How to get even, p.15
How to Get Even, page 15
She’d not had a PR firm, or a team of staff around her when the press had descended. Worse, she’d been sent away by her family because of the impact she was having on their charity work.
She’d borne rabid intrigue, spiteful gossip and running commentary bordering on slanderous with the grace and poise of a beauty queen. The last thing Chase had felt reading that one article was graceful or poised, and his respect for Bella and how she had dealt with things had skyrocketed.
He’d been worried that dealing with Chester’s article was reminding her of all that. She’d seemed distracted, but determined in a way he’d not seen before. Obviously she was doing excellently in her role, and it wasn’t just him thinking so either. Maurice had sent him an approving nod earlier, and Ali thought that the sun rose and set with Bella Carmichael. After her initial shock, she’d hit the ground running and handled the majority of the incoming queries herself which cannot have been easy.
But still…
‘I’m surprised she hasn’t tried to pull some kind of publicity stunt to try and redeem my reputation,’ he thought out loud.
‘Yeah, I can just see it now,’ Tej said. ‘Children?’
‘Of course children,’ Chase said, half laughing.
‘It might not be so bad.’ Tej shrugged.
‘It’d be fucking terrible, Tej,’ he replied without missing a beat.
Tej pulled a face. ‘It happened on her watch. Maybe Bella feels responsible.’
Chase picked at the bottle’s label. ‘That how you see it?’ he asked, keeping himself in check so as not to jump down his friend’s throat in Bella’s defence.
‘Fuck no.’
‘Good,’ Chase replied, a little heat escaping into his tone.
The sudden strike of protectiveness unsettled him. Bella could certainly take care of herself. She’d proved that and then some. But…
I am not a menace and I wasn’t making a scene.
He’d seen it. The vulnerability. The fear. He hated that for whatever reason, she’d not let herself be… loud. Be… relentlessly physical.
He coughed and spluttered as his beer went down the wrong way.
Tej ignored him as he died not so quietly, thumping his chest to try and ease the congestion.
‘But think about it though,’ Tej said, his eyes on him.
‘What?’
‘The children.’
Chase threw the label at him, which Tej expertly ducked, and reached for a slice of pizza.
‘I vote we track down the ex-wife,’ Astrid growled later that evening on the video call they’d all scrambled to get to.
All the girls replied with a strong and very definitive, ‘No.’
Astrid looked awful. Bella knew that the guilt over her part in instigating his downfall was eating at her, but how could she try to assuage it when her own guilt was an iceberg-sized wedge pressing on her chest?
God, Bella was unspeakably thankful for them. The girls’ support had been near constant since they’d discovered Chase’s ‘innocence’.
‘I mean, I’m not sure he’s entirely innocent, but certainly less so than we’d thought and planned for,’ Sienna had conceded.
There was, the girls were beginning to discover, mitigating circumstances, degrees of guilt and therefore varying appropriateness of vengeance, all of which needed recalibration in Chase’s case.
But they were all in firm agreement that he needed rescuing from their overly successful serving of just desserts, and that a serious act of redemption in the public’s eye needed to happen sooner rather than later.
‘It has to be natural. It has to come from him, otherwise he’ll sulk and look even more like an ass,’ Bella had told the girls, completely missing the way they smiled when she unconsciously cursed.
‘What about money? Can’t Tej throw some money at something?’ Sienna suggested.
‘I’m not sure that’s going to help,’ Paige pointed out.
‘I mean, like, some good-will charity thing.’
Astrid scrunched her nose. ‘But that’s Tej, not Chase.’
‘We’re already on that. I have the PR team securing tickets to the Harrison’s charity gala.’
Appropriate whistles, wows and awe were produced by the girls.
‘It’s a start, but it’s not enough.’
‘It needs to be about him.’
‘But also not something he thinks is about him. He’s less tetchy when he’s doing things for other people.’
I want people to come in and have the same look on their faces as you did when you came in.
