Page 1 of The Billionaire's Wake-up-call Girl

One

Lizzie

Looking back,maybe I should’ve noticed the red flags.

The unusually large sign-on bonus, for example—payable only after I lasted thirty days on the job.

Who can’t last in a job for thirty days? That was my thought when I applied for this position.

And then there were the strange looks my co-workers would give me when I went around introducing myself as Vossameer Inc.’s new social media manager. “I’m here to jazz up our online image,” I’d explain.

In the elevator, on the communications floor, down in the sleek and elegant lobby, just these strange looks. Uncertain smiles. One woman’s mouth formed into an alarmed “o” before she introduced herself back to me.

At first I chalked it up to company-wide cluelessness about social media. After all, Vossameer didn’t even have a Facebook page when I started three weeks ago.

But now as I watch my boss Sasha fret and frown over the PowerPoint report I created to show how perfectly I nailed my assignment, I’m starting to think a little bit harder about those red flags.

She clicks to a page that shows examples of my successful, industry-appropriate posts and a graph of my stunning engagement numbers.

She sucks in a breath. Winces.

What?

Trust me, Facebook engagement was no easy feat; Vossameer’s most exciting product is hemostatic gel for use in traumatic wound-care situations.

Another wince. A frown.

Was I the clueless one all along? Was I misreading the looks I was getting from my new co-workers?

Am I like the traveler in Transylvania who excitedly tells all the villagers about finding an awesome free castle to stay in? OMG, I have the whole place to myself because the owner only comes out at night. Isn’t that wonderful? Score! High five!

I hold my breath as she clicks from page to page.

Sasha has a severe blonde bob, a love of nautical-looking outfits, and a Cruella De Vil makeup style, though to be fair, it might be a poorly lit home mirror.

“Mmm…” she says finally. And it’s not ayumtype ofmmm. It’s anuh-ohtype ofmmmm.

“Is there a problem?” I ask.

She just shakes her head. As though the problem goes beyond words. Like she asked for an interim report and I gave her a handful of peanut shells with the salt licked off.

She clicks to another graph of positive results and again she furrows her dark and dramatically arched brows—I see it in the reflection on the screen.

“The engagement numbers are already better than most of Vossameer’s peers,” I point out.

Crickets.

Actually, not even crickets. “Crickets” suggests little beings are happily chirping away in a field. What I hear is more like the silent gloom of stones in a forgotten parking lot.

She clicks to the next page. My website mock-up.

“You wanted our site to come up on the first page on Google,” I remind her. “Now it does, but we’ll do even better once the new site is up. I think people will stay longer.”

Trust me, that’s a nice way of putting it. The current Vossameer site looks like it was made by depressed robots in 1998.

Of course, when you’re Vossameer, a billion-dollar unicorn of a company, you don’t need a nice site. Vossameer could have no site at all, and giant health groups would still pay zillions of dollars for their lifesaving medical gel.

But now they’re trying to partner with some high-profile charitable foundation—Locke Foundation, part of Locke Construction.

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