“To your knowledge.” Neale shook her mass of curls toward the neighbors’ house. She could not be bothered to comb out her hair, which had grown into something resembling Yoko Ono’s coiffure during the Lennon years, only dyed blonde. The whole copper-skinned, lion-maned goddess-of-space vibe worked for her.
“Well, I ran into Mike last night, and he didn’t try to strangle me, so I think you’re probably safe from the Merry Murderers Robinson.”
“Oh, you saw Sexy Robinson?” Neale asked, excitement tingeing her voice. “No wonder you think Patricia and Linda are normal. He’s so good looking I wouldn’t care if he was an ax murderer either.”
“Neale.” Dylan rolled her eyes.
“Please. You could be blindfolded, and you’d still notice he was good looking. Don’t feel bad; everyone has a crush on him, even Mom, in that weird-old-lady-who-is-married way,” Neale nettled, shaking an unintentional dreadlock out of her face.
“That’s gross.”
“I think he’s way nicer than the other brother,” Neale carried on, pointedly ignoring her. “Maybe Mike is the exception to the serial-killing rule? You could totally date him once the rest of the family goes to jail.”
“I live with Nicolas.”
“Who we’ve never met. Are you sure he’s real?” Neale’s gaze started to go fuzzy, following her thought process.
This was too much family time for Dylan. If she let Neale keep going, they would soon be discussing the aliens who tended bar at Lenny’s. “Okay, Neale. You win. Nicolas is a figment of my imagination that I’ve photoshopped into all my social media posts. The Robinsons are totally mass-murdering maniacs, and I’ll marry Mike when they are all safely locked away.”
“That’s my girl. Never let homicide stand in the way of what you want.”
“Good night.” Dylan smiled over her shoulder, making her way up the stairs.
“FYI—last I checked, Milo was sleeping in your bed. You may need to move him or something . . .” Neale’s voice trailed off into her book.
Dylan walked up the stairs, trying not to let the weight of talking to Neale bear down on her. She loved her sister so much it hurt, but Neale refused to grow up. She couldn’t stick to one idea for long, and unlike Billie, Neale was not cut out for the starving-artist schtick—hence what she was doing living with their parents at twenty-seven. The thought of an untethered Neale made Dylan nervous.
Sighing, she pushed open her bedroom door to find Milo deeply ensconced in her sheets. Dylan wondered whether it was worth it to shower tonight, knowing she would have to get up and rinse Milo’s fur off in the morning. She had just decided to skip the shower when her phone buzzed, startling her. Glancing at the phone, she watched Nicolas scroll across the screen. She had completely lost track of time and their scheduled call. Picking up the phone, she made her way to the bed and pushed on Milo’s backside.
“Hi, honey,” she said, prompting Milo to groan and slink off the bed.
“Babe! How was your first day?” Dylan could hear the smile in his voice. Everything must have gone well with the divorce settlement.
“I’m concerned about this one,” she sighed and started to sink into her bed, only to jump back, praying she hadn’t gotten dog hair all over her dress. “The woman I should’ve been working with left the company. They didn’t even remember I was coming.” She reached around her back and let down the zipper. Pushing one sleeve off her shoulder, she started chuckling and added, “I practically stalked Tim Gunderson to get a meeting. It’s kind of funny—”
“Oh! Guess what? Sorry, I’ll let you finish in a minute, but this is awesome, and I don’t want to forget.”
“What?”
“Totally got that woman to back down on the health care stipulation. I should have the Wilson divorce done in a week or two, tops.”
“That’s great. You didn’t even need your lucky tie,” Dylan mumbled, stepping carefully out of her dress.
“Still haven’t found that. Are you sure you don’t know where it is?”
She immediately regretted mentioning it. Dylan loved a good luck charm as much as the next girl, but Nicolas had been going on about the thing for weeks. The guy had a place for every one of his possessions and was convinced he’d never lose an expensive Thom Browne tie. Dylan was pretty sure it was still somewhere in the gym’s locker room, despite how many times he tried to convince her otherwise. She opened her mouth to say something rude about his tie obsession, but Milo chose that exact moment to howl at nothing, cutting her off completely. That’s probably for the best, she thought. When had she ever cared if Nicolas obsessed over something as trivial as a tie? She usually just tuned that side of him out.