Chase, who was secretly working with Sascha. Mentoring.
‘Everyone loves kids,’ Bella said.
‘Yes, well. Most people,’ Astrid replied. ‘You’re not going to have him adopt a kid for sympathy?’ she asked sceptically.
‘What? No,’ Bella replied, half outraged.
‘Well, it’s just that since, you know, you went all Jane Bond on us—’
‘More like Bellafeld,’ Sienna interrupted with a laugh.
‘Hey!’
‘Sorry,’ Sienna mumbled.
‘We’re just trying to pull you back from the dark side,’ Astrid insisted.
‘I wasn’t that bad!’ Bella cried out in defence.
‘No, you weren’t. You were that good,’ Paige insisted unhelpfully. ‘But you were talking about children.’
‘Children. New Yorkers love nothing more than a gruff man that’s good with kids.’
‘Who doesn’t?’ asked Sienna like anyone who didn’t would be utterly unreasonable.
‘Yeah, but would Chase be any good with kids?’ Astrid asked sceptically.
Bella thought back to the way he was with Sascha, and okay, she wasn’t a kid, but Bella believed that he would be. She could see how much he would enjoy their unfiltered and uncensored creativity.
Chase disliked people for their duplicity. Something she was beginning to understand more and more, after Tej told her about his wife’s betrayal. Children – young children – were much less likely to be duplicitous.
‘But who in New York would let their children anywhere near Chase at the moment? He’s toxic right now,’ Paige pointed out.
Bella anxiously nibbled the edge of a nail bed that she promised to file down properly later.
‘What if they think it won’t get out?’ Sienna suggested.
‘What do you mean?’ Bella asked.
‘Like, what if you do an event that isn’t an event, but then you’re “found out”?’
‘Ohh,’ Astrid cooed, ‘I get it. Like Chase is “caught” doing “good works”.’
‘Yes,’ Sienna replied.
Finally catching on, Bella’s mind moved at a million miles an hour. Words from all the research she’d done on Chase, sentences, opinions, the conversation at the gallery warehouse, the divide between who got to see art, to do art…
‘What if we did something at the gallery with a local school?’ she began. ‘If we invited them to the gallery, got them to create some art and then while they’re at lunch, we could hang their pieces on the walls and after lunch they can tour their work in our gallery?’
‘Ohh, you could invite the parents too,’ Astrid added.
‘But how do you get that news out?’
‘You don’t have to,’ Astrid said smugly. ‘In fact, the harder you try to keep it a secret, the more likely the press will uncover it, especially if you do this soon.’
‘But we can’t guarantee that, can we?’ Sienna asked.
‘And I’m not actually sure I want to subject children to anything remotely press related…’ Bella realised, backing away from the idea.
‘No,’ the girls all hastily agreed.
‘But if we could make sure that it wasn’t a press gang? If the news didn’t get out until after the event, so the press would be nowhere near it. And of course, the “source” would want to protect the children and wouldn’t name the school, but I’m sure some “photos” could leak.’
Bella could see it in her mind. Could see how much fun the kids would have. How good it would be and how well it fit with what Chase wanted for the gallery, for art, for a mechanic and a school teacher…
‘Okay. What would that look like?’ Bella asked and the girls got to planning.
14
In a position of this sort […] it will be advisable not to stir forth, but rather to retreat.
THE ART OF WAR, SUN TZU
OPERATION PHOENIX RISING
Restore Chase’s reputation.
Make the gallery a roaring success.
Stop crying when I see CM.
Buy the next book in Delia’s series.
‘I cannot believe that you talked me into this,’ he grumbled.
‘Just shut up and smile,’ Bella commanded.
Chase pressed his lips together. He didn’t want Bella to see how much he enjoyed seeing her in boss mode. It was different to before. There was a determination to her that seemed to bypass her natural instinct to defer and pacify, which made Bella come to life in ways he’d just begun to imagine.
