Chapter 5 — The First Day
985 Words
Amelia's first day at Sinclair Global started the way most first days did badge photo taken at an unflattering angle, a desk that smelled faintly of someone else's coffee, a stack of onboarding paperwork thick enough to double as a doorstop and for the first few hours, it felt almost ordinary. Almost like a job she'd gotten the regular way.
Her team was smaller than she'd expected, six people clustered around a bank of desks near the windows, and within an hour she'd learned three of their coffee orders and roughly none of their names, which felt like an acceptable ratio for a Monday.
"Don't worry, it took me a month to learn everyone's names too," said the man at the desk next to hers, not looking up from his monitor. "I'm Noah, by the way. Bennett. I do the client decks nobody wants to do, which apparently makes me indispensable."
"Amelia. I do apparently whatever Victoria decides I do."
"Ah." Noah's mouth did something complicated. "You're the one everyone's talking about."
"Already?"
"Small building. Big gossip economy." He said it lightly, but there was a flicker of genuine sympathy underneath it. "For what it's worth, I looked at the case study brief you turned in for the interview. It's better than what half this floor would've come up with. Whatever people are saying, that part's real."
It was, Amelia would think later, the first entirely kind thing anyone at Sinclair Global had said to her without an agenda attached, and she held onto it more tightly than she probably should have, given she'd known him for forty minutes.
The morning went well. She sat in on a strategy review, offered one observation about a competitor's repositioning that made Victoria's assistant actually write something down, and started to believe cautiously, the way she believed most good things, like they might be revoked if she trusted them too openly that she might actually be good at this.
The afternoon undid most of it.
It happened in the open floor meeting, forty people crowded into the largest conference room for the quarterly all-hands, Victoria at the front running through department updates with the crisp confidence of someone who had never once doubted her right to the room. She introduced the new hires by name and title, moving briskly down the list, until she reached Amelia's.
"And Amelia Hart, joining strategy this week." A pause, just half a beat too long to be accidental. "Amelia comes to us through a somewhat unconventional path I understand Mr. Sinclair personally recommended her file after they met outside of a professional context. I'm sure her work will speak for itself, in time."
The room didn't laugh, exactly. It did something quieter and worse a ripple of glances, a few too-careful smiles, the specific social currency of forty people simultaneously deciding they now knew something about you that you hadn't told them.
Amelia kept her face perfectly still, the way she'd learned to in rooms exactly like this one, and said nothing, because there was no version of defending herself in that moment that wouldn't have made it worse. She felt Noah shift slightly beside her, a small, solidary movement, not quite touching her arm but close enough that she understood the gesture.
She got through the rest of the meeting. She got through the walk back to her desk with her spine straight and her expression composed, the same posture she'd worn out of the interview that had started this entire strange chain of events six days ago. It wasn't until she was alone in the stairwell she'd taken the stairs instead of the elevator specifically so she wouldn't have to share a small enclosed space with anyone's opinion of her that she let her shoulders drop.
Her phone buzzed. A text from a number she didn't recognize.
Heard about the meeting. Are you okay?
She stared at it for a long moment before realizing, with a small jolt, that it had to be Adrian she'd never given him her number, which meant he'd gotten it from somewhere, which was its own small violation she didn't have the energy to examine right now.
I'm fine, she typed back, then deleted it, because it wasn't true and she was tired of performing fine for an audience of one when the audience of forty had already exhausted her for the day.
That was humiliating, she wrote instead. And I don't think it's going to be the last time.
The reply came fast, faster than she expected from a man who presumably had an actual company to run.
I'll talk to her.
Don't. Amelia typed it quickly, thumb moving before she'd fully thought it through. If you fix this for me, it proves her point. I need this to be something I survive on my own, or it isn't worth having.
There was a long pause before his next message arrived long enough that she pictured him actually thinking about it, weighing it, rather than firing back a reflexive reassurance.
Okay. But if it gets worse, tell me. Please.
She didn't answer that one right away. She went back to her desk instead, put her headphones on, and buried herself in the case files Noah had quietly, wordlessly slid across to her without comment the kind of help that didn't announce itself, which she was beginning to suspect was the only kind she could accept right now without it costing her something.
She didn't see the photo until she got home that night the one taken in the lobby four days earlier, finally surfacing on a minor industry gossip account with sixty thousand followers, captioned with a question mark and a winking emoji, Adrian's face and hers both clearly visible, close enough together to read as something it hadn't quite been yet.
By the time she saw it, it already had four thousand shares.
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