Magnolia Wednesdays Read Online Free PDF

the moment, who she was. She was aflame with anger and righteous indignation. She was every woman who had worked hard, pulled herself up, claimed her place. Only to have some younger, bigger-lipped woman brought in to shove her out of the way.
    “I wasn’t aware that I needed to run hiring decisions by you.” Dan’s tone and face turned cold, frigid in a way she’d seen but never experienced. “We started looking earlier this year when the focus groups began to indicate that a fresher, hipper approach would hold more appeal.”
    He rose so that she could no longer tower over him. They were practically nose to nose over his desk. Both of them knew that “fresher” and “hipper” were the legally acceptable terms for “younger.”
    “Now you’ve done it,” the voice said. “There’s no way this can end well.”
    And as the rage seeped out of Vivien with the speed of air escaping a balloon, she realized that the voice was right.
    “Your numbers have been slipping, Vivien. Your stories just don’t grab viewers like they used to.” His tone turned wry and a little bit nasty. “You got quite a spike with that stunt in the parking garage, of course. But unless you’re planning to get injured on a regular basis, those numbers are not sustainable.”
    She realized then that things were both further along and far worse than she’d realized. She was on her way out whatever she did; they’d just hoped they could get her to train Regina, acclimate her to New York, and maybe introduce her to her contacts before she left. So that their fresher, hipper, younger reporter would already be up to speed and familiar to the audience when she took over Vivien’s job.
    Her fury returned in full flame. She couldn’t even imagine training someone else to take her place, couldn’t stomach pretending everything was fine while everyone in the business knew that she was on her way out. She simply wouldn’t stand for being a lame-duck investigative reporter. She would not do this.
    “Oh, no,” the little voice said. “Please be careful. Have you taken leave of your senses?”
    “I am not going to train someone else to do my job,” Vivien said, ignoring the voice. “I don’t care what color blonde she dyes her hair or how many collagen treatments she’s had on her lips.”
    And then, because she had apparently lost her mind and control of her faculties, she looked him in the eye and shouted, “You’ll have to get someone else to train her because I quit!”

    BACK IN HER office Vivien told the horrified little voice to shut up. She emptied a box of blank DVDs and began to fill it with her things. An ancient photo of her family. One of Stone and her at a recent industry awards banquet. The awards and plaques on her wall that she’d won over the years. The one plant that had managed to survive her sporadic ministrations.
    Her contacts were on her PDA and her story files were already backed up on her laptop, so the whole process took her maybe ten minutes. She was ready to flounce out of her office, down the elevator, and out of the building when her phone rang. She paused.
    If she was no longer employed here, was she required to answer the phone? Her secretary, Sara Spiegel, poked her head in the doorway, took in the stripped wall of fame and the box filled with Vivien’s things. “Oh.”
    Vivien always hated it when someone felt compelled to state the obvious, but it was clear she had to say something. “I’m leaving,” she said. Obvious, obvious, obvious . Maybe she should mention that she’d completely lost control of herself in a way she never had before and hoped never to again, and was only just now starting to grasp the ramifications of what she’d done. “I quit.”
    “Oh.” At thirty, Sara Spiegel was not the sharpest tool in the shed. But she’d been a good and faithful worker and had spent the last seven years in front of Vivien’s office. “You have a phone call. It’s your doctor’s office.”