The Summer We Forgot to Say Goodbye

Chapter 4 — The Second Chance

Diane Okafor talked fast, in the clipped, efficient cadence of someone who managed a great many things at once and had long ago stopped wasting words on people who could keep up. A position had opened in the brand strategy division, she explained separate from the one Amelia had interviewed for, reporting to a different director entirely, with a start date that assumed, apparently, that Amelia had already said yes.

"I have to be honest," Amelia said, pacing a tight loop around her bedroom, phone pressed hard to her ear. "I interviewed for a different role at Sinclair Global yesterday. I was told I didn't have enough experience."

"I'm aware," Diane said, without missing a beat. "This role has different requirements. Mr. Sinclair flagged your file personally after reviewing candidates for the strategy division said your presentation showed exactly the kind of thinking we're short on internally."

Amelia stopped pacing. "Mr. Sinclair reviewed my file."

"He reviews every file for that division. It's not unusual." Diane's tone gave away nothing, professionally smooth in a way that made it impossible to tell whether that was entirely true. "Can I put you down for an interview Thursday at ten? Ms. Langford will be conducting it she runs strategy."

Amelia should have said no. Every instinct she had, the ones that had kept her steady through two years of freelance work and a rental market that ate people alive, told her that walking back into that building was walking directly into a complication she did not have the bandwidth for.

"Thursday works," she heard herself say instead.

She hung up and sat very still on the edge of her bed for a long moment, the paperback with the business card still tucked inside it watching her from the nightstand like it had an opinion about all this.

She didn't call Adrian. She told herself that was restraint, not curiosity she was too proud to indulge. She spent the next three days doing what she always did before anything that mattered over-preparing, rereading Sinclair Global's public filings until she could recite their last two annual reports from memory, rehearsing the version of herself that would walk in Thursday sounding like she belonged there.

The Sinclair Global building looked different in daylight bigger, colder, all that glass throwing back a version of the sky that made the whole structure look like it was made of something other than what it actually was. Amelia rode the elevator to the fourteenth floor with her portfolio held against her chest like armor, and stepped out into a reception area that smelled like money and good coffee.

"Ms. Hart?" A woman rose from behind the reception desk not the receptionist, Amelia realized quickly, but someone senior enough to be doing the receptionist's job as a courtesy, or a test. Victoria Langford was tall, immaculate, the kind of beautiful that had clearly been curated as carefully as a business strategy. Her handshake was firm enough to make a point. "Victoria Langford. I run brand strategy here."

"Thank you for having me."

"Mr. Sinclair speaks highly of you." Victoria's smile didn't move past her mouth. "Which is interesting, given you interviewed with a different department three days ago and were, I understand, not selected."

Amelia kept her expression even through years of practice doing exactly that. "I understand the two roles have different requirements."

"Do you?" Victoria turned, gesturing for Amelia to follow her down a corridor lined with framed campaigns Amelia recognized from three different industries. "Because from where I'm standing, it looks like the CEO personally intervened to get a woman he met socially a second interview for a position in my department, forty-eight hours after she struck out somewhere else in the building. I'm sure that's a coincidence."

"It is," Amelia said, more evenly than she felt. "I didn't ask him for anything. I didn't even know who he was until after we'd already spent an hour talking."

"How romantic." Victoria stopped outside a glass-walled conference room, hand resting on the door. "I'm not saying this to be unkind, Ms. Hart. I'm saying it because you're about to walk into a building where everyone will assume the worst version of how you got here, and I think you deserve to know that going in, rather than finding out the hard way."

It was, Amelia realized slowly, probably the most honest thing anyone at Sinclair Global had said to her yet delivered with exactly enough edge to make clear that Victoria Langford intended to be the person to make that assumption hardest to shake.

The interview itself went well genuinely well, the kind of well Amelia recognized in her own bones rather than had to convince herself of afterward. She answered the case study questions cleanly, caught an error in one of Victoria's own assumptions about a competitor's positioning without making it feel like a correction, and left the conference room forty minutes later with the distinct, cautious sense that she had actually earned whatever came next.

She was three steps from the elevator when a voice stopped her.

"Ms. Hart."

Adrian stood in the doorway of an office at the end of the hall, tie loosened, sleeves rolled a version of him she hadn't seen at the café, sharper somehow, more clearly the man whose name was on the building. For a second neither of them said anything, the formality of Ms. Hart sitting strangely between two people who had, three nights ago, argued about pineapple pizza on a café napkin.

"Mr. Sinclair," she said, matching his tone, because it felt like the safer choice with Victoria's warning still fresh.

"How did it go?"

"You tell me. You're the one who apparently flagged my file."

Something flickered across his face not quite guilt, but close enough to it that she knew Victoria hadn't been lying about that part, at least.

"I read your original application after we met," he said. "You were qualified for more than the role you interviewed for. I mentioned that to the right people. That's all I did."

"That's not nothing, Adrian."

It was the first time she'd used his name. She watched it land on him, watched something in his shoulders ease slightly at the sound of it, like he'd been waiting three days to hear it without a title attached.

"I know," he said quietly. "I thought about it for a long time before I did it. I decided I'd rather you be angry at me for helping too much than never know I could have and didn't."

Amelia held his gaze a moment longer than was strictly professional, standing in a hallway where at least one person already suspected exactly the kind of story they were both trying not to write.

"I got the job on my own merit in that room," she said. "Whatever you did before that doesn't change what happened in there."

"I know that too." He almost smiled. "For what it's worth I wasn't in the room for a reason. I wanted it to be true without me."

She left the building without answering that, because she didn't entirely trust what she'd say if she tried, and because some small, unguarded part of her the part that had sat on her hallway floor two nights ago admitting things weren't nothing was already looking forward to Monday.

She didn't notice, on her way out, the woman standing at the far end of the lobby with a phone raised at exactly the wrong angle, or the small, deliberate click of a photo being taken.