She closed her laptop, threw the computer into its case, and grabbed her coat. She wasn’t sure where she was going; all she knew was she was in over her head, and she didn’t want to hyperventilate or barf on Technocore’s third floor.
Dylan sat in the car, breathing in through her nose for five seconds and out through her mouth for eight, like her middle school choir teacher had taught her. She had been using this trick to fight a state of near-debilitating dread since she’d bolted from the office a half hour earlier.
As she forced herself out of the car, the fresh air hit Dylan like a blast of cold, pine-scented reality, and she yanked on Cruise’s door. This time of day, the place was mostly empty, save for a few college students who looked as stressed as she felt. Trotting toward the counter, she attempted to maintain whatever calm she’d regained on the drive over as the barista finished wiping down the espresso machine. Sure, she was in a hurry, but she wasn’t pressed enough to want old milk from the steamer hanging around her beverage.
“Good morning. How are you?” the guy behind the counter asked, his red stapler tattoo smiling up at her from his forearm.
“Hi, I’m fine, thanks. Can I have a small double latte, please?” Dylan said, forgoing the usual polite exchanges. Best not to get sucked into a conversation when she was exactly three heartbeats away from an anxiety-induced blackout.
“Oh, a double. Someone has a busy morning,” Stapler Tattoo said, smiling despite the fact that Dylan looked like she was ready to tear her hair out.
“Sure is,” she said, her best please-leave-me-alone smile stuck to her face.
“Anything else I can get you?” the guy said, tapping at the screen in front of him.
Dylan eyed the pastry case but decided against getting anything. If she got started with sweets now, she would be eating them all day. “Just the latte, thank you.”
“No problem.” The barista smiled, accepting her credit card. After a moment, he flipped the screen around for her signature. “All right. I’ll bring your latte over to you in a moment.”
“Thank you,” Dylan said, hustling over to a large corner table. In a flash, she began laying out her papers, the pressure behind her eyes mounting with each file she pulled out of her bag. As she took in the sheer volume of paper, her mind began to haze over at the edges, the insurmountable volume of work pushing her past the point of overload.
“Here you go,” the barista chirped, causing Dylan to look up in a frenzy. He rocked back on his heels as her overwhelm washed over him. “You seemed like you needed a little something to pick you up, so I made you a foam leaf.”
“Oh.” Dylan blinked at him for a moment, wondering if she was experiencing some sort of pressure hallucination. It was the only explanation for why this man was talking to her about leaves when her entire world was rapidly crashing around her ears. When the barista didn’t disappear, she looked down at her latte. There in lovely foam art was indeed a leaf. She racked her brain for what the appropriate pity-leaf-design etiquette was and settled on, “That was kind of you. Thank you.”
Her phone began to buzz, Stacy scrolling across the screen. No time for that right now, Dylan thought, gritting her teeth at her phone as well as at the barista, who was still beaming at her. Switching the phone into airplane mode, she turned her attention back to her computer, giving the guy a silent hint that he could leave her in peace. Much to Dylan’s dismay, he coughed loudly, offering her a hint of his own. When she did not look up, he said, “Rough morning?”
Did she have some sort of sign taped to her that said INTERRUPT ME!? Instinctively, Dylan reached around to feel the back of her blouse before recognizing that this was highly unlikely. Reminding herself that this person was trying to be helpful, she sighed, eyeing the leaf design. “You have no idea. It’s not worth discussing.”
“What happened?” Of course she’d managed to find the one nosy barista in all of Seattle. “I still have like three hours left on my shift.” The guy shrugged, settling into the chair across from her. Dylan nearly kicked herself for having said anything. Now she was trapped in a polite exchange with no way out but friendly chitchat or yelling. Shouting was a bad idea. She didn’t want to get kicked out of the coffeehouse. Repacking and unpacking somewhere else would take another hour. Not to mention the stress. Fine. If he really wanted to know. She would make him sorry he’d ever asked.