But that didn’t make him any more comfortable or happy with Bella’s idea to open the gallery to a local elementary school whose art funding had recently been cut. He’d stared at her, genuinely concerned how on the money both he and Tej had been with her plans to involve children in some kind of redemption scheme, but she had promised him that there would be no journalists and no press attention. This was just about imbedding the gallery into the local community in a way that aligned with his personal tenets.
He wasn’t 100 per cent convinced and had begun to suspect that the perfectly poised Bella might be hiding a devious mind. Which was alarmingly appealing enough to distract him from his suspicions. Which was also why he now found himself staring at nearly thirty children aged four and five, all staring back.
At him.
And some of them weren’t blinking.
The walls of the gallery were completely bare, Ye-Joon having worked hard over the last few days to take down and protect the artwork they’d put up while working on the layout of what would be the final placement for the pre-opening and opening.
Bella clapped her hands together, looking like a bright splash of colour in the sparse, white-walled setting of a weekday morning. She was wearing jeans, which surprised him. He hadn’t seen her in a pair of jeans before. The rich burgundy silk shirt made her grey eyes glow, but he doubted it would last five minutes against a child with grubby hands and a paint-loaded brush. He was trying his hardest to keep his eyes off the way the denim hugged the curves of her backside, and felt the wide-eyed watchful gaze of a five-year-old catching him out.
But what caught his attention the most, was that her hair was down. It was the first time he’d seen it loose and there was so much more of it than he’d imagined. Rich, golden waves hit a few inches below her shoulders, not as long as the middle of her back, but not far off it either. But he couldn’t quite understand why he was so taken by it, other than the fact that for the first time he thought he was seeing her. Not the socialite, not the perfect daughter or fiancée, not the comms director with something to prove. He saw her.
‘So, who has been to a gallery before?’ Bella asked brightly.
About half of the class put up their hands and Chase was slightly gutted by the sight. Every single one of them should have been to a gallery of some kind. But with the cost of entrance and travel to get there, with busy lives and cheap entertainment, it was harder and harder to get kids into spaces that were so heavily guarded against the noise that children would make, or the mess they could produce.
‘And who knows what happens at a gallery?’
The children blinked back at her. Until they all started talking at once.
‘Old people walk around a lot?’
‘Kids get shouted at for making a noise?’
‘People stare at pictures?’
‘Children, remember to put your hands in the air if you want to answer or ask a question,’ Mr Tawney chided, apparently remembering that he was there to supervise the children and not stare longingly in the direction Maurice had disappeared off to, having taken one look at a class of school children and run as far and as fast as he possibly could.
Chase coughed a laugh and caught Bella glaring at him.
‘Galleries are places we go to see paintings and sculptures and other kinds of art,’ Bella informed them with a smile, her voice pitched perfectly for the kids. She would have made a great teacher, he heard his mother say in his mind.
Chase swallowed.
‘And what does he do?’ a kid asked, pointing at Chase.
‘He’s my boss,’ Bella replied.
‘Why aren’t you the boss?’ the little girl asked, with a similar tone to that of a person asking to speak to the manager.
‘Because she’s a girl,’ a boy replied with a snicker.
‘Girls can be bosses too,’ the future president replied, snippily, crossing her arms definitively over her chest in a ‘because I said so’ move that should have been enough to stop the conversation.
‘But she’s not a girl, she’s a lady,’ the boy pointed out.
Battle lines were being drawn, teachers were beginning to look to each other with concern as the situation threatened to escalate. The children moved subtly within the group on the verge of taking sides.
‘Can ladies be bosses?’ the girl asked, swinging her attention back to Bella whose smile hadn’t changed a bit, despite the way they’d dramatically veered off topic in barely three seconds.
‘Ladies can be bosses. Everyone can be a boss if they want… they just have to work hard enough.’ Which managed to successfully unite every single child in the room with a single disappointed groan as if they’d heard the sentiment many times before.
