Page 80 of How Dare You
A gal I don’t recognize is working at the front desk, and she becomes extremely flustered when I walk past her toward Trina’s office. When I walk between the designers’ desks, a few of them greet me, and they all drop what they’re doing to see what is going to happen next.
Pushing open Trina’s closed office door reveals her having a meeting with Alex. Perfect.
“You can’t be in here,” Trina scolds.
I shut the door behind me. “And yet, I am.”
“You bitch,” Alex sighs. “Of course you’re here.”
“Glad to hear you’re as original as always with your insults,” I say, taking the seat next to his.
“Devon, you are not welcome here. You have to—”
Generally, I find interrupting to be an abhorrent practice, something I would class firmly in the wrong thing category. Today, I’m breaking my own rules. “I know you hired Nathalie to turn her article into a smear piece about me.”
Bea and I did some deep diving into our email history, and found a few things buried in the threads that I’m certain Trina wouldn’t want me to see. Evidently, her mother never taught her not to email something you wouldn’t want forwarded to everyone at your company. Or in this case, my company.
“I did nothing of the sort,” Trina objects, dramatically pressing her hand to her chest.
Nathalie had been emailing Trina, a couple other women who were lucky enough to be dropped from the article, and me in a group thread. I found an email she sent to the group that was supposed to only go to Trina.
“She was an easy pawn for you to manipulate and you convinced her it was ‘better to have you as a friend than an enemy’,” when I quote the exact wording from her email, her eyes widen. “You were so threatened by me that you paid her to try to take me down. I’m flattered.”
Alex stands up to leave, but he pauses at the door when I say, “I assure you, you will regret walking out of this room without hearing what I have to say.”
Trina flashes him an angry look, and he returns to his seat.
“I know your part in this, too.” I smile widely at him. “Really, you both are quite sloppy with your correspondence.”
Alex’s mistakes were ridiculous. He must have accidentally clicked Bea in his email instead of Boatswain because she found one in reference to Shephard saying,
Do you need help getting Devon off this one? Or do you have it on your own?
Bea hadn’t noticed it originally because he’s notorious for emailing the wrong person, and she wasn’t interested in playing his assistant and forwarding it on to the correct party.
The final pieces of the puzzle came together when Trina’s office manager of thirty years agreed to meet me with me yesterday. She came with piles and piles of evidence that she was already planning to take to a reporter but wanted me to see first.
“You’ve been at this together for years. You love to be the biggest name in design in Palm Springs, so much so that you’ve run everyone else out of town who could have been competition for years, creating yourself a mini monopoly. That is, until you tried it with me.”
“Devon, this is quite enough,” Trina’s face flushes red. “You need to—”
“I know you’ve been sending my clients falsified bad reviews. You’ve been telling them stories about projects that never existed that I botched so badly people had to move.” Mrs. Sandro forwarded me the email she got from Trina just this morning, wanting me to be aware of what she was doing and asking if it may be related to her flood.
“So, here’s what happens next—”
“Oh, fuck off—” Alex objects.
“You still have clients who, as far as I can tell, you haven’t done any harm to. I will allow you to keep them—”
“You can’t take anyone from—” Trina sputters, losing her cool in a way I have not witnessed before.
“You will work with Nathalie to write an official retraction, that I will sign off on.” Adrenaline pumping, I add on a demand I hadn’t planned on. “You will also stop taking on new clients—”
“You can’t be—” Her attempted protest is practically a shriek.
“It’s time to retire. Or I will make sure that Noon Magazine finds out every detail of this.” Trina lives and dies for public recognition. Her reputation is everything to her, and I know the idea that it could be tarnished with the most prestigious magazine she’s involved with shakes her to her core. Nathalie’s blog feels like a big deal in our small city, but for a major national publication like Noon, it wouldn’t even be a blip on their radar. They won’t find out about anything—unless I bring it to their attention.
“Noon isn’t going to care about your silly emails, and neither do I.” Her thick swallow gives away her lie. If any of this came out, the legacy of her career would be ruined.