Taking another deep breath, Dylan laid the last twelve hours out for the complete stranger in front of her, leaving out nothing except names. She might only be employed at Kaplan for another few days, but that was not a good enough reason to relax her spotless client-confidentiality standards. By the time she’d confessed everything, the barista was staring like she had just admitted to highway robbery. “So yeah, I’m roughly twenty-four hours from finally losing my job. I’m being held hostage by my ex, while alienating the boy next door—”
“Technically, the man across the street,” the guy said, holding up an unusually delicate hand. Examining Dylan’s incredulous brows, he demurred, “But I see what you mean.”
“The thing is, I don’t want to give up. I’ve worked hard and done well at my consultancy. I hate that I’m in this pressure cooker where I’m bound to throw it all away.” He opened his mouth to add something, but Dylan pressed on, her voice rising. “And I like a lot of the people at the company I’m working for. I don’t want to let them down. Even the CEO, who I like . . . sometimes.”
“But do you have to give it up?” he asked, watching as a customer strolled in and stopped short of the counter to consider the menu mounted on the wall. “Your job, I mean.”
“Well, not technically. But I’m between a rock and a hard spot.”
Glancing at the customer again, the barista stood up, looking put out over having to do his job. “Okay, if a brand-new consultant came to you with this problem, what would you tell them?”
“Calm down. You are perfectly capable. All you need to do is sketch an outline for each document, then fill in what you can. That way the bosses can see your thinking and provide feedback, as opposed to wondering why one piece is perfect and nothing else is even started. It looks like better time-management skills.” Dylan shrugged.
“One, that was way more detailed than I expected. Two, just do that.” The guy shrugged as if it were that easy. “You’re smart. You’ll figure it out.”
“That’s kind of you,” Dylan laughed, mentally preparing a rebuttal until the customer stepped up to the counter and threw the barista a hurry-it-up-dude look.
“I’ll check on you later. Good luck,” he said, wandering back to the counter with less hurry than the waiting customer expected.
Watching him wander away, Dylan smiled at the unexpected pep talk. Yes, the barista was prying, but he wasn’t wrong. She just needed to get through the next few hours. Then she could head back to the office, and everything would be okay.
The caffeine from her half-drunk latte began to work its way through her overtaxed system, and her mind shifted gears, pushing aside the stress, making just enough room for her to focus. Dylan glanced behind her to see if anyone was listening, then realized that at this rate, she didn’t care if the whole coffee shop thought she had lost it. Pulling her shoulders back, she whispered, “He’s right. I’m smart. Focus, Dylan. You got this.” Then she started working.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Dylan yawned as she tipped her blinker toward the parking lot belonging to the kind of warehouse she’d told Tim she wanted nothing to do with. She’d managed to get into a flow state at Cruise with Tyrell, the overly friendly barista, making sure that each shift change kept her in a steady supply of snacks and caffeine as she’d organized the good, the bad, and the ugly from the retreat. It wasn’t until well after dinnertime that she’d even remembered she’d put her phone in airplane mode. When she’d turned the phone back on, the deluge of messages had been so overwhelming that she’d switched it right back off, vowing to return every single call and text after she made h
er deadline. When Cruise had finally closed at midnight, she’d carried on her work at home until her mother had started to make phone calls to France at three thirty in the morning. Even in French, her voice had carried through the house, eventually forcing Dylan to put in ear plugs and give up working.
Scanning the parking lot, she didn’t see a car that looked like something Tim would drive. As she considered the risk of being murdered in the parking lot if she leaned her seat back to catch a power nap, a pounding on her window sent her heart into her throat. Attempting to strangle the rest of her scream, Dylan took in a semideranged-looking Tim in a neon-orange bicycle helmet, his ludicrous grin fading at the sound of her screeching. Clutching the place where her heart was making an effort to escape her chest, she rolled down her window.
“What is wrong with you?”
