I stepped out of the Honda.
The eleven o’clock sun was beating down onto the asphalt of the Vanguard parking lot with dry, high-altitude fury.
I did not slouch.
I did not look at the ground.
I walked through the revolving glass doors of the lobby, my scuffed leather dress shoes making a clean, concussive *tack… tack… tack* against the green Italian marble floorboards.
The receptionist—a twenty-two-year-old girl named Jenny who had started three weeks ago—looked up from her console.
When she saw me walking toward the security turnstiles, her face drained of all color:
“Mr….
Mr.
Miller…?”
Jenny stammered, her hands hovering over her telephone extension:
“Nick… Mr.
Sterling gave explicit instructions to the building security… He said you were not permitted past the reception desk!”
“I’m here for my personal effects, Jenny,” I said softly.People & Society
My voice had no anger.
It carried that quiet, terrifying, sixty-cycle baseline that had governed three years of commercial campaigns:
“My family photographs on desk fourteen.”
“My grandfather’s brass drafting compass.”
“And the leather-bound client ledger that belongs to my personal consulting charter.”
Jenny swallowed hard, her eyes darting toward the frosted-glass conference room at the end of the central hallway where Nick and Carter Holbrook were currently presiding over an emergency all-hands meeting of the agency’s executive staff.
She didn’t press the security alarm.
She slowly, trembling, lowered her hand from the intercom:
“You have ten minutes, Sebastian,” she whispered, tears welling in her young eyes:
“Nick told the senior managers that you had a psychotic episode in the conference room.
He told them you tried to physically strike him before you ran into the parking lot.”
I smiled—a thin, dry, terrifying curve of my lips:
“Thank you, Jenny.”
“Make sure you keep your resume updated on LinkedIn this afternoon.”
“By five o’clock…”Pants
I stepped through the turnstile:
“…this agency will not have an executive board left to sign your paycheck.”
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The bullpen of Vanguard Creative Group was sixty feet wide, an open-concept monument of polished concrete floors, exposed steel ductwork, five-thousand-dollar Herman Miller ergonomic task chairs, and twenty-four young designers and copywriters who worked seventy hours a week for forty-two thousand dollars a year while Nick Sterling bought sports cars in Aspen.
When I stepped onto the concrete floorboards, the room died.Desks
The clatter of mechanical keyboards ceased.
FULL STORY on the next page.