"Christian all girls school," Dar said. "Actually, she's never spoken badly of it, but she's not that comfortable going back to her hometown after the last couple of times there, and she got roped into this speech at the last minute."
"Ahh." Alastair picked up his glass of red wine and swirled it a bit before he took a sip. "Yeah, she's had a tough time up there from what you said. Surprised you didn't go with her."
Dar paused in mid bite. She swallowed the bit of potato and cocked her head at him. "And miss this meeting?" she asked, in a quizzical tone. "I offered. Kerry told me to stop talking crazy."
Alastair smiled. "You know, I never figured you for a family woman, Dar, but you make a damn fine one," he said, putting his glass down and checking his watch. "Well, damn it all. Does this guy think people don't need to sleep? It's 2:00 a.m.!"
"Uh huh." Dar ate another bit of potato. "On the other hand, I'll be sick to my stomach if I fall asleep after I eat this so maybe staying up is better." She glanced across the table, where Sir Melthon was in consultation with his minions. "By the way, thanks for kicking him in the ass for me."
Her boss smiled as he neatly cut his steak into squares. "Figured I owed it to you," he said, in a conversational tone. "But you know, even if I didn't, I would have done it. Man was giving me an itch."
Dar frowned, her dark brows contracting across her forehead. "You owed me what?" she asked, puzzled. "Did I miss something?" She looked around, but the rest of the group was busy with their own dinners or talking amongst themselves--even Hans was leaning over talking to Sir Melthon in a low mutter.
"Ah well." Alastair chuckled softly. "Remember when that crazy feller Ankow was in our shorts?"
Dar snorted, and rolled her eyes. "Jackass."
"Mm," Alastair agreed. "But you know, I felt like I was the jackass in all that, Dar," he said. "I look back and I know I sat back and let you take heat you didn't deserve."
Dar blinked. "Well--"
Her boss looked over at her. "He was after me. And the only thing standing in his way was you."
Dar blinked again, caught utterly by surprise, and unsure of how to react.
"You could have given him what he wanted, Dar, and done well by it," Alastair said, his eyes watching her curiously. "Any particular reason you walked into a bear trap on my behalf?"
Was there? Dar felt a little bewildered by the question. "Alastair, it never occurred to me to do anything else," she muttered. "Besides, you asked me to help."
"I did. So you know, when I look back at that, and how you were treated at that meeting, I kick myself every single time."
Well. Dar ate a few pieces of her steak, and recalled that tense, angry few days when she'd been torn between the stress of the board's being prodded to fire her and her anxiety about Kerry, testifying at her father's hearing.
She paused, putting her fork down and taking a swallow of the wine that had been untouched in her glass. "You know, I almost walked away from it all in that meeting." She tasted the unfamiliar tang of the tannins on her tongue. "There was one minute there, when I almost said to hell with it."
"Glad you didn't," Alastair remarked.
"Me too." Dar smiled, and raised her glass toward him. "Alastair, you don't owe me anything. I just did what comes naturally to me."
Alastair lifted his glass and touched it to Dar's. "Exactly," he said. "I can't tell you how much of a pleasure it's been the last year or so getting to actually know you."
Unsure if that was a compliment or not, Dar decided to smile anyway. "Likewise." She covered her bases. "I just wish I'd seen my father kick his ass. I was incredibly pissed off that I missed that."
"Security cameras caught it," her boss said. "I'll send you copy." He winked at her, and went back to his steak.
Dar took another swallow of wine, deciding that her life was enduring an evening of new experiences. She only hoped Kerry's would turn out as pleasantly interesting.
"YOU KNOW, THE truth is that people don't get respect." Kerry moved around in front of the podium, taking her microphone with her as she closed in on the audience again. "Especially, if you grow up in the spotlight like I did. Everyone assumes the worst of you because in a quirky kind of way, that makes people feel better about themselves if they do, doesn't it?"
She scanned the crowd, finding a lot of very curious eyes mixed with those very full of disapproval. "So I knew that even before I started working for ILS," Kerry paused, and made eye contact with a few people, "I knew that before I left here."
Kerry walked over to one side of the stage. "I knew that, even though I was a good, smart student, and even though I went to college and got a degree, that no matter what I achieved, everyone would assume someone handed it to me on a plate."
The room had settled into silence.
"So I eventually decided that I couldn't worry about what other people thought. What mattered is what I thought about myself, and that's why I decided to leave here, leave my home and my family to try and achieve what would be success in my own eyes."
A hand lifted. Kerry pointed at the girl. "Go ahead."
"Couldn't you have done that here? Wouldn't it have been more impressive, if you had?"
Good question. "I might have been able to," Kerry conceded. "It would have been harder, staying here and being so close to everything that I felt was boxing me in. But the fact is I didn't."
She paused, and then continued. "What I did was take a job in the field of my major, in a city far away from home. It was scary," she said. "But the people who hired me had no idea who I was, only that I could speak English and construct compound sentences, so it was like starting from scratch in a way."
Another hand. "What job was it?"
"Manager of an IT department," Kerry said. "It was a small company, and I actually did well there until one day a much bigger company bought us."
She nibbled her lower lip. "When that happened, the person in charge of their IT department came in and told me that we weren't wanted or needed, and we'd be getting pink slips in very short order."
The audience reacted, murmuring a little.
"In a way, that was pretty horrific," Kerry said. "But in a way, it's just reality. That's what it's like out there." She made eye contact again with a few of the watchers. "That does happen, every day. It's business. And one thing it meant to me was that I was being treated just like any other unwanted worker would have been. There was nothing personal about it."
It was hard not to smile as she said it, seeing she knew just how much of a lie they were both telling themselves at the time. "When you grow up in privilege like I did, like a lot of you did--" She paused meaningfully. "You don't expect that. You expect someone to come in and fix things don't you?'
She could tell at least some of them were thinking about it. It had taken her a long time to be able to. "So for me, it was a learning experience because I hadn't faced that kind of situation before."
"What did you do?" the same girl asked. "Go to another company?"
"Well." Kerry smothered a grin. "Not exactly. I worked hard to make the transition less painful for the people working for me. I wasn't worried about myself, but there were people there who really were depending week to week on that job to survive."
"Wait, wait." Her old friend stood up again, glancing behind her at the headmistress, before she continued. "You can't have it both ways, Kerry. Either you were on your own there, or you were just posing, in which case you're right, you had nothing to worry about."
Kerry smiled. "I was on my own," she clarified. "But I knew I was unattached, and I could get a job again fairly easily. Most of the people working for me had families and mortgages they had to worry about, which I didn't," she said. "But it was a very tough time for me, because the last thing I wanted was to have to come home, having failed."