“Why are you screaming?” Tim asked, looking around the parking lot in terror.
“You can’t just come out of nowhere pounding on car windows in abandoned parking lots.”
“I’m wearing neon,” Tim countered, as if that rendered terrifying her impossible. Unluckily for him, all it did was serve as a reminder that she hadn’t gotten nearly enough sleep to notice a millionaire in a tragic spandex color combination.
“Still not a good excuse.” Dylan angled her chin at the warehouse. “What are we doing on the set of CSI?”
Tim’s face folded back into a delirious V shape. “Staff appreciation!”
“I don’t understand.”
“I need to get inside and get changed before Taylor arrives.” Tim held up a bicycle saddlebag. “Come on, Dylan. Don’t worry; you won’t get hurt. I play capoeira.”
With that, Tim turned and marched toward the big metal doors of the warehouse. She doubted Tim’s capoeira was as good as he claimed, but the odds of anyone attacking a man in a fluorescent catsuit seemed pretty slim.
Dylan continued to cling to her coffee mug as she got out of the car and crossed the aluminum threshold of the warehouse; a strong sense of dread began to creep through her. Just behind the security desk was a large window, presumably for a foreman to survey whatever was happening on the floor. In this case, Dylan had a clear line of sight into what appeared to be a massive garment-production factory on one half of the facility and a packing operation on the other. Tim took that exact moment to strut by the window in his fitted exercise attire, the effect of which was rather like a visual punch to her psyche. Whatever this was, it was real, and Tim was loving it.
She walked past the unmanned security desk and crossed onto the manufacturing floor, where Tim was speaking animatedly with a woman at a sewing machine. Looking up, Tim waved her over. As soon as she was within earshot, he launched into introductions. “Dylan, this is Lois, our head seamstress for the day. We are talking about production timeline. Lois, this is Dylan; she is going to be our floor manager.”
“Nice to meet you,” Lois said, extending her hand and fixing Tim with a glare.
“Nice to meet you as well,” Dylan said reflexively, then paused, processing Tim’s words. “I’m sorry, Tim—may I have a word with you? I think I need clarity around your, uh . . .” Dylan halted, searching for the most delicate way to phrase stupid idea, and came up with, “Vision.”
Tim rolled his eyes and exhaled like a preteen, just to be sure Dylan understood how irked he was, before adding, “Excuse us, Lois.”
Stepping over a few power cables, she took a large sip of coffee before beginning. “Tim, yesterday you said this would be a few-hour meeting. Now I’m a floor manager. What is going on?”
“Well, at the time I thought it’d be a few hours, but after talking with Lois, it seems more like a day project.”
“What project?”
“Staff appreciation!” Tim gestured around the room as if it were obvious. “Your analysis said staff feel ‘unheard and underappreciated.’” Tim put the words in air quotes, his bicycle bag waving along with the motion. “I thought this up on the way back from the retreat.”
“Okay. But what is it?”
“This is why it’s great. I pulled a staff list myself. All two thousand five hundred plus, including part-timers, and—shoot. Taylor’s here,” Tim said, looking at the woman who had just crossed into the workspace, the same look of apprehension on her face that Dylan was wearing. Tim continued, “I wanted to change. Oh well.”
Catching sight of Tim’s neon getup, Taylor sauntered over, clutching the strap on a fringe-covered cross-body bag, which was oddly formal, given her jeans and sneakers.
“Taylor, good to see you. I was just giving Dylan the backstory on our project. Dylan, this is Taylor from the Seattle Examiner; she is here to do a story on the staff-appreciation effort.”
“I didn’t realize you invited anyone from the press,” Dylan said, willing her eyebrows to retreat down her forehead. Somewhere in her trapezius muscles, her sense of agitation blossomed into a full springtime of terror.
“Hello,” Taylor said, her hand still firmly clamped on her purse.
