Page 19 of Hottie on Her Shelf
Chapter Five
Some people drowned the memory of a crushing defeat in ice cream. Or any junk food. Alcohol. Unwise flings. Unnecessary hair color changes.
All of that was just trying to erase the previous bad decision with a new one.
Hallie knew better. There were two important steps to recovering from a…misstep. An egregious mistake. Or…a series of misinformed choices.
One, acknowledge what went wrong. No excuses. Own the blunder and accept that no matter the good intentions behind it, it was not a success.
Two, figure out how to keep from repeating it. Research. Study. All the information was out there waiting to be corralled. Categorized. Comprehended.
Hallie was very much aware that she’d screwed up at the campaign breakfast. That her performance earned zero points. No gold stars. Frankly, they should’ve charged her for the breakfast after bombing so spectacularly.
Embarrassingly.
And given that Swan Cove was a typical small town with a stereotypical group penchant for repeating minutiae? The story of her self-destruction would no doubt be told and retold. Not just for the duration of the campaign but for her entire life. Probably even retold as legend for every campaign that ever kicked off until a black hole, eons down the road, swallowed the earth whole.
Yes, Hallie was feeling sorry for herself. A tiny bit. But she had a plan to fix it all.
She’d eschewed offers from her friends to help her wallow, bring her donuts, bring her tacos, and especially declined the offer to go “run off her shame” for a few miles. Hallie felt bad, but she didn’t feel exercise bad.
Instead, she’d posted up at her home away from home—the library. Amassing the right knowledge, having it all at her mental fingertips, would change everything.
Hallie was surrounded by copies of the Gazette from the past two months. It’d been the logical go-to for info about the expansion plans, but all she’d found so far was a single line about it as a topic for a Chamber of Commerce meeting.
It slightly mollified her that she hadn’t been oblivious to a huge issue—it simply wasn’t public knowledge yet. But being mollified didn’t fix the problem. It didn’t giveHallie the information needed to weigh in.
So, she was also surrounded by books. Books on famous battles, both the insignificant and the major wins/losses and their strategies. The same for campaigns. This wasn’t a one or the other approach—this campaign would be a series of skirmishes. Battles. Fights for supremacy.
And all of that was just to prevent being laughed off the dais again.
Yes. Being buried in facts was the way to go. Even if one stack of particularly thick military histories had toppled and crushed her pinkie.
“Hallie, dear, I heard what happened.” Felicia Montgomery (yes, that Montgomery family, aka,aunt of the current mayor) strode briskly across the library, not bothering to temper her voice at all in respect to the holy temple of knowledge. Her peacock-bright kimono swished against her pants.
“You heard that I decided against ordering the Pulitzer winners this year? Nobody reads them. The cache of having them on the shelves isn’t worth the budgetary hit.”
“Don’t be obtuse. You’re too smart to get away with it.” Felicia pulled her cheaters off the top of her gray head simply to give a pointed stare over the edges of them. “I heard you were eviscerated. No, that’s not quite right. You, yourself, are to blame for much of it. More along the lines of self-immolation, am I right?”
Continuing to play coy wouldn’t accomplish anything. Felicia had sources. And to so blatantly not beat around the bush like this, every single source must’ve raced to update her.
Hallie methodically lined up her pen parallel to the edge of her notebook before answering because acknowledging step one to herself was not the same as doing it to someone else. “I will admit that the campaign breakfast did not rise above my very low expectations. Aside from the food. That was surprisingly delicious.”
“Of course it was. I stole the chef from a burgeoning four-restaurant empire in Chicago.”
That was Felicia Montgomery, the unofficial fairy godmother of Swan Cove. Or, to be more gritty about it, their fixer. She had no official title or salary, but if something needed doing, Felicia would get it done.
“Well, if I don’t need to tell you that the pancakes were as fluffy as cotton candy, then I guess we’re all caught up.” Hallie moved her palm restlessly over the burgundy leather binding of a Napoleon biography. She yearned to be inside its pages, sopping up all the info that would keep her from screwing up so royally next time.
Felicia squeezed her shoulder in a grip that would do a masseuse proud. That single squeeze gave a measure of solace—while also being awkward. Felicia wasn’t a touchy-feely-hugging type. “I’m sorry, Hallie.”
“Thank you.” Good. That was done. They could move on.
The most comforting thing about Felicia right now was that she wasn’t a wallower. She was brisk, efficient, and always focused on the next thing—whatever that might be. Even her hair, in its thick Princess Diana shaggy cut, was wash and go. Felicia never wasted time.
“Naturally, I’m curious why you chose to enter the ring against an incumbent. You’re educated enough to know that drastically lowered your chance of even marginal success.” After a sharp tsk with her tongue, the older woman sat across from Hallie. “But now you’re in the thick of it. All that matters is figuring out how to move forward.”
Hallie delighted in proper vocabulary at all times. There were so many evocative, interesting words that never got used anymore. With that caveat, though, she had to clamp her lips shut to not simply respond Duh! Which was absolutely the right word at the right time.
