Page 45 of The Billionaire's Wake-up-call Girl

I go back to my floor. Just for the hell of it, I send an email request for contact info from my company address to my Yahoo! address, and I cc Sasha and Stanley. To show I’m trying.

I compose another email to just Stanley, giving him the link to the Craigslist ad.Here’s the info, Stanley. This is what we’re dealing with. The customer service is terrible!

I hit send.

Good luck getting those jerks to reply!

And nothing comes back. I’m relieved for the first hour, but then the silence becomes ominous.

Is Mr. Drummond trying another angle? Mr. Drummond is tenacious. He was tenacious on that phone call with me. And he’s certainly tenacious as a chemist.

In one of the interviews with him that I read back when I was applying for this job, he talked about how he knew the original formula absolutely had to be possible, that he could sense it, like a sculptor sensing form trapped in rock, needing to be uncovered. He kept going at it, striving to figure out its shape, its detail. He couldn’t rest until he had it. He slept in thirty-minute intervals while he was going at it. Like a pit bull he went at it.

Apparently people had been dreaming about this advanced type of blood coagulant for years. People knew that it was possible, but the difference is that Theo muscled his way into solving it.

And here, I have the flimsiest of smoke screens. A Craigslist ad. A Yahoo! account. Mr. Drummond could probably place a call to Yahoo! itself and find a crony to give him my info.

But can he do that in two days? No way. And that’s all I need: two days.

Sasha comes back a while later. She has her phone in her hand. She sets it on the desk. The ad is on the screen. “Something’s fishy,” she says. “Look at the date. This ad was put up today.” She eyes me. “Today.”

“I know, right?” I turn my hopefully innocent face up to her. “It turns out that sometimes the people offering services at Craigslist take down their old ads and put up new ones so that they appear at the top of Craigslist searches. It’s a known technique that Craigslist frowns on.”

“Hmph,” she says. “And they don’t even have a website.”

“I know, right?” I say.

“Mr. Drummond doesn’t like mysteries,” she informs me.

I swallow and nod.

“This is frustrating for Mr. Drummond, and therefore it’s frustrating for me.” She looks at me again, as though I’m somehow at fault, which, admittedly, I am. “Dig a little, okay? Google the shit out of Hello Morning and see whether you can get something. Surely there is something out there. Don’t businesses have to register with the state or something?”

I grit my teeth. “I’ll check it out.”

“Don’t just check it out, give me answers. You wrangled this service. You need to handle this. I was counting on you to vet it at least a little, but apparently you didn’t do that, and now we’re stuck with this disruptive situation. I don’t want to disappoint Mr. Drummond again.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry; be proactive.”

I nod. As a matter of fact, I won’t be proactive, but I will be remembering that line to amuse Mia later on.

“Have the answer on my desk in the morning.”With that, she storms off.

Mia is there when I get home, working at her cross-stitching. “How’d the wake-up call go?” She puts out the peanuts.

“Oh, it went…fine.” I concentrate on getting a glass of water.

“Were you just like, ‘Wake up, motherfucker’? Did it work again?”

“Yeah, I guess it worked. It’s hard to say.”

“Well, you still have a job, right? So I’d say it worked.” She shells a peanut. “It’s a very rare opportunity you have here. I hope you’re appreciating it, because you know I am. You’re a hero to everyone who’s ever had a jerky boss.”

I sigh.

When I look back over, she’s studying my face.

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