Chapter Text
Kate Sharma pinched her mouth shut against another wave of nausea. She hadn’t eaten anything all day to forestall just such an attack of nerves, but her stomach pitched and rolled like the Bridgerton Hotel had suddenly taken to the high seas. What did you throw up when you hadn’t eaten? Stomach lining and blood, probably. And that line of thought had only made her queasier.
Think calm thoughts, Didi, her sister Eddie said. Eddie took deep, exaggerated breaths—her narrow shoulders rising and falling—and motioned for Kate to do the same. Calm thoughts, she murmured. Kate could feel her little sister’s hand on her shoulder as though she were here with her now. Eddie’s large, dark eyes watched her carefully, a small smile of encouragement softening her cheek. That’s it, Didi. Kate swallowed. The Bridgerton Hotel had returned to dry land. She made a mental note to tell Dr. Leape that the visualizations were working.
The panic attacks had started in the last year, and she resented everything they had robbed her of. Certainty, clarity, peace. This presentation would have been a cinch for the Kate of two years ago. She would have come in over-prepared and steely-eyed, and no one would have dared deny her requests. The kids needed money and goddammit, they were going to get it, even if Kate had to stare down every millionaire in Manhattan. But then the panic attacks. And then The Panic Attack, the one that happened in the middle of her charity spiel at the Erdrich gala. Her off-the-rack gown had tightened around her ribcage like a torture device, and she had been certain—more certain than she had ever been about anything—that right there in front of all those potential donors in their custom Azzedine Alaia and Versace gowns, she was going to die.
Dr. Leape said she was stressed.
“No shit!” Kate shrieked, “Did you get a degree in obvious observations?” She gasped, taken aback by her own hysterical rage.
He hadn’t said a word, hadn’t looked remotely offended. Politely interested. Dr. Leape did politely interested like a kick to the head.
“Sorry,” Kate said in a more contained tone. “I would like some management techniques for this because I have a lot on my plate at the moment and I can’t go off to the seaside for a nervous breakdown.”
“That’s interesting,” Dr. Leape said.
Kate wanted to ask what was interesting like she wanted a shot in the gut. She stared at him, resolved not to be the one to break the silence.
He smiled and wrote something on his notepad. “Do you think ‘nervous breakdowns’, as you call them, are a luxury for the rich?”
“What?”
“You said, ‘go off to the seaside’ and with not an insignificant amount of…disdain.”
“Can we start with the short-term fix and do the heavy, ‘did your mom love you?’ talk another time?” Kate asked impatiently.
Dr. Leape wrote something else on his notepad and smiled again. “Of course, Kate. Have you tried deep breathing?”
Kate hated Dr. Leape. He was a useless, useless man who oozed condescension like a toxic fog. He was an asshole who thought navel-gazing was a proper occupation. She wouldn’t come back. So help her God, she would never come back to this man again.
Except she did.
Because Kate wasn’t a quitter, and neither were her anxiety attacks.
But she could appreciate the win. Visualizing her baby sister helped. She’d tried visualizing her friends before, but they were all coworkers and that was too close to work, the source of all her stress these days. And, sure, the actual Eddie would never go through a breathing exercise with Kate—because Kate categorically refused to tell her sister that she was having an ongoing breakdown—but it didn’t have to be realistic. It had to be functional.
She pushed her shoulders back. The goal was $50,000. That was chump change to these people. That was sofa-cushions money to them. She smoothed the front of her dress shirt and snapped her blazer lapels efficiently. Don’t fuck up, don’t fuck up, don’t fuck up. Dr. Leape had also suggested mantras.
Kate waited outside the conference room clutching her folders and laptop to her chest and watched the clock at the end of the hall tick down to showtime. The nausea had abated, but she could feel it prowling the perimeters of her calm, looking for a weak spot. She imagined Eddie sitting next to her, looking effortlessly pretty in some pink confection of lace and tulle and girlishness, telling Kate to simply breathe. Telling her that in a few minutes, she would present her grant proposal to the philanthropy committee, and they would give her a standing ovation and twice her ask in funds. Or more realistically, they would nod curtly, and the grant money would be transferred anticlimactically to the Chosen & Cherished bank account. A happy ending, anyway.
She heard footsteps coming down the hallway, a large group of people by the sound of it. The committee. She straightened her posture and slapped on a smile.
A middling tall man with thick dark hair and chocolate brown eyes headed the pack of black and navy-suited businesspeople. He stood out from the rest of them not just because he was a full twenty years younger than the next youngest of the lot, but because he was handsome to the point of distraction. Kate was going to have to present to him?
“This is the last of them,” a harried looking woman with a helmet of blond hair said. She sounded out of breath and Kate guessed she couldn’t keep up with the long strides of the men in her pumps.
