We met that Saturday at the Lancaster Public Library downtown. In a little study room on the second floor.
Ellie sat on the floor next to us coloring a picture of a dinosaur. Rosie slept in her stroller.
Claire handed me her résumé.
She’d described herself as a receptionist.
I read it. And then I read it again.
“Claire,” I said. “It says here you scheduled all the hygienists. You handled the vendors. You managed all the patient records. You dealt with the insurance companies when claims got denied. You trained two new receptionists.”
“Well, yeah. Somebody had to.”
“That’s not reception work,” I said. “That’s office management. You’ve been doing administrative management for six years. You just haven’t been giving yourself credit for it.”
She stared at me.
Together, we rewrote her whole résumé. Then we practiced interview questions. For two hours.
Every time she said “I just answered phones,” I stopped her.
“Say what you actually did.”
By the end, she was sitting up straighter.
I didn’t offer her a job at my company. I didn’t call any friends and ask them for favors.
I wanted her to find out what she could do on her own.
Three weeks later, my phone rang while I was in my office reviewing a lease for a medical building on Harrisburg Pike.
“They offered me the job!” Claire was laughing and crying at the same time. “Office coordinator! At a medical equipment company in East Petersburg! And the hours work with the girls’ daycare!”
In the background, I could hear Ellie shouting.
“Mommy got a new job! Mommy got a new job!”
I leaned back in my leather chair. And I smiled bigger than I had after any business deal that whole year.
“I knew you could do it, Claire.”
“Well,” she said. “One of us had to believe it.”
Adrian Hawthorne is a celebrated author and dedicated archivist who finds inspiration in the hidden stories of the past. Educated at Oxford, he now works at the National Archives, where preserving history fuels his evocative writing. Balancing archival precision with creative storytelling, Adrian founded the Hawthorne Institute of Literary Arts to mentor emerging writers and honor the timeless art of narrative.