Page 2 of Maid For Each Other

They laughed like that made sense—what in the ever-loving hell?—and I needed to go. I pulled my car keys out of my backpack and pasted on a huge smile. “Listen, it was so nice to meet you and I’d love to chat more but I have to get to work.”

“Typical Abi,” Charles said in a she’s-so-adorable tone, giving me just the nicest grin. “Will you be at the Hathaway party tonight?”

Typical Abi?

“I’m, uh, I’m not sure,” I stammered, doing a sideways walk in the direction of the front door, desperate to escape. Because the quicker I got out of there, the better my odds were of not being arrested for trespassing. “Probably…?”

“We won’t take ‘probably’ for an answer, Abi,” Elaine said, running a manicured hand—holy shit that’s a huge diamond—over her perfectly coiffed hair. “No going to work until you say yes. We’re dying to get to know you.”

“Um, yes, then.” Relief shot through me when I reached the front door and felt the cool metal knob in my palm. Almost there. “I will definitely be at the party.”

I would say anything to escape at that moment.

“Oh, that’s wonderful,” Elaine said emphatically.

“Fantastic,” Charles agreed.

“I have to go now,” I managed, pulling open the door and giving them what I hoped was a charming smile. “It was lovely meeting you.”

The second I was in the hall and the door clicked shut behind me, I made a beeline for the stairs, ignoring the elevator completely. I wasn’t usually a fan of exercise, but I full-on sprinted down all twenty flights of stairs, wanting to put as much distance as possible between me and whatever the hell that whole scene just was.

I had no idea why those strangers thought they knew me, but I definitely wasn’t going to stick around to find out.

2

Discovering the Real-Life Existence of an Imaginary Friend

Declan

“Good morning, darling.”

“Mom.” I leaned down and kissed her cheek before taking a seat between her and my dad at the round banquet table. They’d flown in late last night, so I hadn’t had a chance to talk to them before giving my little welcome presentation to the Hathaway VIPs. “How was the flight?”

“Delayed,” my dad said, lifting a piece of bacon to his mouth. “But uneventful. Great speech, by the way.”

“Thanks.” He was right—I’d fucking nailed it—but I still had the entire shareholder weekend in front of me so I wasn’t about to get cocky.

The Hathaway Annual Shareholder Meeting, for which thousands of investors trekked to Omaha for a week of feeling likestock-owning rock stars, always kicked off with a Friday-morning breakfast meeting that was just for the VIPs; there was another one tomorrow morning for everyone else.

This year I’d been tapped to do the welcome address at both.

“He didn’t even bore me while I ate my eggs,” Warren said from the other side of the table, picking up his coffee cup. “The kid’s okay.”

The kid’s okay.

Warren Hathaway, the richest man in America and long-term CEO of Hathaway Holdings, had just spoken those words about me. The guy had a genius brain for business and had been my hero for as long as I could remember, so I’d be lying if I said his praise didn’t mean a lot.

Right after I graduated from college, Hathaway offered my family (who’d taken my great-grandmother’s tiny sofa business and turned it into CrashPad, the nation’s largest furniture store) a multimillion-dollar buyout. It’d been a dream come true because not only could my parents retire early and travel the world, but I was absorbed into the Hathaway enterprise and given the opportunity to work my way up in a much larger corporation.

Suddenly the MBA that my uncles had called a waste (You don’t need college to work in the family business) was guiding me toward the career I’d always wanted.

I’d been an EVP at Hathaway for two years now, but moving higher had been proving difficult. No matter how hard I worked, the guys at the top still saw me as a “young kid,” even though I was thirty.

But a disagreement at the QBR last month—where I was right and CFO Marty Mueller was nearly catastrophically wrong—putme on the map with Warren, and suddenly my career was in new territory.

The old guy and his inner circle seemed to be forgetting about my age and inexperience and actually trusting my knowledge.

Fucking huge.

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