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After lunch, I was specifically excluded from the meeting on the Cartwright response.
I couldn’t have been imagining this. I was sure we’d agreed that there wasn’t a need for the mean boss treatment anymore, so what had I missed?
If I’d said something, or done something, I couldn’t put a finger on it. It wasn’t like I’d forgotten his birthday. I didn’t even know when it was. A brisk walk twice around the block didn’t help.
By the end of the day, I’d had enough.
“Is he in there?” I asked Cindy.
“Yes, and I hope he stays there. Today started off so well, and then he nearly bit my head off at lunch time.”
“Mean boss.”
“Pardon?”
I grasped the door handle. “Oh, nothing.” I opened the door, stepped inside, and closed it behind me.
He glanced at me only briefly before turning back to his computer. “Whatever it is, I don’t have time.”
Refusing to be intimidated, I walked up and took a seat across from him. “We agreed that mean boss was over.”
There, I’d said it, and that should have been enough to jog his memory. It had only been last week.
“I don’t have time,” he repeated.
“And I don’t deserve this.” I sat and waited.
He typed on his keyboard, ignoring me.
“Why are you being like this again? You agreed to stop it.”
He looked up with cold, piercing eyes. “That was when I thought I could trust you.”
The comment froze me. “You…you can. You know that.”
I’d thought he knew that. He should have known that.
He turned back to his monitor. “Is that so?”
The words dripped with disdain, another thing I didn’t deserve.
Wracking my brain, I couldn’t come up with anything that could have prompted this turnaround. “What did I do?”
“How about meeting with Cartwright?”
I cocked my head. I’d never heard anything so outrageous. “I’ve never even met the man.”
“Not him. One of his henchmen, or should I say henchwomen?”
I straightened up. “I have no idea what the hell you’re talking about.”
Before I got to know him, I would have considered doing something like that, but now? No way.
“Yeah, right.”
He surprised me by opening a manila folder on his desk and sliding a picture my direction. “And I suppose this isn’t you?”
It was a blurry picture of the outside of Panera Bread.
