Sebastian Ashford had a system.
It was not a system that most people would recognize as such—his assistant, a harried woman named Diana who had been with him for three years and had developed an impressive immunity to his worst impulses, would have called it "chaos with good PR." But Sebastian knew better. Sebastian knew that what looked like disorder from the outside was actually a carefully calibrated approach to managing the chaos of running a media empire before the age of thirty-two.
His system involved three monitors, color-coded folders, and a daily schedule that his father had once described as "the most aggressive optimization of time I have ever seen." It also involved exactly zero distractions, which was why the woman in his second-round interview roster had been causing what Diana would definitely call "a situation" for the past forty-eight hours.
Her name was Vivian Shaw.
Sebastian had not been planning to conduct second-round interviews himself. That was usually Richard's job—his father had founded Ashford Media thirty years ago and still took an uncomfortably active role in hiring decisions—but the Elite relaunch was his project, and he had argued, successfully, that the editorial direction should be his to define. Richard had eventually agreed, though not without a pointed comment about delegation that Sebastian had chosen to ignore.
What Richard did not know—what Diana did not know—was that Sebastian had specifically requested the Vivian Shaw interview because he recognized her name from the lobby disaster two days prior. He had not admitted this to anyone. He had not explained that when he had seen her name on the interview roster, something in his chest had done a strange, involuntary twist that he had not experienced since he was twenty-two and did something stupid involving champagne and a rooftop in Barcelona.
He had simply moved her interview to the top of his schedule and told himself it was efficiency.
The truth was more complicated than that, and Sebastian was not in the habit of lying to himself, even when the truth was inconvenient.
The truth was that Vivian Shaw had refused his money.
She had looked at him in the middle of Ashford Media's marble lobby, coffee soaking through her blouse, her career-interview blazer ruined beyond repair, and when he had offered her compensation—the automatic, reflexive offer of a man who had been raised to believe that every problem had a price tag—she had looked at him like he had slapped her.
She had looked at him like he was an idiot.
And then she had called him out in front of Chloe, in front of the security guard at the desk, in front of two associates from the legal department who had been passing by with their own coffees and their own expressions of poorly concealed interest.
She had said the pants comment. He was still thinking about the pants comment.
It was not a flattering thing to have said. It was not even a particularly clever thing to have said. But it had surprised him, and Sebastian Ashford was not a man who surprised easily. He had been raised in boardrooms, trained in negotiations, seasoned by three years of running a media conglomerate that employed four thousand people across twelve countries. He had looked into the eyes of hostile foreign ministers and walked away with what he wanted. He had sat across from his father during the worst arguments of his life and never once flinched.
But Vivian Shaw had surprised him.
And now she was on his interview roster, and he was going to find out why.
"Diana," he said, into the intercom. "The Shaw interview. Can you pull everything we have on her?"
There was a pause. Diana's pause had its own vocabulary—short pauses meant she was thinking, medium pauses meant she was concerned, and long pauses meant she was about to deliver bad news. This was a short pause.
"The applicant file is already on your desk," she said. "It came through HR yesterday. Chloe marked it as priority."
Of course Chloe had. Chloe was efficient to the point of being unsettling.
"And her background?" Sebastian asked. "Education, previous employment, references?"
"All in the file." Another pause. "Sebastian, is there a reason you're personally reviewing a junior editor applicant? I thought the plan was to have HR handle first-round cuts and only escalate exceptional candidates."
"She has an unusual portfolio."
"Unusual how?"
Sebastian picked up the file, which was indeed sitting on his desk where Diana had placed it that morning. He flipped it open and found himself looking at a headshot—a formal photograph of Vivian Shaw that was doing absolutely nothing to convey the live version's capacity for verbal destruction. In the photo, her hair was down, her expression was neutral, and she looked like a completely different person. Softer. Less likely to make comments about pants.
"She writes," he said, which was true and also not the reason he was interested.
"She writes," Diana repeated, in a tone that suggested she was not satisfied with this answer.
"Get me everything. Social media, published work, anything she's left on the internet. And ask Chloe to send me her first-round evaluation notes."
"Chloe's evaluation notes are usually confidential."
"Chloe will send them."
Diana was quiet for a moment. Then: "Is she a friend of the family? Is this one of your father's—" She stopped herself, presumably because Sebastian's silence had taken on a quality that discouraged further questions. "I'm not asking because of the hiring process. I'm asking because Lyra called me yesterday asking if you were seeing anyone, and I didn't know what to tell her."
"Tell her I'm not."
"That's what I figured. But she specifically asked if you were interested in any of the new hires, so I thought I should check." Diana paused. "I'll have the file on your desk in twenty minutes."
"Thank you, Diana."
He hung up and looked at the photograph again. In the headshot, Vivian Shaw was smiling politely at the camera, and the expression on her face was so different from the one she had worn in the lobby that he could almost believe they were two different people.
Almost.
He was not, he told himself firmly, going to think about her for the rest of the morning. He had a nine o'clock call with the advertising team about the Elite relaunch budget, and then a lunch meeting with a potential investor, and then three hours of back-to-back editorial meetings that he was already dreading. He did not have time to be distracted by a woman who had refused his money and insulted his spatial awareness and looked at him, for one extraordinary moment, like she was genuinely furious and genuinely interested in equal measure.
