Page 55 of Love Among the Ruins
The next morning, she looked around the office, at Agnes and Isidora, and opened her mouth to say something. But a feeling in the base of her stomach told her this wasn’t the way to go about it.
She walked towards Dominic’s office, Miranda raising her eyebrows as Eleni sailed past, oozing confidence she didn’t feel in the pit of her queasy stomach.
She knocked, then entered when she had been given permission to do so.
Dominic surveyed her as if she’d walked in clutching a hand grenade. They eyed one another warily. It wasn’t that she was scared of him, she was just really taken aback by the steely look on his face. “This better be important. I’m about to make a call.”
“I’m getting paid too much.” She thrust out her paystub, then slapped it down on his desk.
He looked at it, then looked up at her, his face perplexed with confusion. “And?”
“And?” she cried. “I’ve been overpaid. There’s obviously been a mistake.”
She waited for him to pick up the flimsy sheet of paper and examine it, then tell her ‘Yes, so there has.’ And then tell her what the real figure should be. That’s what she needed to know, the real figure.
He didn’t. He didn’t even touch it.
“No mistake.” He was calm. Quiet.
She scoffed at the joke and waited for him to drop the punchline. This man could be cruel and vicious. She’d had first-hand experience. Once.
“What do you mean?
“There’s no mistake.” He stared at her for the longest time, and she wondered if he was daring her to blink, to play that childish game she had played with her friends back at school.
She blinked because her eyes were starting to water.
“Are you complaining that you’re getting paid too much?” He sat back in his chair, tapped a pen against the table and appraised her as if she was a specimen from the zoo. “Your honesty is commendable.”
“I want you to fix it. I don’t want to have money that’s not mine in my bank account. It’s there. All of it, in my account. I checked last night, and this morning, and it’s still there. It’s making me nervous.”
“You’re not listening to me.” The corner of his lip lifted, and raised a hand to his face, his index finger lying across his upper lip while his fingers covered his mouth.
“Are you ... are you laughing at me?” Maybe it would have been better to have not said anything at all.
Immediately, as if he’d been called out, he adjusted himself, and splayed both hands on the table. “It’s rare to have an employee complain they were being paid too much, Eleni. You have not been overpaid. This is what I am paying you.”
“But …” This was shocking. Her mother would be shocked. Happy shocked, and Stefanos, he’d want a job here. If she worked here for more than the summer, for a year—she did the mental math quickly—she would be … richer than she had ever been.
It was life changing. A drop in the big blue ocean to someone like Dominic, but for her, the difference between working to get by, and working and enjoying life.
“But what?” He frowned, lines appearing like magic on his forehead. “You must never undervalue what you are worth. This is the going rate for the job you do, and therefore this is what you get.”
“But when we spoke you told me it would be less.”
“Well, it’s this, now.”
“There’s no mistake?”
“There’s no mistake.”
The scream she wanted to let out would have to wait until she got into her hotel room. This. Was. Amazing.
This was something good.
It meant so many things.
She was smiling and she didn’t even realize it until she looked at Dominic and he was smiling too.
“Thank you.”
“Never underestimate your worth, Eleni.”
