Chapter 1

Kelcey

Boss Anna smiled at me, spinning her chair away from the window and turning to face me. “You’re a smart woman, Kelce,” she said. “You can figure this out.”

I was not a smart woman. I was a very, very stupid woman. I’d always argued with anyone who said that! I got it a lot—just because I liked makeup and hair and pretty clothes and cute manicures, everyone assumed I was dumb and vapid. Just because my family was pretty well-off, everyone assumed I was some clueless spoiled brat who didn’t know how to get by in the world, and I always bristled.

But then Anna said that, and I was pretty sure I was too dumb to figure this out.

“Um…” was all I managed, swaying from side to side in the chair. “I’ll… try my best!” I said, forcing a smile. I don’t think it was the most convincing smile in the world.

Anna softened, leaning back in her chair, picking up her coffee, kicking one leg up over the other. She was a tall woman with a lean, confident look about her, a razor-sharp businesswoman through and through, even if I knew she was soft for her girlfriend Lucy. She was pretty, with long brown hair she usually kept neatly pulled back into a neat, low bun, brown eyes that stayed bleeding-edge sharp taking in everything in the office, always dressed sleekly in a skirt suit, but honestly, I didn’t think anyone related to Veronica Preston could ever not be pretty, not when—

No, no, no. I wasn’t thinking of Veronica. Not at all. Never. Veronica wasn’t pretty at all. Veronica was terrible and ugly and unbearable.

“Honestly, Kelce,” Anna said, “if you don’t know what to do and you feel like you’re in over your head, that’s a sign you’re growing into the role. Berg asked me and Lucy to do that—to make sure you had a task that would push you to grow a little. I want you to feel perfectly empowered to ask more specific questions around how to do it, but we need you to work and figure out what those questions are.”

I chewed my lip. “Um… okay. I do have a specific question.”

“Good, let’s hear it.”

“What specific question should I ask first?”

She smiled dryly. “That’s a very good try, Kelce. It’s a low-stakes job—onboarding videos are always tacky and a little sloppy around the edges, so this seems like a good place for you to screw around and potentially mess up on your way to learning. So… your first task is to go explore, experiment, see what comes up, and if you have any questions along the way, let me know.”

Seriously? I didn’t know how to make a video. Did I look like James Cameron? I… didn’t know what he looked like, but I doubted he looked like me. “Okay… um… I will. I do have another question.”

“Go ahead.”

I sat up taller. “Are you and Lucy going on a date again tonight? I heard you two giggling to each other all cutely and stuff earlier.”

She closed her eyes, letting out a long sigh, but I saw her little smile. She was so obnoxiously, over-the-top head-over-heels starstruck in love with Boss Lucy that she could never turn down an opportunity to talk about how much she loved her. Even if she got shy about it sometimes and pretended she didn’t want to.

Ugh, I was so jealous. I needed that for me. Not with Veronica, though, not when Veronica Preston was the worst person ever in the universe and I didn’t want to see her anywhere near me, not for as long as I lived.

“Any questions about the work, Kelce?”

“C’mon, you two have been working all the time lately. You’ve gotta have a cute little date.”

“We just went back to my family’s house…”

Her family’s house. Where Veronica would have been.

No. No, no, no. I wasn’t thinking about Veronica Preston. Not for a million dollars would I spend one second thinking about Veronica Preston’s chocolate-brown eyes and full, soft lips. I wouldn’t!

“I’m not talking about family time, I’m talking about date time,” I said, leaning forward in my seat. “C’mon, we’re friends. You can tell me. You’re my favorite couple in the world.”

She sighed, downing the rest of her coffee and setting the mug down slowly. “We’re going to an art gallery tonight. Sounds fun, but unfortunately, it’s sort of… mandated. Double date with one of Gould’s daughters and her wife, since he figured we’ll have so much to talk about… which means I have to spend after-hours private time with my girlfriend figuring out how to make friends with our client’s daughter or else shake Gould’s entire worldview.”

