Page 1 of The Law of Attraction
Chapter One
It was Friday afternoon, and Olivia Woerner was engaged in a battle of wills with herself.
Just get up and go talk to him.
She stared across the office at Adam Cortinas. All she could see over the walls of his cubicle was the very top of his head, but that hadn’t stopped her from staring at him for the better part of an hour.
Just go over there.
It didn’t have to be a big deal. It was a simple ask. The odds of him saying no were pretty slim.
Probably.
All she had to do was walk up to Adam and say one sentence: Will you write me a reference for the Future Leader Development Course?
It was a new program the company had announced last week, and Olivia wanted to be a part of it, more than she’d wanted anything professionally since she’d first started this job.
Aside from the obvious leverage it would provide when year-end review and bonus time rolled around, it would be nice to be officially recognized finally as someone with leadership potential. A person worth developing into something more than a junior analyst on the commercial systems team at an independent power producer, which was where she’d been stuck for the last four years.
Jesus tap dancing Christ, her job sounded so boring she was putting herself into a coma just by describing it.
It pretty much was boring, except the part where she was on call at all hours and sometimes had to get up in the middle of the night to fix some code in a system that had gone offline, or else Very Bad Things happened—like hospitals and airports losing power, or grandmothers either freezing or dying of heatstroke, depending on the time of year.
That was what Brad, the CIO, always told people when he thought they might be slacking off: imagine if it was your grandmother without heat in Nebraska in the coldest January on record, or without air-conditioning in Reno during the worst heat wave in a decade. How would you feel if your own beloved grandmother’s power went out because someone wasn’t paying enough attention to their job?
Other than that—the part where Olivia was helping keep grandmothers alive—her job was mega boring.
Not that she expected work to be exciting. She’d accepted that most people spent their lives doing boring work in boring jobs. Even if you had an exciting job like paramedic or bounty hunter or hostage negotiator, she imagined there were still probably lots of days where it felt ho-hum.
But Olivia had been in the same role on the same team for too long, and she was in danger of stagnating. If she wasn’t careful, she’d end up as one of those people in their fifties who’d been stuck in one job their entire career, until suddenly the technology changed and rendered them obsolete.
What she needed was a challenge. An opportunity to grow into something more.
But despite raising the subject of her professional advancement multiple times with her boss Gavin, opportunities never seemed to arise. Or when they did, they always seemed to be earmarked for someone else.
This leadership course was her chance to stand out. To be noticed, finally, and taken seriously.
She’d already finished her application. All she needed now were two professional recommendations. Gavin had already agreed to provide one, but the other had to be from someone on another team.
That was why she needed Adam Cortinas.
He worked on the plant systems team and spent half his time in the field. Whenever one of the company’s power plants was having an issue, Adam was the guy they’d throw at the problem. The CIO loved him, because Adam had saved his bacon about a million times by parachuting into a disaster and fixing whatever was broken. He was a troubleshooting rock star.
If Olivia could get a recommendation from Adam Cortinas, it would give her a serious edge up on the competition.
She and Adam interacted pretty regularly, keeping the company data systems that she maintained integrated with the plant systems that he maintained, and she thought he liked her okay.
Adam could be tough to read. He was a little…brusque. But he was like that with everyone, even the CIO. It was just how he was. Adam wasn’t interested in small talk or making friends around the office. He was laser-focused on his work, and since he was a rock star, he could be as brusque as he wanted.
Olivia wasn’t especially into making friends around the office either, but she didn’t have a choice about playing nice. She wasn’t a rock star like Adam. She was a woman in a predominantly male field, and if she didn’t put in the extra effort to suck up and make friends, it would bite her in the ass professionally.
So now here she was on a Friday afternoon, trying to work up the nerve to talk to Adam, which she wouldn’t have had a problem with under normal circumstances. If she’d needed to talk to him about an ordinary work thing, she’d go straight up to him, no problem.
But this wasn’t an ordinary work thing. This was a favor she was asking him to do for her.
Olivia hated asking for favors.
She preferred to solve problems on her own. Asking for help felt like an admission of weakness, and she already had enough of a problem seeming weak because she was small and female, not to mention so pale, with her alabaster complexion and light blue eyes, that she practically disappeared into the industrial beige walls.
