Page 23 of Return Billionaire to Sender

A few moments later, Willow is setting up on the beautiful cherrywood desk in my room. Her thick, dark hair is in a fun bob, and her T-shirt says “I paused my game to be here,” which is probably true. She’s given us all jobs; I’m plugging in cords, Antonio is adjusting her mobile hotspot, and Francine is opening one of the water bottles.

“No spilling,” I say.

Francine rolls her eyes.

Willow sits, and suddenly her fingers are going like lightning over her keyboard as she tries to hack into Bexley Partners.

“Oh my god, I can barely watch,” I say

“Nobody’ll know,” Willow says. “Sheesh, they have the ultimate small-potatoes system.” She lectures us on using shitty passwords while she does her thing. Every now and then she goes, “Puh-lease,” and then, “You can’t make it just a little harder for people like me? Youwannaget hacked? Yes, yes, little droogies, I think you wanna get hacked.”

I widen my eyes at Francine, who does a little dance.

“Noelle,” Willow says. “I’m setting you up with a new email address where all of Stella’s emails will be going from now on.”

“Really?”

She writes something on a Post-it and hands it over. “Why not check it now? Who knows, you might have email there right now.”

The way she says it, I’m thinking I probably do. I sit on the bed with Jada and Antonio and check it.

“Yikes. This is all of Stella’s work email from…forever,” I say.“Oh, this is so wrong.”

“We’re not hurting anything,” Willow says, still tapping at her keyboard. “So if you send an email, it will be coming from Stella’s work email.”

“Whoa.”

Jada points to a subject line from a month ago with an attachment— “Blackberg info.” I click it. There are a few attachments. I start reading.

“That is the motherlode,” Francine says, reading over my shoulder.

I hit a file called backgrounder and we read.

“Oh, man, this backgrounder. Look—” Francine points to the bottom of the screen. “Malcolm didn’t just fire this guy, Corman—he dragged him out through the lobby by his necktie and then punched him three times on the sidewalk. The emotional intelligence training you’re doing gets him out of potential jailtime for misdemeanor assault. He’s been brought up on assault before.”

“Wonder what that Corman guy did,”Antonio says.

Willow asks me for details on the town where I grew up. “Mapleton,” I tell her. “Population 501. An old railroad town.” I describe the hilly beauty of it.

“May I?” Lizzie motions at my iPad and I hand it over and answer more of Willow’s questions.

“Okay, check this out,” Lizzie says after a while. “This is the key to everything.” She squeezes onto the bed next to me and Jada and Antonio and Francine, because at the Four Seasons, you can get five on a bed.

She has something new up on the screen.

“A link in the main packet led to this interactive form,” she says. “This is your check-in. Every time Malcolm completes a session, you type a ‘V,’ and that makes a check mark. The only other option is to choose an ‘X,’ which I’m guessing is a fail. The blank box with today’s date is where you’d give him a check mark for today’s intro session.I’m thinking that’s how it works.”

I study the form. Today’ssession was supposed to last an hour and be about “setting expectations.” After the intro session, there are twenty boxes. Twenty-one hours of training and twenty-one-plus hours of observation to be checked off.

“This is perfect,” Lizzie says. “This is how you check into the office—by making checks and X’s.”

Willow comes over and takes my iPad, slides her finger around the screen. “It’s more than that. This is everything. This is the job right here. This form is shared with two law firms and Blackberg HR.”

She hands it back and we keep going through.

We find an info email that says, “Dear Stella, everything for the Blackberg job is enclosed, including co-branded shells.”

“What are co-branded shells?” Antonio asks.

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