This Might Hurt - Hardcover

Wrobel, Stephanie

 
9780593100080: This Might Hurt
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0593100085 ISBN 13: 9780593100080
Verlag: Berkley Pub Group, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

“You’ll be gripped in this clever exploration of fear and vulnerability right until the flawless ending—one you’ll most certainly want to talk about.”—ASHLEY AUDRAIN, New York Times bestselling author of The Push

NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2022 BY Newsweek · E! · Parade · Katie Couric Media · Betches · Criminal Element · Shondaland · Bustle · and more!

From the USA Today bestselling and Edgar-nominated author of Darling Rose Gold comes a dark, thrilling novel about two sisters—one trapped in the clutches of a cult, the other in a web of her own lies.
 
Welcome to Wisewood. We’ll keep your secrets if you keep ours.

Natalie Collins hasn’t heard from her sister in more than half a year.

The last time they spoke, Kit was slogging from mundane workdays to obligatory happy hours to crying in the shower about their dead mother. She told Natalie she was sure there was something more out there. 

And then she found Wisewood.

On a private island off the coast of Maine, Wisewood’s guests commit to six-month stays. During this time, they’re prohibited from contact with the rest of the world—no Internet, no phones, no exceptions. But the rules are for a good reason: to keep guests focused on achieving true fearlessness so they can become their Maximized Selves. Natalie thinks it’s a bad idea, but Kit has had enough of her sister’s cynicism and voluntarily disappears off the grid.
 
Six months later Natalie receives a menacing e-mail from a Wisewood account threatening to reveal the secret she’s been keeping from Kit. Panicked, Natalie hurries north to come clean to her sister and bring her home. But she’s about to learn that Wisewood won’t let either of them go without a fight.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Stephanie Wrobel is the international bestselling author of Darling Rose Gold. She grew up in Chicago but has been living in the UK for the past three years with her husband and dog, Moose Barkwinkle. She has an MFA from Emerson College and has had short fiction published in Bellevue Literary Review. Before turning to fiction, she worked as a creative copywriter at various advertising agencies.

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1

Natalie

January 6, 2020

I stand at the head of the conference table. The chairs around me are filled with men: short, tall, fat, bald, polite, skeptical. I direct the close of my pitch to the CEO, who has spent fifty minutes of my sixty-minute presentation playing with his phone and the other ten frowning at me. He is past his prime, trying to disguise the fact with hair plugs and a bottled tan.

"Using this new strategy," I say, "we're confident we will make your brand the number one beer with men twenty-one to thirty-four years old."

The CEO leans forward, mouth slightly ajar as if a cigar is usually perched there. He oversees a household-name beer that's been losing market share to craft breweries for years. As sales have slipped, my new agency has found itself on thinner and thinner ice with this client.

He looks me up and down, sneers a little. "With all due respect, what makes you think you"-he spits the word like it's a shit sandwich-"can get inside the mind of our man?"

I glance out the conference room window, squint at the Charles River in the distance, and count to three. My team warned me about this guy, a dinosaur of corporate America who still believes business belongs on the golf course.

What I want to say: Yes, however will I peel back the layers of such complicated minds? Can a simpleton ever truly understand the genius of the noble frat star? For now they crush empties against their foreheads, but someday they will command boardrooms. Someday they will be you and insist they got to where they are through nothing but sheer hard work. By then they'll have traded the watery swill you call beer for three-hundred-dollar bottles of pinot noir. They'll still spend their weekends falling down and throwing up, only now they'll do it in hotel rooms with their best friends' wives. When Monday rolls around, they'll slump at this table and wonder why I don't smile more often. They will root for me to break the glass ceiling as long as none of the shards nick them. They will lament the fact they can no longer say these things aloud, except on golf courses.

What I actually say: "To get up to speed on your business, I've spent the past two months conducting focus groups with six hundred men who fit your target demo." I scroll to the appendix of my PowerPoint deck, containing forty slides of detailed tables and graphs. "I've spent my weeknights collating the data and my weekends analyzing what all of it means. I know these men's occupations and income. I know their levels of education, their religion, their race. I know where your guys live, their lifestyles and personal values, their attitudes toward your brand as well as toward all of your competitors' brands. I know their usage frequency, their buyer readiness, and the occasions when they buy your beer. I know their degree of loyalty to you. When I get on the train to go to work or am lying in bed at night, I relisten to my interviews, searching for any insight I might've missed. I can say with confidence, I know your guy as well as I know my own father." I wince involuntarily. "Which means I know him as well as you do. I don't think I can get inside the mind of your customer. I know I can. Because I already have. With all due respect." I grin so the jab sounds playful instead of aggressive.