Dylan nodded briefly before fixing Tim with a stare that would melt Satan. After his last brush with the press, he should have learned his lesson about arranging his own photo ops. Apparently she needed to have a more explicit conversation with him. And find a good PR trainer. But all that would need to wait until tomorrow, assuming she still had a job on Friday, which was in clear and present danger.
Locking eyes with her glare, Tim shuddered and cleared his throat, turning his attention back to Taylor. “As I was telling Dylan, today is all about thanking Technocore’s employees. I came up with this whole thing in a dream and have been making calls all week to make it happen. Over here, we have people working on custom employee jackets, complete with their names on the front and monograms on the cuffs. Then we have hand-calligraphed certificates of appreciation, which will all be signed by me and accompanied by a handwritten note. Then there are the personalized thank-you mugs.” Tim paused, smiling before asking, “Can you tell I’m big on customization?”
“This sounds expensive,” Taylor said, eyeing the people huddling over sewing machines.
“Oh, it is. I hired every seamstress within a hundred miles of the city. Finding a space with enough power was a challenge. And the permitting!” Tim wiggled his eyebrows.
Dylan took the mention of permits as a sign she should intervene. “Tim, let’s hold off on sharing exact details until we have a chance to discuss what Lois was telling you.”
“Yes. Lois mentioned there was a problem with the employee name files. Nothing is in alphabetical order. They just need to alphabetize every individual piece before we can start stuffing the gift bags.”
“Sounds time consuming,” Taylor said, now eyeing Dylan, whose expression was hovering somewhere between murder and total annihilation.
“We have the warehouse until midnight, so it shouldn’t be an issue,” Tim said. Ignoring the apoplectic sounds coming from Dylan, he added, “If you don’t mind, I’d love to change out of my bike clothes before we continue. Perhaps you can get some background on our recent efforts from Dylan.” Without another word, Tim turned and sprinted toward the back of the warehouse.
“Is he always like this?” Taylor asked, startling Dylan out of her delirious fear state.
She had to get rid of this woman now, before things got any worse. And with a Tim idea, there was no way things wouldn’t get worse. Taking a deep breath that did nothing for her racing pulse, she said, “I’m sorry, but there has been a misunderstanding. Tim is not available for interviews. I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to leave.”
“That’s funny, because Tim was pretty confident he could be interviewed when he offered me exclusive access to this event. I guess I could go back and write about how Tim had some crony kick me out when he began behaving erratically while dressed like an inflatable dancing puppet. It isn’t as good a story, but something has to go in my column.”
Taylor shrugged like there wasn’t a threat lurking in her words, an
d Dylan’s mouth went dry. This was her worst Technocore nightmare come to life—a walking ultimatum carrying a fringe-covered bag. Her mind clawed at its caffeine-soaked edges, desperately searching for an alternative that wouldn’t result in bad press. As it was, letting Taylor see “staff appreciation” was more likely to produce a positive outcome than roundly kicking her out of the warehouse would.
“Fine.” Dylan sighed. “But I think we had better set a few ground rules.” She hoped her tone conveyed a level of authority she neither felt nor possessed. “First, I’m a consultant, and I’d appreciate it if you did not name me in your piece.” She took another deep breath, pulling her posture yardstick straight. “Second, please consider the conversations Tim and I have confidential. I’m sure you can understand why having a reporter quoting them verbatim would risk trade secrets.”
The reporter rolled her eyes. “I’d never report on anything for the sake of salacious reads, and certainly not—”
Holding up her hand, Dylan interrupted, “I’m sure you wouldn’t, and it is not my intention to imply you have low ethical standards. But I’ll need your word just the same. With the clear understanding that the full and considerable weight of my company will bear down on you and the Examiner should you violate our good faith agreement.” She wasn’t entirely sure what good faith meant in legalese, but Nicolas used it as a threat all the time.
Taylor had the decency to look momentarily crestfallen at the realization that her big break was probably not going to come today. “Of course.”
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