Chapter 3 — The Name on the Building
921 Words
Amelia didn't remember the walk home. She remembered standing under the café awning, and she remembered arriving at her apartment door twenty minutes later with her keys already in her hand, but the space between those two things had dissolved into a kind of static, replayed loop: Mr. Sinclair. Mr. Sinclair. Mr. Sinclair.
Sinclair Global Holdings. The name on the letterhead of the rejection email she still hadn't brought herself to open. The name on the building she'd walked out of two hours ago with her spine forced straight and her portfolio damp at the corners. The name, apparently, of the man who had split a blueberry muffin with her and admitted, unprompted, that he'd never learned to swim.
She let herself into the apartment, dropped her bag by the door, and didn't bother turning on the lights before sliding down against it, sitting on the floor of her own hallway like a woman twice her age.
"You're doing the sitting-on-the-floor thing," Charlotte said from the kitchen doorway, not even looking up from the toast she was buttering. "That's a top-five-worst-days thing. What happened?"
"I had coffee with the CEO who rejected me for a job four hours before I had coffee with him."
Charlotte's knife stopped mid-stroke. "I'm going to need you to say that again, slower, and with context."
Amelia told her. All of it the interview, the collision, the umbrella, the no-names rule, the muffin, the pineapple pizza argument, the car pulling up, the driver's voice saying Mr. Sinclair like it was a title and not just a name. By the time she finished, Charlotte had abandoned the toast entirely and was sitting cross-legged on the floor across from her, wide-eyed in the particular way she got when a story was better than anything currently streaming.
"So let me get this straight," Charlotte said. "You spent an hour being devastatingly charming at the man who personally decided you weren't experienced enough to be trusted with a spreadsheet."
"He probably didn't personally decide anything. He's the CEO, not HR."
"Amelia."
"What?"
"You're defending him. Four hours after he broke your heart via a hiring manager named Deborah."
"He didn't break my heart, he" Amelia stopped, because she didn't actually have a way to finish that sentence that didn't sound insane. "It's not like that. We're not there's no that. We had coffee. He held an umbrella. It's not a whole thing."
Charlotte reached over and plucked something out of the side pocket of Amelia's bag before Amelia could stop her a plain white business card, heavier stock than seemed necessary, with nothing on it but a name, a title, and a phone number in restrained black type.
Adrian Sinclair. Chief Executive Officer, Sinclair Global Holdings.
"He gave you his card," Charlotte said slowly, "on the same day he rejected your application. That is either the most romantic thing I have ever heard, or the beginning of a lawsuit. I genuinely cannot tell which."
"He didn't know who I was when he gave it to me. That was before" Amelia took the card back, turning it over like the blank side might explain something the front hadn't. "It doesn't matter. I'm not calling him. I don't need a pity job from a man who felt guilty about a coincidence."
"Did it feel like pity?"
Amelia thought of the muffin split carefully in half. The question about the worst part of her day, and the way he'd actually waited for the real answer instead of the easy one. The two missed calls he'd silenced without checking, because he hadn't wanted the evening to end yet either.
"No," she admitted. "It didn't feel like anything close to pity."
"Then what did it feel like?"
Amelia didn't answer that one. She got up instead, tucked the card inside the front cover of the paperback on her nightstand the one she'd been rereading for comfort since March, its spine cracked soft from use and told herself, with the particular firmness of someone who does not believe a word she's saying, that she would never take it out again.
She lay awake a long time that night listening to the last of the rain against the window, running the evening back over in pieces: the muffin, the umbrella, the low steady sound of his voice admitting something true. She thought about the rejection email sitting unread in her inbox, and how strange it was that the worst news of her day and the best conversation of her year had arrived wearing the same name.
She still hadn't opened the email by the time she fell asleep.
Her phone woke her the next morning at 8:14, buzzing insistently against the nightstand not an alarm, an actual call, from a number she didn't recognize, area code local, no name attached.
Amelia stared at it for three full rings, some instinct she couldn't name telling her that answering it was going to change something, before she finally picked up.
"Hello?"
"Ms. Hart?" A woman's voice, brisk and professional, entirely unfamiliar. "This is Diane Okafor, calling from Sinclair Global Holdings. I'm sorry to call so early I was hoping to speak with you about an opportunity that's just opened up. Do you have a few minutes?"
Amelia sat up slowly in bed, the paperback with the business card tucked inside it still sitting on the nightstand exactly where she'd left it, and felt the ground shift under her for the second time in twelve hours.
"I'm listening," she said.
- Writer