Teachers breathed a sigh of relief. A united front was better than fighting or out-right civil war. It took a little time to wrangle the kids into the seats at the tables they’d brought in for the visit, but eventually each child was settled down at the table they’d formed into a U shape and all that could be heard was the sound of pen on paper which was strangely soothing.
Bella knelt by a little boy, helping him choose some colours. Maurice passed through the gallery an unnecessary number of times to check on some spurious thing and tried not to fall over his own feet checking out Mr Tawney.
Chase could see that working, he thought with a smile.
He felt a tug at his pant leg and looked down to find a young boy staring up at him with large solemn eyes.
‘Yes?’ he said.
The kid tugged again.
Chase bent down and offered the kid his ear.
‘I don’t know what to draw,’ the kid whispered, a confession that seemed pulled from Chase’s own psyche.
He turned to look at the kid. ‘You don’t?’
The kid shook his head.
‘What about an animal?’
The kid shook his head again.
‘A flower?’
The kid scrunched his nose up and Chase hid his smile.
‘A house?’
When he went preternaturally still, Chase clenched his jaw. Eventually the kid shook his head. He caught Mr Tawney’s concern from the corner of his eye, but waved him off.
‘What’s your name?’ Chase asked.
‘Joseph,’ the kid replied with a nod that shook almost his entire little body.
‘Do you know what I liked to draw when I was a kid, Joseph?’
The kid looked at him as if trying to work out how Chase had once been a kid. Sometimes he wondered himself, but he pushed that thought aside and took the very small-sized child’s seat at the table. Joseph laughed as Chase’s knees rose above the table, but he came to stand next to him, until Chase kicked out the empty chair beside him for Joseph to sit on. Chase picked a piece of paper and his hand hovered for a second over a pen, before choosing one at random.
‘Nothing,’ Chase whispered to the kid as he started colouring in the page, finally answering the question he’d asked before. ‘I didn’t want to draw cats, or clouds, or airplanes,’ he said, the pen moving the pen across the paper, while still looking at the little boy.
‘What did you want to draw?’ he asked.
‘I,’ he confided at a whisper, ‘wanted to draw feelings.’
Joseph looked back at him. Wide, brown eyes full of wonder. ‘Can you do that?’
Chase nodded. ‘My mother said I could,’ he confided. ‘She said that I could draw anything I wanted to. Anything. And so can you. With this pen, nothing is right or wrong. And no one can take what you do with it from you,’ he told Joseph, who ate up his words like they were the God’s honest truth. And that, Chase realised, they were.
He looked down at the piece of paper beneath his pen and stared at the first piece of artwork he’d created since he’d caught Annalise and Darren in his bed.
‘What do feelings look like?’ the kid asked.
Chase pushed his piece of paper towards the kid. ‘Mine look like that today.’
‘Today?’
Chase nodded again as Joseph peered over at the colours, hovering over a forest green colour that merged into a deep grey, with slashes of red.
‘Tomorrow they might look different.’
The kid nodded sagely as if he understood. For all Chase knew, he did. For all Chase knew, Joseph probably had it more together than he did.
They sat beside each other for the next half an hour, as Joseph filled pages with colour, getting more and more confident and happy as he did until Mr Tawney announced they were all going to the park for their packed lunches.
He caught the nod of thanks Mr Tawney threw his way for taking time with Joseph, but shrugged it off. As Bella and one of the teachers gathered up the pictures the children had drawn, he thumbed the edge of the page he’d filled with felt-tip pen scribbles, slid it from the table and slipped it into the bin before heading back up to the office. He felt Bella’s eyes on him the whole way.
Bella, Maurice, Ali, Ye-Joon and one of the parent helpers spent the lunch time putting the drawings into frames and hanging them on the walls of the gallery, in between grabbing bites of sandwiches that she’d ordered in from a deli across the street.
