Seven
As Charlotte Shields passed the secretaries’ lunch room on her way to her corner office, the off-key strains of the happy birthday song wafted through the open door. Her steps slowed. Stopped.
“Open my gift first,” a voice cried out.
“Wait until after the cake,” someone said and female laughter followed.
Charlotte yearned to join the celebration, but she knew she wouldn’t be welcome. Not now. Early in her career several of the other women had invited her to join them on a girls’ night out. She’d longed to say yes, but she’d known better. The morning of her first day, her father had called her into his office and given her a list of rules designed especially for her. Primary among them was that she was not to mingle with the employees. To his way of thinking, it would be hard to discipline or terminate a friend. She’d been eager to please and convinced that her father knew better than she how to run a business, so she’d complied.
After a while, the invitations slowed and finally stopped. The offers of friendship dried up. The other women came to regard her as conceited and unfriendly, a reputation she’d lived up to over the years. She regretted her behavior now, but years ago she’d been willing to do anything to avoid disappointing her father.
Charlotte’s need to please her father had always been her downfall.
She forced the longing and regrets away and continued through the maze of cubicles, pausing when she got to her secretary’s desk. “Did anyone call while I was out?”
“Yes, Ms. Shields.” Anita handed her a stack of pink paper. “Your father has scheduled a meeting in the conference room for three this afternoon.”
“Thank you.”
Although Anita was only a year younger than Charlotte’s own thirty-four, she never addressed Charlotte by her first name, something that hadn’t bothered Charlotte before. For some reason, the distance it created between them bugged her now.
Charlotte opened her mouth to ask how the other woman’s pregnancy was progressing, but she couldn’t find the words.
“Is there something else, Ms. Shields?” Anita asked when Charlotte continued to stand there. Anita’s voice was professional, lacking the warmth that was there when she interacted with the other secretaries, and Charlotte’s heart sank.
“No, nothing.”
Stepping through the door to her office, Charlotte riffled through the messages. Nothing urgent. Her mind returned to the meeting her father had scheduled for that afternoon. Charles was a creature of habit and had established a schedule that hadn’t changed in all the years she’d worked here. The fact that he’d called an impromptu meeting was unsettling. But there was no sense asking him about the agenda beforehand because he wouldn’t tell her. Although she was his daughter, he never treated her better than anyone else. If anything, he was harder on her.
She had master’s degrees in both business and marketing, but she’d still had to start at the bottom and work her way up to the position of executive vice president of marketing. There was not the slightest doubt in her mind that had she been a son, her path would have been easier. By now, she’d be president.
She got down to work, determined to have her desk cleared in case her father passed out new assignments.
At promptly 2:55 she stepped into the conference room. Several executives mingled, talking quietly among themselves. They nodded at her and she did the same. She was too jittery to engage in conversation, so she stared at the framed newspaper and magazine articles lining the walls. The articles chronicled the progression of Shields Manufacturing from a small company specializing in bookcases to one of the top furniture manufacturing companies in the world.
Five minutes later her father entered, followed by a man she’d never seen before.
“Have a seat,” Charles said. The man he’d brought with him took the chair at her father’s right—her chair—so she was forced to sit in the next chair. She glowered at the trespasser but he didn’t seem to notice.
Instead of immediately getting to the point of the meeting as was his habit, Charles’s eyes traveled the same path hers had only moments ago, a small smile on his face as he seemed to relive the history of the company. For the briefest moment, her father seemed reflective. Charles was many things, but introspective wasn’t one of them.
Was he ill? He’d lost weight since her mother’s death two years ago, but she’d attributed it to lack of appetite due to grief. She looked at him closely. She didn’t notice anything different.
“I know you’re all wondering why I called this meeting today.” Charles smiled. Smiled! He never smiled. Charlotte’s heart sped up as worry gnawed at her.
“Let me put you at ease,” Charles continued. “I’m not sick. And you all know the company is doing well.”
Relief whooshed through Charlotte. Although Charles wasn’t the warmest person, he was for all intents and purposes the only family she had, as she was currently estranged