“What’s that? Are you outside?” Nicolas shouted into the phone as if she were standing next to a fire truck and a jackhammer.
Holding the phone away from her ear, Dylan called out, “Sorry. It’s our dog—Milo, knock it off.” Milo stopped and lay down on the floor with a self-satisfied thud, the metal of his collar ringing as it hit the wood. “Good boy—anyway, no. I have no idea where your tie is,” Dylan said, shrugging her pajama top over her head. Thinking back to what Neale had said about him, she chimed in before Nicolas could bring up the case again.
“Hey, I’ve been thinking—I’m not sure how long I’ll be assigned to Technocore.” Or anywhere, she thought. “So, we should take advantage of the free companion ticket Kaplan offers. You could come up here, meet my folks. Show my sister you’re not made up.” Dylan laughed as she pulled the drawstring on her pajama pants. “Maybe next weekend? Since the divorce is wrapping up, you could take Friday and Monday off and make it a long weekend.”
“I don’t know, Dyl. We hadn’t really planned for me to take a vacation right now.”
“True. But we hadn’t planned on me being assigned to Seattle either. You could just use the time you set aside for a trip to Paris.”
“But that’s in August. You’ll be back by then.”
“I know. But you do have the vacation time. And who doesn’t love a spontaneous weekend away?” Dylan joked, trying to ease some of the tension that had crept in over the line. These long placements were always tough on their relationship. She had to remember that.
“You don’t,” Nicolas laughed. “Our last weekend away was on our calendars six months in advance.”
“Thought we could try something new. Spice it up,” Dylan said, a hint of sarcasm poking through her otherwise jovial tone.
“That’s kind of a lot of time away from the office right now.”
Dylan tried not to be offended. Early in their living together, she’d made the mistake of having a phone call with her mother on speakerphone so she could fold their laundry, and Nicolas had caught an all-too-real glimpse of her parents’ life, complete with petty struggles between them and a gallery. To say Nicolas had left the call disinterested in her parents and concerned about their self-employment would be downplaying his reaction. The following week, he’d thoughtfully scheduled a meeting for her with his financial planner to explain the pitfalls of feast-or-famine income and the impact it could have on her retirement savings. Nicolas’s heart was in the right place, even if the meeting had been entirely unnecessary. Giving her head a shake to clear the memory, she tried again. “It’s no more than the time you took off for the comp tickets to New York.”
“Yeah, but things are pretty busy around here.”
“We’ve been together for years, and you still haven’t met my family. The last two times they came to Texas, you were out of town. I figured now would be a perfect opportunity.” She shrugged, put the phone on speaker, and picked up her scarf to wrap her hair. Hearing Nicolas’s exasperation, she tried a softer tone. “It doesn’t have to be a long weekend. You could always fly up late Friday and leave Sunday. Whatever works for you.”
“I’ll think about it, okay?”
“Just let me know so I can send the details over to the office.”
“All right, babe. I’ve got to
be up early tomorrow. Talk to you later?”
“Of course,” Dylan said, trying to match his casual manner.
“Night.”
“Love you.”
Nicolas hung up the phone before Dylan realized she’d never finished telling him about her day.
“We were tired anyway, weren’t we, Milo?” After tying off her head wrap, she sank into bed and pulled her comforter around her.
Dylan woke up to Milo crushing her legs and a steely determination to make the Technocore assignment work. As far as she was concerned, things could only go up from yesterday.
“It’s not like Tim could announce my assing the company twice,” she said, stealing bites of her mother’s soggy peanut butter toast.
Bernice quirked an eyebrow. “At least you’ll be getting a lot of ass.”
“Yuck, Mom.” Dylan rolled her eyes as her mother snickered. A small corner of her brain wanted to laugh along, and she quickly squashed that instinct, annoyed at herself for even thinking it was funny. If Dylan laughed, her mother would make more inappropriate jokes, and the next time they’d be in public. Best to nip that instinct in the bud before it got them kicked out of a Fred Meyer or something.