Everyone else in the room appears impressed. My assistant, Tyler, forgets himself and claps. I shift my eyes in his direction, and that's enough to make him stop, but by then the others have joined in, both the clients and my account team. The CEO watches me, amused but undecided. It was a risk, publicly challenging him in order to galvanize the rest, but I'll rarely interact with him; I'm told he shows up to advertising meetings only when he has no one else to antagonize. The marketing team members are the ones I need on my side. The CEO sits back and lets his underlings finish the session. He leaves halfway through the Q&A.

Five minutes later the clients have signed off on our strategy brief for the year. Handshakes and back pats are exchanged. Invitations to lunch are extended for the first time in months. The account team stays with the clients but I bow out. My lunch hour is for catching up on e-mail. If my inbox is empty, I spend the hour at the gym.

Tyler and I take the elevator forty floors down to the lobby of the Prudential Tower. I smirk while he raves about how awesome the presentation was. I didn't choose him as my assistant; he was assigned to me. What he lacks in ambition (or any set of demonstrable skills, really) he tries to make up for with personality.

On Boylston Street I shiver in the cold while Tyler books an Uber. Once we're nestled in the car, I turn toward him. "I want you to buy a box of Cohibas from the cigar parlor on Hanover. Wrap the box in navy blue paper. Send it with a note on the back of one of my business cards. Not the shitty agency-issued ones but the thick card stock I had made with the nice embossing. Do you have a pen? Then get your phone out. I want the note to say this exactly: 'To a productive partnership.' End that sentence with a period, not an exclamation point. Then, under that line, a dash followed by 'Natalie.' Got it? No 'Yours truly' or 'All my best' or 'Cheers.' Just a dash with my name. Send it to the CEO."

Tyler gapes at me. "But he was so rude to you. In front of all those people."

I tap a list of post-meeting to-dos on my phone. Without glancing up, I say, "When I was coming up in this industry, you know what I spent most of my time doing? Listening. And taking notes."

Out of the corner of my eye I see his expression sour slightly. He's only three years younger than I am.

"I want the minutes of today's meeting on my desk within the hour. Please."

"In my two years at DCV no one has ever done meeting minutes," he mumbles.

"Maybe that's why you almost lost the client that pays all of our salaries." I wait for a snappy comeback. When I don't get one, I pull a folder from my bag. "I glanced through your Starburst brief. It's riddled with typos." I find the marked-up pages and hand them to him. "It reflects poorly on both of us when the work is subpar. More careful proofreading next time, okay?" His jaw tightens. "And I told you: section headings in all caps and bolded. Not one or the other. Both. You'd be surprised how far attention to detail will take you."

The car pulls up to our office building. We ride another elevator together, this time in silence. On the sixth floor we get off. As we're about to part ways, Tyler sniffs. "If you've never met the CEO before today, how can we be sure he smokes cigars?"

"I know my target." I head into the women's bathroom.

A minute later I walk down the hallway, scrolling through my calendar (three more meetings this afternoon). I'm about to round the corner to my office when hushed voices in a nearby cubicle catch my ear. I recognize the first as that of one of the assistants, a woman who doesn't know she's being considered for a promotion. "I would love to work for her. She's such a boss bitch."

"Or your run-of-the-mill bitch." That one is Tyler.

The other assistants titter.

"She treats me like a child," he says, gaining steam from his friends' reactions. He affects a shrill voice. "Tyler, I want you to go to the bathroom. When you wipe your ass, use four squares of toilet paper, but make sure it's three-ply, not two. If it's two, you're fired." They all giggle, these people who are almost my age but make a third of what I do.

I straighten, pull back my shoulders, and stride past the cubicle. Without slowing down I say, "I don't think my voice is that high-pitched."

Someone gasps. The last thing I hear before closing my office door is total silence.



At my desk I remove the lid of my...

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Verlag
Berkley Pub Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2022
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593100085
ISBN 13 
9780593100080
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
319
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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