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He seems genuinely put out by this. There’s a touch of something almost like hurt in his expression.
I blink, puzzled by his reaction. “Well… to be honest with you, I don’t really do birthdays anymore. I kind of stopped making a big deal out of it after my parents died.”
“Why?” he demands.
“Nobody in my life ever did anything big for it after that,” I say with a shrug. “And my ex barely ever remembered it, so I kinda just let the day come and go without making a fuss.”
Declan looks positively outraged at that. “Are you serious? When is your birthday?”
I have to pull up a mental calendar to count the days; I really don’t keep track of my birthdays. “Um… next weekend,” I say, startled that it’s so close. I was definitely going to forget if I hadn’t made that offhand comment to Nora at lunch.
“Next weekend?”
“Yeah. The fourteenth.”
He growls softly under his breath, as if cursing someone who isn’t present, then reaches out to hold me by the waist. He pulls me in close, staring at me intently.
“Now, you do have someone in your life who will make a big deal about your birthday,” he tells me. “And trust me—I’m going to make a big fucking deal.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
He grins, leaning down for a kiss.
“Declan,” I say once he draws back. “What does that mean?”
“It means keep your schedule open next weekend.”
Chapter 42
Sophie
“We need to change direction,” Hannah declares.
I’m seated at the long, oval-shaped table in the Dynasty marketing department’s meeting room. Across the table, Mark and Andrea are hunched over the same laptop, looking at some of last week’s social media posts for the company. At the head, Carol sits, frowning up at Hannah, who’s on her feet, shuffling papers.
“Look at this,” she says. She sticks one of the papers in front of Carol. I don’t have to look at it to know what’s on it. “Engagement is way down. Two months ago, we were racking up likes, but things are slow-going at the moment.”
Carol purses her lips, considering. “And what are you suggesting?”
“This whole ‘new angle’ thing just isn’t working,” Hannah says, making me groan internally. Here we go. “Public opinion’s not changing. Whatever we’re doing, it isn’t coming across as genuine enough.”
“And how would you alter our course, here?”
“To be perfectly honest,” she says, raising an eyebrow, “I think we should just scrap this campaign altogether. Start with something new. Something fresh. If we really want people to buy this equipment, we need to be advertising with celebrities. Athletes.”
I bite my lip, staring down at the table. I still believe that Hannah couldn’t be more wrong. The vast majority of people—the people who will buy our products—are not celebrities or athletes, so how could they relate to yet another cash-grab advertisement that tries to convince them they are?
Carol’s eyes narrow as she scans the paper one more time. She looks up at me, then back at the page. Finally, she gestures for Hannah to sit back down, folds her hands on the table, and clears her throat.
“Sophie,” she says, “this is your vision here. Give me your perspective on this.”
I tap my pen against my lips, thinking. My first instinct is to toss out wild suggestions—more focus groups, twice the posting rate on TikTok, guerilla interviews of passersby on the street—but then I collect myself. I have to cut to the heart of the issue.
“I really think this campaign can still work,” I say. “And I really think this is the direction we need to take.”
Hannah is already shaking her head as I’m talking, and the second I’m done, she jumps in. “Give me a break. There’s a reason most of our rivals don’t advertise like this. It’s not working, and there are better, tried-and-true methods of getting the word out. Let’s get some YouTube ad spots and get an NBA star on payroll, already.”
“Carol,” I say patiently, ignoring Hannah, “the vast majority of people who will buy a bike from Dynasty are not professional basketball players.”