“Oh.” That didn’t sound as nice, judging by her dry tone. “So what were you two giggling about?”

“Nothing in particular, Kelce. Just me talking to my partner without realizing we were being eavesdropped on. Can we focus?”

The tips of her ears turned a little pink. I think I knew what she and Lucy were talking about. They’d always had… a healthy level of excitement for each other, ever since I found them getting together for the first time in the office, Lucy in Anna’s chair while Anna was grinding on her lap.

I guess it was a Preston thing. Veronica was—

Not someone I was thinking about. That’s what Veronica was. Also mean and horrible and not at all pretty.

“Okay,” I said, hopping up to my feet. “Well, I hope your date tonight goes great! And that you’re able to get up to something you enjoy in the middle of it all. You know, anything, really.”

“Mm-hm. And you’re going to do your work? Actually focus on it and get started, make some progress?”

Oh yeah. I forgot about that. I bounced on the balls of my feet, nodding. “Yeah! I’ve already got an idea how to start.”

“Oh… good.” She relaxed in her seat, opening her laptop again. “Then I look forward to hearing how it goes. I mean it, any—specific—questions you have, you can reach out to me. Don’t be afraid. We want to be helpful. Talk to you later, Kelce.”

“See you, Boss Anna,” I said, drifting towards the door, and she sighed, hard.

“Kelcey. Your laptop. And don’t call me that.”

Ugh, that thing was always slipping away from me! I turned around and snatched it up and turned back to the door, heading out into the office, the energy level low today. With Christmas around the corner, everybody was already in Christmas vacation mode, and everything was quiet right now, people tapping lazily away at computers. I strolled through the maze of desks and made my way to the perfect place to start: Miranda’s desk.

She kept her head down, focusing on her laptop. I tapped on the desk, rhythmically tip-tapping my fingernails for her attention—just, you know, letting her know I was there—and she turned to look at me, eyebrows raised high.

“Kelcey?” she said. “What do you want?”

“Hi, Miranda. How are you doing?”

“I’m busy. What’s going on?”

Miranda was sure grouchy today. I tried to be cordial, but some people just weren’t having it. “Anna gave me a project and I don’t know where to start it.”

She furrowed her brow. She was a lean, wiry woman with puffy auburn hair, always dressed in shades of gray, with a charcoal sweater vest over a white shirt today. Some days I think it represented the amount of personality she had too. “Ask her where to start it, then,” she said, turning back to her computer.

“No… I did. And she said, um… that she, um, was busy. And to ask you.”

“She said to ask me?”

A little white lie never hurt anybody, right? I smiled sweetly. “She said you’re really good at showing people through things!”

She scowled at me, brow furrowing, before she went back to her computer. “What’s the project?”

“You know the new hiring drive picking up. They want a new onboarding video to replace the one from, like, the year I was born.”

“Wasn’t that long ago,” she muttered under her breath, and I? The magnanimous one here? I chose to pretend I did not hear it. Let it be said Kelcey Huntington was a generous soul.

“So, can you help?”

She sighed, hard, pushing back from her desk looking up at me with an exasperated expression, like the whole world was arrayed against her. That was kind of how Miranda operated, though—we ran out of coffee in the breakroom and she took it as a sign that there was no God, and if there was, then He hated her personally, that coffee production was going down by the wayside and that the earth would be flooded and the breakroom would never have coffee again. She was a little depressing sometimes. But she was better at her job than I was, so here I was, making puppy-dog eyes that got her to fold her arms and say, “You’ll have to get in touch with a team for videos. All the rest of our onboarding videos are animated, so you’ll probably want to contract some people for an animation. You should already have the requests from HR on what they want the video telling people, so… just figure out a way to express that in video and pass that along to the team.”

“I don’t really know any animators off the top of my head.” I bounced on my heels, hands clasped at my waist. “Pixar?”

