Chapter 3 – What Diana Didn’t Know

The full weight of the interaction became clear three weeks later, when Diana returned to the salon for a follow-up appointment, this time bringing her teenage daughter along for a mother-daughter manicure ahead of a school event.

“I actually work in cosmetics marketing,” Diana mentioned to her daughter, apparently unaware Audrey was still within easy earshot while preparing her station. “Winslow Beauty, actually — I do regional promotional events for them. Big company. Real career, unlike some people.”

Audrey, recognizing her own company’s name in Diana’s casual, dismissive comparison, felt a complicated mixture of amusement and genuine annoyance at the layered irony of the situation — a Winslow Beauty employee, unknowingly insulting the company’s own chairwoman over the course of two separate appointments.

She said nothing during the appointment itself, maintaining her usual professional composure, though she found herself, afterward, genuinely curious about Diana’s actual role within the company and whether the condescension displayed at the salon reflected a broader pattern worth investigating through more official channels.

A discreet review of Winslow Beauty’s regional marketing team, conducted the following week through Audrey’s actual executive access, revealed that Diana’s “regional promotional events” role involved considerably more responsibility, and considerably more direct contact with sales associates and product demonstrators across the region, than her salon comments had suggested — contact that, troublingly, several internal HR complaints suggested had followed a similar pattern of casual, persistent condescension toward employees she considered beneath her.

Audrey, reviewing the pattern of complaints, made a decision that would bring her two carefully separated worlds into direct, unavoidable collision.