Chapter 2
Paul's face froze, his professional smile cracking at the edges.
He glanced from Emily to me, his eyes wide with confusion.
The smug grin on my competition's face evaporated.
Emily tapped a single finger on the table.
"You two can wait outside."
Her voice was quiet, but it held a chilling authority that brooked no argument.
Paul practically tripped over himself to obey.
"Of course, Ms. Warren."
He ushered the other guy out of the room, pulling the heavy door shut behind them with a soft click.
The massive conference room was suddenly plunged into a suffocating silence.
The AC vent above me blasted cold air, and I could feel a chill seeping right into my bones.
Emily leaned back in her oversized leather chair, her hands laced together on the table.
She just watched me with a gaze like a surgeon's scalpel, methodically dissecting everything from my cheap suit to my white-knuckled fingers and down to my eyes that darted around in a desperate search for a safe place to land.
I felt like I was suffocating under the weight of her stare.
The girl I remembered, the one with the ponytail who used to sit in front of me and cried in secret because she couldn't afford tuition, was gone. In her place was this powerful stranger. They were two completely different people.
"Alex Chapman."
She spoke first, her voice even colder than before.
"Yeah."
My voice came out raspy.
She said, "I've reviewed your resume."
She picked it up, holding it by a single corner between her thumb and forefinger as if it were something filthy.
"Thirteen years. Seven jobs. The longest one didn't even last three years."
She raised her eyes to meet mine again.
"Why?"
I opened my mouth, but no words came out. What could I say?
Should I tell her that I had a string of bad luck with companies going under?
I gave up a promotion to take care of my sick father.
Besides, I was too straightforward to play the office politics game.
In the face of her cold interrogation, they all sounded like pathetic excuses.
"No career plan," she stated, answering for me. Her tone was laced with an undisguised contempt. "You majored in Classical Literature. She summed it up, her tone laced with a hint of disdain."
She went on, her sharp eyes cutting through me.
"What did you possibly think you could do with a degree like that? What was going through your head?"
A sharp pain lanced through my chest.
What was going through my head?
My first choice had been finance. My grades were good enough for the best university in the country.
But her tuition was still short.
Our homeroom teacher had given her a final deadline.
I found her crying in a corner of the school playground.
So I changed my application. I picked a local university, one with the lowest tuition in the city, and a major in Classical Literature.
The money I saved, added to my parents' life savings, was just enough to make up the 40,000 dollars she needed.
I then slipped that cash into her backpack when she wasn't looking.
Now, she was asking me what was going through my head.
I stared at her, my throat feeling like it was stuffed with cotton.
I stammered, "I... I liked literature back then."
"Liked it?" she echoed.
For the first time, the corner of her mouth twitched into something resembling a smile. It was pure mockery.
"Liking things doesn't pay the bills, Alex. In the real world, you have to be responsible for your choices."
She tossed my resume back onto the table.
"You lack foresight, you're impulsive, and you let sentimentality cloud your judgment.
"This is all your resume tells me."
Her words were like shards of ice, each one piercing my heart.
In her eyes, everything I had sacrificed for her was just sentimentality.
"This company has no place for someone like you," she said, reclining in her chair with an effortless grace that felt like the final gavel strike on a death sentence.