those . . .” He pressed his lips together. It didn’t work. Like a dam bursting, a laugh boomed out of him. “Seriously? Cow pajamas? I mean, you’ve always had the sex appeal of yesterday’s leftovers, but this is a sad state of affairs even for you.”
“Feel better?” I asked. “Does insulting me help you deal with my accurate assessment of your capabilities?”
“Accurate?” His eyes went wide and then narrowed. “Just because I know how to delegate and you don’t doesn’t mean I don’t work just as hard as you do. I’m just better with my time management.”
“When Friday happy hour is your most important meeting of the week, I guess you have to be.”
“Don’t judge me just because I have a life and you don’t,” he said. “You should try it sometime. It might get the stick out of your—”
“Jason! Chelsea!” Aidan interrupted. “That’s enough.”
The monitor spun, and I was looking at Aidan again. For a guy who maintained a positive Zen at all times, he looked a bit wild eyed and red faced. I would have felt badly about it, but Knightley, really? On my campaign? I refused to feel guilty for calling Knightley out, and when the idiot screwed it all up, I wasn’t going to feel bad then either. No, I wouldn’t feel bad; I’d be furious.
“All right.” Aidan pinched the bridge of his nose. “I understand that you two don’t see eye to eye all of the time, but the thing to remember is that we’re all on the same team and this is the biggest corporate gift we’ve ever gone after. Ten million. It could set a precedent, and I do not want to lose it because you two can’t buck up and work together.”
I huffed out a pent-up breath, and I heard what sounded to be the same coming from Knightley in the background. Aidan sighed.
“Listen, I am asking you two, as professionals, to put your personal feelings aside until the Severin Robotics campaign is a go. I’d step in and do it myself, but I just can’t right now.”
There was something in his tone. I felt the hair on the back of my neck prickle. Aidan was never one to back down from anything. He’d managed corporate gifts and campaigns for years, pulling millions from seemingly unreachable corporations. This wasn’t like him.
“What is it, Aidan?” I asked. “You can tell me and it will go no further—you know that.”
“Same here,” Jason agreed.
The computer monitor swiveled again, and I now had a view of both Aidan and Jason. I glanced at Jason and noted he was wearing a charcoal-gray shirt today, making his eyes a stormy shade of gray. Whatever. He wasn’t looking at me, however, but frowning at Aidan with a quiet intensity that made me even more nervous.
“I’m going to hold you both to that. The truth is . . . I’ve been diagnosed with stage-two lung cancer—damn cigarettes of my youth—and I just don’t know how things are going to roll out for me for the next few months. So I’m asking you two to take this on together—for me.”
There was a beat of silence as we absorbed the news. Shock rendered me speechless, and I imagined it did the same to Jason. He recovered first.
“You can count on me,” he said. “I’ll do whatever it takes.”
I stared at my mentor’s face on the tiny screen of my phone. Aidan had lung cancer. Stage two. That meant it had traveled to either his chest cavity or his lymph nodes. Not good. But only stage two. That was better than three or four, right? Still treatable, still beatable.
“Breathe, Chelsea,” Aidan said.
I exhaled a breath I hadn’t even known I’d been holding.
“How long have you known?” I asked. I supposed it didn’t really matter, but if he’d told me that day in his office, the day I’d tried to quit, I likely wouldn’t have left. Had he known that?
“A few weeks,” he said. So he had known, and he’d still let me go. “And yes, the irony of working for the ACC and getting diagnosed with cancer is not lost on me.”
I studied his face. Did he look thinner? Yes, he did. How had I not noticed? The beard. It was hard to get a sense of his health behind all that hair.
“Can I count on you, Chelsea?” he asked. “Will you continue to work in an advisory capacity with Jason on the ask?”
“Of course,” I said. “I’m available whenever you need