He absolutely was not going to think about the way she had said "fuck my life" when the coffee hit her. The specific cadence of those three words. The way her voice had cracked slightly on the second syllable, like she was trying not to cry and failing.
He was not going to think about any of that.
He was going to think about Elite magazine and the relaunch strategy and the fact that his father kept pushing for a more conservative editorial direction that Sebastian thought was outdated and boring.
He was going to focus on work.
He was going to be professional.
He was going to—
His phone buzzed. A text from Diana, which meant it was urgent, because Diana did not text unless it was urgent.
File is ready. Also: Chloe says the interview went exceptionally well. She wants to fast-track Shaw to the final round. Says Shaw has "the instinct." I'm not sure what that means but it seemed to impress Richard.
Sebastian stared at the message.
Richard was involved now. That was unexpected—and not in a good way. Richard Ashford had opinions about everything, and those opinions had a tendency to become mandates when they concerned the running of Ashford Media. If Richard had taken an interest in Vivian Shaw's application, Sebastian's father would either end up hiring her or blocking her entirely, depending on whatever mood he happened to be in.
There was no middle ground with Richard.
"I'll handle the Shaw interview personally," Sebastian typed back. "Keep Richard out of it for now."
He's going to notice. He notices everything.
"I'm counting on it. See you in five."
He picked up Vivian Shaw's file and carried it to his private office, which was on the thirty-second floor of Ashford Media Group's tower and had a view of Central Park that had cost him more arguments with his father than he could count. Richard had wanted to use that space for an executive conference room. Sebastian had wanted a private office. They had compromised, which in Ashford family terms meant they had fought until one of them gave up, and in this case Richard had given up only because Sebastian had threatened to take the entire Elite relaunch project to a competing media group.
It was an empty threat and they both knew it, but it had worked, and now Sebastian had his office and his view and the ability to conduct interviews in private without Richard wandering in to offer unsolicited opinions about candidates' suit choices.
He sat down at his desk and opened the file.
Vivian Shaw had graduated from Columbia with a degree in English Literature three years ago. She had spent the intervening time working at a small literary magazine called The Cornerstone, which published emerging writers and had a readership that was respectable but not particularly large. Her writing samples were good—better than good, actually. There was a short story attached to the file, something she had published in The Cornerstone's winter issue, and Sebastian found himself reading it twice, which he never did with job applicants.
The story was about a woman who worked in a bookstore and fell in love with a man who came in every Tuesday to buy the same type of coffee. It was quiet and understated and ended without resolution, and it was nothing like what he would have expected from someone who spoke as loudly and defensively as Vivian Shaw had in the lobby. But there was something in the prose—a sharpness beneath the softness, a sense that the author understood loneliness in a way that required firsthand experience—that made him want to read more.
He set the story aside and looked at the rest of the file.
References were listed. Former professors from Columbia. A supervisor from The Cornerstone. And, surprisingly, personal references from two people: someone named Marcus Webb, listed as a "friend and neighbor," and someone named Maya Shaw, listed as a "best friend since childhood." The fact that she had two personal references—rather than the usual one professional and one personal—suggested a level of social connectedness that he had not expected from her file. People with strong friend networks were either very lucky or very good at maintaining relationships, and neither quality was common in the cutthroat world of Manhattan publishing.
Sebastian noted that and moved on.
The interview was scheduled for 10:15 AM. He had forty minutes to prepare himself to sit across from the woman who had ruined his morning two days ago and whom he could not stop thinking about, and he was going to do what he always did when he was faced with a situation he didn't fully understand.
He was going to take control of it.
He pulled out a clean sheet of paper and began making notes. Questions for the interview. Strategies for steering the conversation. Contingency plans for every possible direction she might try to take it.
He did not let himself think about the way her voice had sounded when she'd said "fuck my life."
He did not let himself think about the coffee stain spreading across her blazer like a bruise.
He did not let himself think about the fact that she had looked at him, in that lobby, and seen nothing but a rude stranger who had ruined her day—and that somehow, despite everything, that had made him more interested, not less.
The clock on his wall said 10:07.
He stood up, straightened his tie, and walked toward the conference room where she was probably already waiting, probably rehearsing her answers in her head, probably wondering if the man who had spilled coffee on her was going to be the same man who interviewed her.
He was not, he promised himself, going to make this weird.
He was not going to mention the coffee.
He was absolutely, under no circumstances, going to let her see that he remembered every word she had said.
He was going to be professional.
He was going to be composed.
He was going to be the Editor-in-Chief of Elite magazine, making a hiring decision based entirely on merit and qualifications and nothing else.
He opened the conference room door.
And when Vivian Shaw looked up at him from her seat at the long glass table, her face going through approximately seven distinct expressions of shock before settling on something carefully neutral, Sebastian Ashford felt his carefully constructed professional composure crack slightly at the edges.
It was going to be a very long interview.
He could already tell.
