Chapter 26

After the meeting is over, I went to Shawn’s office. He greets me with a smile but I was not in the mood for it. 
“Why do you insist on calling me by my name?” I asked before even saying ‘hi’. 
“Then what am I supposed to call you?” He asked coolly. 
“Ms. Jona is what you are supposed to call me. Don’t call me ‘Princi’ call me ‘Ms. Jona’. And if you have anything you want to talk to me about work then say it to Oliver like you used to.” I walked out before he could say a word. When I walked out of his office, I felt everybody’s eyes on me. It was too pressuring and uncomfortable. I truly miss the days when no one cared about me even if I was missing from the group. I miss the times when I would do my job in the background. I know I am saying this because I am upset, but I totally miss the time I worked for my former boss Mr. Custo, when he would ignore my presence in a meeting or wouldn’t even bother telling me to go to the meetings and would even forget my name to ask me for a cup of coffee. I was totally invisible there, but now I feel like the entire world has its eyes on me. 
I started my old ways of hide and seek. I did my best to avoid any conversation with anyone. I would keep my head low everywhere I go and Oliver had been helping me through most of it. He started working extra hard to shield me form the eyes of the whisperers by running more departments than he used to and I would 


Thanks to Oliver, I spend most of the free time I got hiding in the restroom. But that also happened to be the main spot that attracts gossipers and their wild rumors. So I would sit on top of the toilet lid and listen to the crazy things they talk about me as I held my legs up so as not to be seen. They would fabricate a false story and bring it to life. They would talk about how I was sleeping my way to the top and that I take pride in doing so. I would cry my heart out from frustration and anger but at the end of the day, I couldn’t say anything about it to Shawn. I walked myself home discussing my pain with myself. When I got home, dad was at his usual place and after a long time; mom was in the kitchen fixing dinner. I wanted to ask my dad about the extra cloth in his black bag but I was too exhausted to. We sat around the table and dinner was served. As soon as I take a bite of my lasagna, my dad asked “What did you do about that thing we talked about?” 
I looked at him in curiosity. He was talking about me breaking up with Shawn and choosing my job over him. All of a sudden I lost my appetite. “I’m not hungry.” I said with a sigh and left the table for my room. After a couple of minutes mom came after me. She opened the door and said “Knock knock” 
I was sitting on my bed on top of the covers with my legs crossed. She looked at me out of pity for some reasons. She walked towards me calmly as she always does and sat next to me. 
“Your dad told me everything.” she said as she reached out for my hand. 
“About what” I asked. 
“About Shawn and that he told you to break up with him. Honey, don’t listen to your father. What he said should not bother you. He just said that because he was worried about you.” she tried to make me think that it was all fine but I have already been thinking about it. 
“Mom, it’s not that he made me think of it. I think I have had the idea of breaking up with Shawn at the back of my head. I just didn’t want to admit it until dad said it out loud.” 
“If you’re going to run at the first sight of danger, then I don’t think you are ready to be in a serious relationship yet.” she hits me with the brutal truth. She might be right. Maybe I am not mature enough to have a serious relationship. She continued. 
“Let me ask you something. Why do you think you have never met your grandparents_ she didn’t give me any time to answer _ When your father and I met we were just in high school. They say teenage romance is the hardest to break. My parents forbade me from seeing him and his parents did the same. But no matter how many warnings we got from our families we still chose to date. When I accidentally got pregnant with Kevin, your father and I decided to get married. Of course our families didn’t approve. They told us to break up for good and that the child will be raised by my family or else they would once and for all disown us. But I refused to loss the love of my life so I ran away with him. Our lives were not easy. Robert had to work three jobs to help us get by. He dropped out of school to find other ways to feed our family. I took advantage of the scholarship I got and went to collage when Kevin was old enough to stay with your dad. After I got a job as a professor I started making decent money and your father would work for some of his friends until we had our own house and can support ourselves without worrying if we would starve the next day. You don’t know all of this because when you were born we had our lives back on track and we didn’t worry if we had an addition in our family.” 
“Wow, I thought I didn’t meet my grandparents because they were dead, not because they disowned you.” I was amazed to hear this foreign story. 
“The reason I am telling you all of this is because you need to understand the sacrifice that someone pays to stay with the person they love. If the problems you have are compared to the ones’ your father and I went through, they are nothing. You need to know that every rumor in the office dies eventually when another one rises. Your issue is just temporary. It will pass.” 
She is right. It is just temporary. It will all pass. I kept telling myself that. And it was all dying. People at the company were getting tired of talking about me sleeping my way to the top. I felt at ease. My mom was right; I was over reacting for nothing. Every rumor gets replace by another and the previous one will eventually die off. The only problem was, the next rumor that took over my rumor was mine. Oliver and I were supposed to tag along with an employee Mr. David from the IH to seduce or hunt an investor but that Mr. David told us that he was suddenly called in and that the two of us had to do it alone. 
The guy we are hunting Edward Swift is a loaded guy that has shares in almost every foreign company in china and has been refusing to invest in DC. The employee that send Oliver and I told us not to get our hopes up. Half way on the road Oliver got a phone call and heard that his father had passed out and that he needs to come to the hospital. Oliver got out of the taxi and told me to go on my own. I realized that I am going to fail but I still chose to try my shot. In the taxi I opened the file and started reading about the man. I have never heard of him so the file was a good help. His nickname was ‘Trillgates’ because he is a trillioner. But as he is rich, he is proud. He is one of the hardest people to have a one on one conversation with. And he has already invested in several companies in town including MWD. Since I have been to one investor hunt I feel like I can do this well. 
I arrived at his house and it was spectacular. The house from my hypothesis has over fifty workers. A tall man in a black suit wearing black sunglasses led me to Edward Swifts’ study. He was sitting on one of the chairs at the corner of the room next to a gigantic book shelf filled with hundreds of books. I can tell that he was really tall even though he was sited. Just like his height, his face was pretty long as well. His eye brows were tick and black as hell but his entire head has gone gray. He had a sharp nose and his lips were upside down. The man was so classy that he was wearing a red with golden coat on top of his red suit when he obviously has nowhere to go to and was sitting with his legs crossed. He had a book in his hands titled ‘The great Gatsby’