The general counsel rolled his eyes. “Randy Kemp wants to talk about his deposition in the Kentucky FLSA case, and that is definitely more than a five-minute conversation. Tell him he can have twenty minutes at four thirty.” He turned to Brooke after his assistant left. “How much are you not going to miss all this when you’re EVP of sales?” he asked jokingly.

“You mean, having at least two conversations a day that start with ‘So, um, how bad would it be, legally speaking, if I told you that . . .’”

The general counsel chuckled. “Exactly.”

Brooke smiled. Weirdly . . . she thought she kind of would miss that.

At the end of the day, she met up with Palmer again, and he led her down yet another hallway to a corner office.

“Thought you might want to try it on for size,” he said, with a wink.

“This would be mine?” she asked.

He nodded. “All you have to do is say ‘yes,’ Brooke.”

She stepped into the large office, modernly furnished with cream marble and ebony wood furnishings. The view from her office at Sterling was better, but it wasn’t the view that mattered—it was what the office represented. The money. The title. The fact that she’d be running the entire sales division of such a large corporation.

One simple word, and it was all hers for the taking.

All she had to do was say yes.

* * *

BY THE TIME Brooke finally made it back to the hotel around ten o’clock that night, she was exhausted. She’d been awake since five A.M., she’d had to be “on” for nearly twelve hours straight, and she was feeling somewhat . . . out of sorts.

Palmer and two of the VPs—luckily, not the two stiffs from lunch again—had taken her to dinner at a French-Italian “seasonal cuisine” restaurant located in the city’s historic Elizabeth district. The conversation was good, and the food and wine were excellent, and all in all, she’d had an enjoyable evening. But something was off.

Never once had Palmer pressured her to accept the offer, but she knew, understandably, that he was eager for her response. And several times during dinner, she’d been tempted to say that one word, yes, because of course she should accept the offer. It was an excellent opportunity, and by and large she’d liked the people she’d met at Spectrum. The pragmatic businesswoman in her had been shouting, What are you waiting for? all through the dessert course—but something kept holding her back.

She didn’t know what, exactly, that something was. But she’d first noticed it that afternoon, when Palmer had shown her the office that would be hers at Spectrum. He’d needed to step out to take a phone call, and while he was gone she’d taken a seat behind the sophisticated ebony wood desk. To “try it on for size,” so to speak.

It hadn’t felt quite . . . right.

She’d ignored the sentiment, thinking it was nothing, that it was merely akin to buying a new house but not feeling like it was actually hers until she moved in. But that same nagging feeling had popped up again throughout dinner, whenever she’d been about to accept Palmer’s offer, so in the end, she’d just stayed quiet.

Brooke decided to sleep on it, wondering if perhaps she was simply feeling off because she was tired. The next morning, she woke up refreshed, reinvigorated, and ready to check out Charlotte with an open mind. The driver was waiting for her when she got downstairs, and he came armed with a list Palmer’s secretary had put together of places Brooke should visit while in town.

Charlotte was a big city, but she noticed that it had something of a small-town feel—which appealed to the midwesterner in her. After touring around all morning and early afternoon, she asked the driver to drop her off at an outdoor café by her hotel, one that the concierge had recommended. She ordered a Margherita pizza and a glass of wine, and then she settled in and waited for that moment to come when she knew that accepting the offer was the right way to go.

Then she waited some more.

The moment sure seemed to be taking its sweet old time.

When the waiter brought over the pizza she’d ordered and she was still waiting, she thanked him and happened to catch sight of the people at the table across from her: a little girl, about eight years old, eating lunch quietly while her mother typed away on her BlackBerry.

“Almost finished, I promise,” the mother was saying. “I just need to get this e-mail out before my client drives me completely nuts.”

Brooke watched them, able to identify with the woman’s feeling all too well. In a minute or two, she would put down the phone, smile at her daughter, and say, “Sorry. Just had to finish that.” Except it wouldn’t be finished, because, really, no work problem urgent enough to require the immediate attention of a woman simply trying to enjoy lunch with her daughter, or, say, a barbeque with her best friend, or a book club meeting with some girlfriends, could ever be fixed with one e-mail. The work would still be there when the woman got home, or maybe another issue would pop up that required the woman’s attention, because work was always there. And it wasn’t that the woman was complaining—she actually liked her job, in fact—but lately she’d been wondering if her life had gotten a little . . . off balance.

Or, maybe Brooke was over-personalizing the situation. Just a bit.

She tabled that thought as she walked back to her hotel. In her room, she fired up her laptop and, naturally, turned first to work-related e-mails. After that, she checked her personal account and saw that Rachel had e-mailed her, saying how great it had been to catch up at Ford’s barbeque and that she wondered whether Brooke wanted to get together for lunch anytime next week.