to get out of here?”
He was kind of cute, for a Bridge and Tunnel guy. Even as he had tried not to choke on that latke-lookalike earlier. Hers was sitting like lead in the pit of her stomach, after Hedstrom’s little speech.
No bonus.
No half the rent from Libby.
No Florida February.
Leave it to our trailblazer.
“Lead the way, Ruben.”
She liked the way Beck called her that. Not like Hedstrom, who used her surname as a punchline. Coming from Beck, it felt as if they had been in the trenches for years together; not like two quasi-strangers who just happened to be on the same payroll. Whose paths would only cross at the random corporate retreat or quarterly team-builder.
Or holiday parties from hell.
She also liked the feel of his suit sleeve brushing against her bare arm as they made their way into the mezzanine.
“Let me grab my coat upstairs and – oh, hell. Never mind.”