“Let’s get this over with then,” the handsome one said. “I have a lunch at one.”
Kate’s attraction soured like milk. Let’s get this over with? Like he was getting an enema. No, like he was giving an enema. As though donating life-changing amounts of money to the poor and needy was beneath him? Kate scoffed. She had met his ilk before. The ones trying to give just enough in charitable contributions for the tax breaks and not a dollar more. The ones who couldn’t wait to eat some exotic and endangered species of bird for lunch, whose bank accounts would never run perilously close to empty because of a rogue automatic debit and who, therefore, had no understanding whatsoever what it meant to struggle in any way that mattered. Because, no, losing their college polo matches in front of their disappointed fathers didn’t count. Let’s get this over with in-fucking-deed.
The suits all filed into the conference room and Kate caught fragments of their conversations.
“Beat him by four strokes last weekend—"
“Martin bought her another car when I expressly forbade—”
“The numbers are down, but I think it’s too soon to—”
“Miss Sharma?” The woman with the helmet of blonde curls leaned over her with a warm smile. “If you’ll just follow them in.”
Kate stood up and Eddie hopped to her feet, too. She nodded at Kate, her smile easy and affectionate. Breathe, didi. Don’t let this man distract you from your goals.
Kate took a steadying breath and followed the EA into the room. She left Eddie at the door. She had this.
After the EA walked Kate through the equipment and helped her connect her laptop, she went around the room handing out water to the suits. Her shoes knocked against the expensive tile floors and Kate concentrated on that sound to block out all the snatches of rich-speak she didn’t want to hear. She could hold them in contempt for their money and still ask them for it; she just couldn’t show them she held them in contempt while asking for their money. And it would be hard to hide her true feelings if she heard one of them mention a yacht they wanted to purchase this weekend.
The EA came back to the front of the room and smoothed her navy-blue skirt. “Mr. Bridgerton, I would like to introduce Kate Sharma. She is here on behalf of the organization, Chosen & Cherished.”
Mr. Bridgerton was, of course, the handsome asshole at the end of the table, the one to whom she was principally appealing.
Kate began her speech. She had done this talk so many times, she no longer needed notecards or even the prompts on the PowerPoint behind her. She and Petra had reworked the presentation a few weeks ago for maximum impact. No words, just silent video clips and pictures showing the kids in their placements and group homes; with their mentors at Coney Island or the High Line; at the street fairs the charity put on for them every summer. If those smiling faces didn’t budge the millionaires in this room, they were too far gone.
“As of 2019, there were an estimated 424,000 children in foster care and nearly half of them are in nonrelative foster family homes. This means that around 200,000 children are taken from their parents and placed with strangers. Well-meaning strangers, perhaps. Perhaps not. But for many of them, the unintended message is, I am not wanted, and I do not have a real home. No child should ever have to feel this way, but it is the unfortunate reality for far too many. One way that Chosen & Cherished addresses this problem is with a mentorship program pairing foster children with previous foster children who have exited the system and want to give back.”
Kate let her voice rise and fall with the emphasis and emotion that would elicit the correct response, but the lines were by rote. More than half of her mind wasn’t with her mouth; it was with Mr. Bridgerton.
He sat at the end of the long conference room table like a bored king. He didn’t slouch or fidget; he was too well-bred for that, but there was a tick in his jaw and his eyes never once landed on her or her presentation. He wasn’t listening. He was thinking about his damn lunch date, probably with some useless socialite who’d one day be his wife and take over the odious task of pretending to care about the needy. Kate seethed. Her presentation was less than eight minutes. Anyone could convincingly pretend to pay attention for eight minutes.
She was a person, goddammit, and he had to know how much work went into these presentations, this begging trussed, gussied, and rebranded as ‘applying for aid’. Or maybe he had no idea how much work it took because he’d never done anything close. She knew his story. Who didn’t? His father left him an empire of luxury hotels and resorts that spanned the globe. He had been born, and riches had dropped into his lap. And he had grown up handsome, because of course he had. we wouldn’t want the rich, white boy to experience any hardship. God, the universe was unkind. Men like him got to walk around, all monied and uncaring, while kids—kids, for god’s sake—suffered the indignities and shame of feeling unloved and unwanted.
Kate realized she had stopped talking, but the presentation wasn’t over. She could see the changing images behind her as a light flicker on the table. Words—unsanctioned, unrehearsed words—were clawing at her throat. She couldn’t say it. She shouldn’t say it. She tried to picture Eddie, but Eddie didn’t appear. Kate could only see that man, indifferent and remote as the moon.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Bridgerton,” she said, the words pushing past her own good sense. “Am I boring you?"