The Lie by Natalie Wrye (primary phonics books .txt) 📕

Another text from Nancy—this one snarkier than the last.

Hell-beast: You don’t have to be there at all. Your shift doesn’t start until tonight.

It’s a threat. And it’s not the first one she’s made this week.

I’m not an idiot…

I know what our new manager Eric has been pressing her to do. What she wouldn’t dream of doing until he showed up in a shiny suit, promising to make everything bad that had happened with the bar in the last year alright.

I type back, repeating myself.

Me: I’m there now.

Hell-beast: You’re really there now?

Me: Yes.

“There” like a ghost. Like a wraith. Like a specter.

Like a big ass liar…but what was new?

I decide to set the phone aside at last, slipping it into my front pocket. But Frank is already staring at me, mouth open enough to catch flies.

He blinks. “Who’d you say was on the phone?”

I can feel my eyes harden. I shift on my seat.

“My boss. Why do you ask?”

“I don’t know.” He leans forward. “I guess just because of the fact that you were smiling the entire time.”

“I was?”

Was I?

Nancy and I had always had a messed-up dynamic—a love-hate sort of rapport from the second I stepped inside The Alchemist and filled out a bartender application.

She was head bartender at the time.

Sweet as pie…

To everyone but me.

I didn’t mind. It wasn’t like I was climbing over the rafters to be her friend, either.

She took her job too damn seriously, her green eyes often cutting at me in scorn for slacking off.

I was damn good at my job. But as far as Nancy was concerned, nothing but perfection would do in the bar her estranged father had left her.

I wasn’t a guy like Eric—our newest strait-laced manager with no imagination…which in the book of Sticks-Up-Their-Asses, Chapter Twelve, Verse Seventeen meant I was insufferable.

We’d been at each other’s throats from the beginning.

I shift under my jacket, meeting Frank’s stare. “Must have been a facial tic.”

“Lemme guess,” he wagers, “your boss is a woman.”

“Well, I haven’t had a chance to accurately check to be sure since she seems more android than human. But she looks like a woman. And talks like a woman.”

“Is she attractive?” Frank presses.

I shift again. “She’s…” Very attractive. Strawberry blonde hair, slender shoulders and peachy skin. I search for another word. “Decent. Why the hell do you want to know?”

“Is she smart? Dresses well? Can hold a conversation?”

“Frankie boy, if you’re looking for a woman, all you had to do is tell me. I would refer some options to you but, well, you’re you, and I despise you, so…”

“I don’t need a woman for me.” His blue eyes glow, suddenly hungry as he hunches forward, his jowls jiggling a little as he talks. “I need a woman for you.”

I stare. “For me?”

“I didn’t get a chance to tell you the other stipulation your grandmother has for her estate…” Frank folds his hands on his desk, smile smug. “She plans to leave you the majority stake in this company. Her company. Fletcher Financial Group… A stipulation contingent on you continuing the Fletcher family line, of course.” He holds up his hands. “Her words.”

“So, you’re saying…”

“By the end of this weekend, you can own Fletcher Financial Group—the estate, the house, everything that your grandfather cut you out of. But in order to do that… I need you to get a wife.”

Chapter 2

NANCY

The Alchemist, Manhattan NYC

Friday night

Firing employees has never been my forte.

In fact, if I were to be graded on the act, it would be the first “F” I ever really earned in my entire education-centered life.

The bad part of it all: My City University of New York business classes never prepared me to handle issues like this one.

Neither has the ‘University of YouTube.’

And no matter how many let someone down easy videos I watch, no matter how many times I practice it in the mirror, I’m no longer closer to perfecting the task of being the bitch.

The one who hires people and fires them.

But then again, nothing (and no website) ever prepares you for what to do when your business is on the verge of collapsing.

I will say this: I plan on writing a strongly worded letter to my CUNY professors for leaving this little tidbit out of the curriculum.

Because being in the top ten percent of your graduating cohort means nothing when a company man twice your age shoves a figure fifty thousand dollars over your budget across your marred, oak office desk.

The piece of crinkled paper with the price of the new construction blurs in front of me, and I blink—blink back the burning behind my eyes, hoping that the numbers on the page will change.

They don’t.

“That’s it?” I inch closer to the page, my eyeglasses threatening to slide off my face. “That can’t be right.”

“I can assure you, Ms. Anderson. That’s the price we’ve estimated to fix the piping problems.”

“It has an extra zero. Or four.”

“I know.” The balding businessman pinches his lips together, sipping an Alchemist-made espresso too hot for his thin lips. He frowns. “And when I went over the numbers with my accountant, I thought he might be wrong too. But then we ran another estimation. The repairs. They’re extensive. This building was built pre-war.”

“I know. This building was built right before the Prohibition era. An Irish mainstay. It’s why we’ve loved it so much. It’s a classic.”

“Why, yes. That is true. But a classic bar comes with a cost, Ms. Anderson. And after everything that happened last year, the arson, the damage, the insurance company refusing to cover it—”

“I get the drift, Michael. We’ve had a lot of misfortune.”

“Well,” the bald man shifts in his leather seat, his face full of grim lines, “then you might want to find—I don’t know—an investor, maybe? Or someone that can back you. It might make the process a little easier.”

“Easier?” My stomach roils at the thought. The thought of asking someone for money for our business. “But this construction is