I grew up in a middle-class neighborhood in suburban Chicago, the kind of place where lawns were trimmed on Saturdays and everyone waved even if they didn’t really know your name. My life back then was simple, predictable, and honestly, I thought that was enough. My dad, Tom, spent thirty years on the police force before retiring with a bad knee and a habit of waking up at five in the morning no matter what day it was. My mom, Sarah, still works as a secretary at Lincoln Elementary, the same school where she once walked me to kindergarten holding my hand like she was afraid I might disappear if she let go.
They gave me everything they could—love, stability, a sense of right and wrong. What they couldn’t give me was money, but I never felt deprived. We weren’t wealthy, but we were safe. And for a long time, I thought that was the most important thing.
My name is Tasha Mitchell. Well, it was, before I became Tasha Reynolds. And then, eventually, Tasha Mitchell again.
After graduating college with an accounting degree, I landed a job at Anderson & Partners, a midsized accounting firm downtown. The pay was decent, the work steady, and I assumed this was how my life would go: wake up, go to work, come home, repeat. I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t feel particularly alive either. That all changed on a rainy Tuesday in October when I literally ran into someone who would change everything.
I was rushing out of Starbucks, already late for work, juggling my coffee and my phone when I slammed straight into someone coming the opposite direction. Hot coffee splashed everywhere—all over his suit, down his sleeve, onto the sidewalk.
“Oh my God, I’m so sorry,” I blurted out, mortified. I grabbed napkins, desperately dabbing at what was obviously a very expensive suit. “I’ll pay for the dry cleaning, I swear.”
Instead of getting angry, he laughed. “Don’t worry about it,” he said easily. “You could make it up to me by having dinner with me tonight.”
That was Marcus Reynolds. Dinner turned into another dinner. And another. Marcus was charming in a way that felt effortless, not rehearsed. He didn’t talk down to me. He didn’t make me feel small. When he told me he was the son of James and Victoria Reynolds—owners of Reynolds Industries, one of the biggest manufacturing companies in the Midwest—I was intimidated, sure, but he brushed it off.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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