She snagged the rest of the toast and hopped into the car, where she called items to Siri and tried to navigate the growing traffic snarl that was Broadway. She waved as a driver let her merge into a crowded lane, and her optimism picked up when she found a metered spot right in front of a popular coffee shop. Ordering her favorite skinny vanilla latte, she picked up coffees for Brandt and Charlie, hoping to buy herself a little goodwill and a lot of luck on her second day at the office.
After dispensing the coffees and begging the pair to spread the word that her assessment was not a Hunger Games–style selection of employees to fire (or ass), she got started on the interviews.
Several hours and six interviews later, Dylan wondered how Tim Gunderson had managed to go from principled hacker and computer genius to resident doofus without anyone stopping him. She was having a hard time reconciling the young man who had lovingly hired Frank—the now-tearful seventysomething head of admin from his old elementary school—with the man Frank was currently describing as having “callously dismissed half of the administrative team with no notice or severance.”
Deep’s pixie cut popped through a crack in the door. “Hey, Frank. Sorry, but I have to speak with Ms. Delacroix here before my three-thirty meeting.” She didn’t look the least bit sorry, but Frank seemed to buy it. Standing slowly, he prepared to go.
“Of course. I lost track of time. Ms. Delacroix—”
“Please, call me Dylan.”
“Dylan. Thank you for your time. I hope you get things turned around here. I mean, it’s so frustrating to put—”
“All right, Frank, I think she’s got it handled,” Deep said, wrapping an arm around his shoulders and steering him toward the door. As soon as Frank crossed the threshold, Deep closed the door, letting out a little laugh, then sank into the chair across from Dylan as if she owned it.
Glancing down at the schedule in front of her, Dylan scowled.
“I’m not on it today. Or at all, I don’t think. I could hear Frank crying at you for, like, the last forty-five minutes, and I couldn’t take it anymore. I had to save you,” Deep said, a you’re-welcome look running circles on her face. “Frank is a big crier. You should see him when we do a charity event. Waterworks for days over the garden Technocore planted for a preschool.”
“Thank you.” Dylan sighed.
“So. What are our problems?” Deep said, examining her perfectly polished fingernails.
“I’m really not certain I should be discussing them with you before talking my findings over with Tim,” Dylan said, her back stiffening.
“Relax. First, I can hear everything because I’m right outside your door. Second, Tim’s office is like a sieve. Layla at the coffee cart tells everyone everything. And finally,” Deep said, ticking off reasons on her long fingers, “you need help. And God knows Brandt and Charlie are only going to get you so far.”
“Be that as it may, I still have quite a few interviews to get through before I can even start to come to anything conclusive.”
“Please. You must have some inklings,” Deep said, leaning forward as if she were about to hear state secrets.
“Fine. But do me a favor and keep them under your hat until I talk with Tim. Cool?”
“As if I tell these scrubs anything.” Deep grinned conspiratorially. “Now spill.”
“First, let me call Brandt.”
“We’re like a dysfunctional crime-fighting team,” Deep shouted at Brandt, who had become so pale as to be translucent. In the time she’d spent going over issues, Dylan had recognized two important facts. The first was that both Deep and Brandt had a knack for spotting behavioral patterns and tracing them to specific company policies or events. The other was that Deep, despite her many skills, could not under any circumstances whisper. Half the floor heard Deep shout every time she got excited.
“I think this is more of a loose affiliation, really,” Brandt actually whispered.
Deep shook her head. “Nope. This, right here, is a team. I don’t know what they taught you clowns at Lakeside, but when people work together and are clearly killing it, that is a team.”
“I didn’t go to Lakeside.” To Brandt’s credit, he was holding his own against Deep. An accusation that he’d attended Seattle’s most elite private school wasn’t going to stand with him. Dylan smiled despite herself. The idea of a team united against crappy corporate culture tugged at a corner of her brain, and she let it rotate in her mind a few times.
