1 Chapter 1

1: The Arrangement

Tess brushed the sleep from her eyes and leaned back in her chair. Outside, the sky was dark and cold; the sun hadn’t yet risen and even the space heater beneath Tess’s desk didn’t do much to lessen the winter chill. A few sad paper chains littered the walls, but besides that it was a normal day at the office. You wouldn’t have guessed it was three days until Christmas.

The room was empty, at least. There was just Tess, separated from the rest of the open plan room by her desk, which was sat right next to the door of her boss’s office. One of the perks of an early start—according to Tess, at least—was the quiet. It gave her time to think.

The automatic doors whirred open and Tess jumped. Before her stood Colette Sylvestre, her boss—tall and slim, with pale porcelain features and dark, chocolate colored hair. That morning she was wearing a brilliant green pant suit with a plunging neckline and red lipstick, and her face was drawn into a formidable expression. Tess gulped. However, much she might admired her boss, Colette was a scary woman to work for.

“Good morning, Ms. Sylvestre,” said Tess. She stood up from her chair to take Colette’s coat.

“Is it? I hadn’t noticed,” said Colette. She didn’t look up from her phone. “Run me through my schedule.”

“Oh, well, first you have a conference call with the board, and then a meeting with Mr. Rowing—he’s not happy with the marketing around his novel, and I did try to explain that it’s industry standard but—”

Colette sighed. “What else, Tessa?”

“Uh, you’ve got to look over the minutes from the meeting you missed last week, and then there’s a few people scheduled in after lunch. I made sure to keep an hour because your mother called earlier and she says she wants to speak to you.”

Colette’s head snapped toward Tess. Her eyes were wide and her lips pursed. “My mother?”

“Yeah, she called at, like, six-thirty, right after I’d gotten in, and she said it was urgent.”

“Did you ask what exactly she wanted?”

“No, but she did say it was private. Something about a family matter? I didn’t want to pry,” said Tess. She reached for the door to Colette’s office and held it open for her. When Colette was inside, Tess began to close the door.

“Call if you need anything. I’m just out here.” Tess tried to make her smile as reassuring as possible. After two years of being Colette’s personal assistant, she liked to think she had a pretty good handle on her boss’s facial expression—she knew the tiny crease between Colette’s eyebrows and the flinch of her lip all added up to some big catastrophe, some big family drama that would no doubt be stressing her out. It was important to Tess that Colette knew she was happy to help.

“Yes, yes, just like you’re paid to be.”

The door slammed shut.

Tess sighed. Objectively, she knew that Colette was a hard woman to work for—Colette was rude, dismissive, and worked far too hard for her own good, but Tess wasn’t exactly an objective person. Where Colette was all ice and business, Tess was warmth and butterscotch cookies. She believed in everyone and everything, she forgave immediately, and there was no limit to what she was willing to do for those she loved. The two were complete opposites, which was why Tess’s crush on her boss was so embarrassing.

The day passed slowly, full of phone calls and boring emails. It wasn’t that Tess didn’t like her job, exactly, it was just that her passion was elsewhere. Working in the publishing industry was a dream come true for a bookworm like herself, but she was only technically in the publishing industry—scheduling appointments for Colette wasn’t the same as running them herself, after all.

At lunchtime, when the few colleagues not on holiday had drifted into the office and then back out to eat, Tess felt safe to take a break and work on her true passion project—her novel. She sat straight in her chair, her fingers tapping away like crazy, as the words spilled out of her. Since starting as Colette’s assistant, Tess hadn’t suffered from an ounce of writer’s block—she simply didn’t have the time. Her lunch break was short and the hours were long, so she had to fit all the writing she could into twenty-minute writing sprees.

Tess took a sip of coffee. Her stomach rumbled. With a final flourish of her hand against the keyboard, she finished the scene. A thousand words in half an hour—not bad, she thought, not bad at all. She’d even have time to nip down the street to get a bagel before her break was over.