The Babymoon Arrangement

Excruciating

Zara

“Why Cavendish Group specifically," he said. "Not the industry. Not the role. This company. "

It was the question I'd prepared the least for because it was the one I'd assumed would be softest. I should've known better.

I thought about the real answer, which was complicated and personal and involved a lot of late nights reading industry analysis because I couldn't afford to make a wrong move. And then I thought about the version of the real answer that I could actually say out loud in a job interview.

"Because Cavendish Group is the only company in this sector that's consistently made the right call five years before everyone else caught up," I said carefully. "The 2019 acquisition. The pivot to integrated strategy in 2021. The Lagos expansion that everyone called premature." I paused. "Whoever is making decisions here is thinking in the right direction. I want to be in a room where decisions like that get made. I have things to contribute to that room."

He was quiet for a moment.

"That's a diplomatic answer," he said.

"It's an honest one," I said.

He looked at me for one more long second — the kind of look that made me feel like I was being read the way he'd read my file. Carefully. Completely. Without particular mercy.

Then he stood up.

I stood up too, automatically, and we shook hands across the desk. His grip was firm and brief and completely professional, and I told myself the slight warmth in my face was just the room temperature.

"Thank you for coming in, Miss Ellison," he said.

And that was it. Standard. Formal. Nothing.

I picked up my portfolio. I thanked him. I walked to the door.

~

The elevator ride down was twenty-three floors of me staring at my own reflection and trying to figure out whether I'd just done the best interview of my life or completely imploded it. I genuinely couldn't tell, which had never happened to me before. I'm usually good at reading rooms.

He was not a room I could read.

The lobby doors had barely closed behind me when my phone buzzed.

It was an unknown number — Manhattan area code. I answered before I'd thought it through.

"Miss Ellison?" A woman's voice, professional and warm. "This is Donna Park, executive assistant to Mr. Cavendish. He's asked me to extend you an offer."

I stopped walking in the middle of the sidewalk. A man bumped into me and kept going.

"I'm sorry," I said carefully. "I just left the building."

"I know," she said, and I could hear the slight smile in it. "He called me before you reached the elevator."

I stood there on the street in the blouse he'd bought me, holding my phone very still.

"In my eleven years with Mr. Cavendish," Donna said, with the cheerful precision of someone sharing information they thought was significant, "he has never made a same-day hiring decision. Not once."

I didn't say anything.

"I'll send the offer letter to the email on your application," she continued. "Do let us know if you have questions."

She hung up.

I stood on the sidewalk for another few seconds. Around me the city moved at its usual relentless pace, unbothered by the fact that my entire life had just shifted sideways.

He'd hired me. Before I'd reached the elevator. A man who — forty minutes ago — I had called a walking biohazard on a public street.

I started walking. I needed to call Maya. I needed to read the offer letter. I needed to think about this clearly and practically and without letting the weird fluttering in my chest get anywhere near my decision-making.

I also needed to figure out one very specific thing.

I pulled up the Cavendish Group website on my phone. His name was on the front page — the CEO profile, formal headshot, all of it. I stared at the photograph for exactly as long as it took me to confirm what I already suspected.

Luca Cavendish.

I worked for Luca Cavendish now.

The same Luca Cavendish who, at this very moment, was eleven floors above me in an office I'd just walked out of — and who had, if I was reading the morning correctly, been watching me with those unreadable dark eyes since the moment I'd turned around on a sidewalk and told him exactly what I thought of him.

My phone buzzed again. Maya.

Did you get it?????

I looked at the message. I looked at the building behind me. I looked back at my phone.

Yeah , I typed back. I got it.

What I didn't type — what I was going to have to figure out how to deal with entirely on my own — was the part where I was almost completely certain that my new boss had been waiting outside that boutique not because he felt guilty about the blouse.

But because he hadn't been ready to stop looking.

~

Luca

I called Donna before the elevator hit the lobby.

"Send the offer," I said.

A brief pause. "Today, sir?"

"Before she reaches the street," I said. "Standard senior strategist package. If she negotiates, approve up to fifteen percent."

Another pause. Longer. Donna has worked for me for eleven years and has earned the right to her silences.

"Of course," she said finally. "Shall I note the urgency in the file?"

"No," I said. "Just send it."

I hung up and stood at the window with my hands in my pockets and looked out at the city below. Forty-first floor. On a clear day you could see all the way to Brooklyn. Today there were clouds coming in from the west.

I had just made a decision in under ten minutes that I typically take three weeks to make.

I was going to need to think about that.

The qualifications were exceptional — that part was simple and true and entirely sufficient as a justification. She was the best candidate we'd seen in four months. The Morrison numbers alone put her above everyone else on the shortlist. Hiring her was professionally correct.

I told myself that a few more times until it felt more like the whole truth and less like part of it.

The rest of it — the part where she'd sat across my desk and pushed back on every question without raising her voice, the part where she'd looked at me like she was not even slightly afraid of me, which almost no one managed — that was irrelevant. Professionally irrelevant.

My phone lit up. Claire.

I looked at it for a moment before answering.

"Lunch tomorrow?" she asked when I picked up. Her voice was pleasant, easy. "The Carlyle. I have something I want to discuss about the foundation."

"Fine," I said. "Twelve-thirty."

"Perfect." A pause. "How was your morning?"

I looked down at the street forty-one floors below. Somewhere down there, a woman in a cream silk blouse was walking away with a job offer and my complete professional objectivity in her portfolio.

"Uneventful," I said.

I hung up and went back to my desk.

The file was still open. I closed it. I put it in the tray. I pulled up the afternoon schedule and found seventeen things that required my attention and focused on all of them with the particular intensity of a man who is not thinking about something else.

I was almost convincing.