“Well, you act like—”
“All right.” Dylan cut Deep off before another volley of insults was fired. “Deep, as much as I like having you here, I have to ask—what is it that you do?”
Deep extended one finger and flung her bangs from her face so Dylan could see her pouting, then sat back in her chair. “Front-end developer. Well, I would be, if anyone in the new app group would stick around long enough to code anything worthy of a front end.”
“So I’ve heard.” Dylan sighed. Technocore wouldn’t have to fire nearly as many people if they could retain the good employees they had. Unfortunately, the mountain of issues in front of her made it clear that saving the development department would take a lot more than a few bonuses.
The crime-fighting-trio idea turned over in her mind again, then clicked. Dylan grinned. Tapping the page in front of her, she said, “I’m taking these issues to Tim. Assuming I get his okay, I have an idea I want to run by you both.”
“Which is?” Brandt asked, his usually cautious tone carried away by Deep’s enthusiasm.
“What if you two chaired a staff-appreciation committee?” Deep snorted before Dylan had finished the sentence. Brandt leaned back in his chair, like her idea was contagious. Shaking her head, Dylan rushed on: “Hear me out. You’re both good at pinpointing where the morale sinkholes are. It makes perfect sense that you use your powers to fix them.”
The skeptical lines on Deep’s face slackened ever so slightly at the flattery. Brandt still looked like he would rather jump over a canyon, but Dylan suspected that when push came to shove, he would probably do it. “Come on, you’re both in here because you care about where you work, and you actually want to do your jobs, which is unusual. Please help me out and chair the committee. Then I can tell Tim it’s already happening, and you can add it to your résumé or your LinkedIn or whatever.”
By the time she had finished drawing the e sound out in please, she could tell she had hooked Deep, who sighed. “Fine. I’m good at this kind of thing. Besides, I don’t have anything better to do. And contrary to popular belief, I like to be useful and actually earn my paycheck.”
Brandt nodded vigorously, pushing up his glasses. “There’s no structure for interns. I can either work with you or try to act like I’m not reading under my desk.”
“Done. I�
�ll send you both an email once I have ‘the conversation’ with Tim. It’s getting late.” Dylan glanced at her watch. “I should let you go. Thank you both for your help.”
“No problem,” Deep said, with way more pluck than anyone who had been working all day should have. “See you tomorrow, Captain!” She grinned and gave a mock salute, then marched out the door.
“Do you need anything else?” Brandt asked, standing up and pushing Deep’s chair in.
“Nope. Head out, Brandt. You don’t need to put in fourteen-hour days with me. I need you fresh and ready for tomorrow.”
“All right,” Brandt said. Dylan turned her attention back to the firestorm on her desk as Brandt reached the door. “Hey, Dylan. You sure you have all this under control? It’s kind of overwhelming.”
Overwhelming didn’t begin to cover it, in her opinion. But she didn’t need to scare Brandt with that. After all, she was here to help. Fixing was her specialty. “No worries, Brandt. I got this.”
“Well, Captain, if you need help, I’m here. I mean, no one ever asked me to lead anything before now.” Brandt said this mostly to his feet.
“I have a feeling your leadership will make this place better. Get home safe.”
Brandt smiled, his shoulders falling away from his ears. “Don’t stay too late.”
“Night,” Dylan said, wondering if she could capture even a quarter of the confidence she acted like she had.
As she looked around her desk, her stomach grumbled at her. Given the time, it had probably been grumbling for a while; she just hadn’t been able to hear it over Deep’s whisper-shouts. After taking a moment to carefully pack her bag, she shut off her light. She might as well head home and work over dinner.
CHAPTER SIX
Working at the house was a poor choice, Dylan thought over the sound of Neale and Bernice howling to a Motown classic. She stared down at the notes in front of her, then rolled her eyes and heaved herself out of the well-worn armchair she had been using as a desk. It was no longer sprinkling out. Maybe she’d indulge in a walk to the coffee shop around the corner. On balance, working in overused and comfortable coffeehouse chairs was a rite of passage in Seattle, not a cliché. After packing up her computer and notes, she bounded down the stairs.
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