Chapter 7

"Mr. Ford..." I began.

"Have a seat," he said, gesturing to the chair across from him.

I sat, and Charles sat down as well, next to me.

"Charles told me what happened," Alexander continued. "And I read your message from the group chat myself."

So it wasn't just a screenshot passed up the chain.

Alexander had personally laid eyes on the exact words I had sent. "Honestly, did this guy get his head stuck in a door or what? We've been through eight rounds of revisions and he still wants more."

I wished the floor would open up and swallow me whole.

"Ms. Simmons," he said.

I straightened up. "Yes."

"How many years have you been in advertising?"

"Four."

"Four years, which means you're hardly new to this. Posting a message without double-checking who's going to see it is the kind of mistake I'd expect from a junior."

I didn't bother defending myself. He was right. It was a stupid mistake, the kind that had no excuse.

"But that's not why I called you up here," he went on.

I looked up slightly.

"Mr. Bennett mentioned that you stayed up last night reworking the proposal?"

"Yes, I did."

"Let's have a look."

I handed the tablet across the desk.

He took it and started scrolling.

The whole thing took maybe five minutes, and for every single one of those minutes, I found myself watching his face like a hawk, trying to read whatever might be going on behind it.

He flipped through the pages at a steady, measured pace.

The first few sections drew no visible reaction at all. Then, when he reached the brand positioning section in the middle, his eyes stopped for a split second.

I had no idea whether that pause meant he liked something or hated it.

He carried on. By the time he got to the visual concepts at the end, he zoomed in on a couple of details, studied them for a moment, and finally set the tablet down.

"It's an improvement over the earlier rounds," he said.

I felt a small wave of relief pass through me.

"But it's still not where it needs to be."

And just like that, the relief vanished, replaced by the same knot that had been sitting in my chest since I walked through the door.

"Your understanding of the brand identity only goes skin-deep," he said. "You've picked up on the keywords from our industry, sure, but you haven't figured out what actually makes us different from our competitors.

"And on the visual side..." He paused briefly, "You've played it safe across the board. Nothing wrong with any of it, but nothing that sticks in your mind either."

I listened as my thoughts raced to keep up.

Every criticism he made sparked an immediate urge in me to push back, but I swallowed it because I knew, deep down, that he wasn't wrong.

I had gravitated toward the safest possible choices at every turn, the direction with the least chance of getting rejected, and while that might have kept me out of trouble, it had also kept me squarely inside the realm of fine-but-not-great.

"I'll give you three days," Alexander said.

I looked up at him.

"Three days," he repeated. "I want a completely new version. Not revisions on top of what you've already got. I want you to start from scratch."

He went on, "I'm not the type to drag things out, for what it's worth. This project has gone through eight rounds already, and honestly, I'm just as fed up with it as you are."

He said he was fed up too. Did that mean he had personally seen every single one of those eight drafts?

"One last chance," he said, holding my gaze. "Three days from now, you come back and present. If this version works, we move forward. If it doesn't, the contract ends, and we pay whatever penalty the agreement calls for."

My mind was already spinning through a dozen different calculations at once. Was three days even remotely enough time? What did starting from scratch actually mean in terms of the work required? How many hours was I realistically looking at?