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One of my walls was covered with simple but expensive black frames, each showcasing a different magazine ad: a dad in a red apron barbecuing hot dogs; a preppy couple sinking their bare toes into their new carpet; a young executive reclining in her first-class airline seat. Blissfully reclining.
    I smiled, remembering that campaign. It had taken me two weeks and three focus groups to decide on the word blissful instead of peaceful. Yet my whole campaign was almost torpedoed at the last minute because the model I’d chosen had the exact same hairstyle as the airline owner’s ex-wife, who’d convinced him that true love didn’t require a prenup. If I hadn’t spotted a five-dollar tub of hair gel in the makeup artist’s case and begged the client for thirty more seconds, our agency would’ve lost a $2 million account on account of a chin-length bob. Clients were notoriously fickle, and the rule of thumb was, the richer the client, the crazier.
    The one I was meeting today owned half of Manhattan.
    I grabbed the mock-up of the magazine ad my creative team had put together for Gloss and scanned it for the millionth time, searching for nonexistent flaws. I’d spent three solid weeks agonizing over every detail of this campaign, which I’d get maybe ten minutes to present in our conference room in— I looked at my watch and my heart skipped a beat.
    Unlike other ad shops, it was the culture of my agency to blur the division between the creative work and the business side of our accounts. If you wanted to succeed at Richards, Dunne & Krantz, you had to be able to do both. Of course, that also meant all the responsibility for this presentation was mine alone.
    The worst part, the part that gnawed at my stomach and jolted me awake at 3:00 a.m . on nights when I managed to fall asleep, was that all my work, all those marathon stale-pizza weekend sessions and midnight conference calls, might be for nothing. If the owner of Gloss rejected my ads—if something as simple as the perfume I was wearing or a splashy adjective in my copy rubbed him the wrong way—hundreds of thousands of dollars in commission for our agency would slip through my fingers like smoke. Once a Japanese tycoon who owned a chain of luxury hotels sat through a brilliant, two-months-in-the-making campaign presentation our agency’s president had personally overseen—I’m talking about the kind of creative vision that would’ve won awards, the kinds of commercials everyone would’ve buzzed about—and dismissed it with a grunt, which his assistant cheerfully translated as “He doesn’t like blue.” That was it; no chance to tweak the color of the ad copy, just a group of stunned advertising execs with the now-useless skill of saying, “Konnichi-wa!” being herded like sheep to the exit.
    I gulped another Advil from the secret stash inside my desk drawer, the one Donna didn’t know about, and massaged the knot in my neck with one hand while I stared at the mock-up ad my team had created for Gloss.
    After Gloss Cosmetics had approached our agency last month, hinting that they might jump from their current agency, our agency’s president—a forty-two-year-old marketing genius named Mason, who always wore red Converse sneakers, even with his tuxedo—called our top five creative teams into his office.
    “Gloss wants to kick some Cover Girl ass,” Mason had said, swigging from a bottle of Lipton iced tea (they were a client) and tapping his Bic pen (ditto) against the top of his oak conference table. Mason was so loyal to our clients that he once walked out of a four-star restaurant because the chef wouldn’t substitute Kraft ranch for champagne-truffle dressing.
    “Gloss’s strategy is accessible glamour,” Mason had continued. “Forget the Park Avenue princesses; we’re going after schoolteachers and factory girls and receptionists.” His eyes had roved around the table so he could impale each of us with his stare, and I swear he hadn’t