“You probably could afford to contract them,” she muttered, and she cleared her throat. “Let’s aim smaller. I’ll dig up who we’ve used before, but it’s a vicious market and everyone falls apart in the market before long, and it’s been ages, so fat chance of the team actually still working together. And good luck tracking any of them down.”

“Okay, well, I believe in us,” I said. “Just give me what you can find. You’re the best, Miranda. How’s life, by the way? How’s your big kitchen reno project?”

She sighed miserably, going back to her computer. “It was a mistake, is what it was. We’ve been walking around on bare flooring and there’s all these faults in the flooring and the whole kitchen is just a nightmare, so I’m having to fix everybody else’s mistakes, and I wish we’d never started. The previous owner really screwed up the windows and we didn’t notice until we were fixing them.”

Okay, this was the wrong conversation starter. I was getting sad just listening to her, like gravitational misery. “That’s rough,” I said, inching backwards a little.

“And of course, nobody wants to lift a finger to help. So I’m here doing this by myself and everybody’s just walking around me like they couldn’t give a rat’s ass about the kitchen, like they’re all just happy to keep cooking in a kitchen with bare floors.”

“That’s… that’s rough,” I said, kind of out of other words, inching a little further back. I should have asked David for help.

“That’s what I want for Christmas,” she said. “Someone to give a damn. Maybe help out with something. It’s exhausting having to pull everyone’s deadweight.”

“That is… definitely… rough. Well, I hope it gets better soon—”

“Not going to. Kevin already said before we started that he didn’t want anything to do with this, so it’s up to me. The boys don’t care about anything other than when I’m going to cook for them next.”

“Jeez, that sucks. Hold on, I have something urgent I need to take, but thanks for the help! Good luck with the kitchen!”

I turned and ran away, nearly bumping into someone at the corner—Lucy Masters, coming in from the elevators, dressed in a snappy red coat over her regular black pantsuit today, blonde curls and signature red lipstick curled up in an odd smile.

“Look like you saw a ghost, Kelce,” she said.

“Saw someone who needs a visit from three ghosts… I kinda made the mistake of asking Miranda how her kitchen renovation was going.”

She smiled dryly. “Dangerous game to play, Kelce. Should I take that to mean Anna passed along your videography task and she told you to take the initiative on it and figure out your own path on how to start it, and you went and asked the furthest person from Anna’s office?”

I swayed, hands clasped behind my back, looking at Lucy’s lapel. “Um… no.”

She smiled wider. “Guess I was wrong, then. Well, good luck with the assignment.”

“Um—” I stood up taller. “By the way… do you know off the top of your head who the videographers we contracted for the last ones were?”

“Can’t remember the name, but it doesn’t matter. Their house folded.”

“Damn, that’s worse than what happened to Miranda’s house.”

She paused, thinking it over. “Not in Miranda’s mind, it’s not. We’ll trust you with scouting out some names for other teams to contract, and you can pass them to me and Anna for review.”

“Ah…” That sounded like something I could do. I’d just be looking up their portfolios and watching a bunch of videos, right? Maybe they’d have some fun movies. “Yeah, I can do that,” I said. “Just watch! I’ve been waiting for my opportunity to show what I’ve been doing and prove to Veronica—to everyone that I’m perfectly capable.”

She smiled sadly. “I look forward to seeing what you do, Kelce. You’ve got two fans in the executive office to support you.”

“Is it… going to get really hot? It’s almost Christmas.”

She blinked twice before she smiled wide. “I wouldn’t count on that,” she said. “One of the fans is really hot.”

“Huh?”

“Don’t worry about it,” she said, turning and walking past me, raising a hand as she went back towards the executive office. “See you, Kelce.”

I didn’t get it. Was I supposed to be using fans in the project? Should I have been worried about overheating? But—if one of the fans was really hot, wasn’t that a problem? Didn’t it need to get checked on?

I’d cross that bridge when I came to it, I guess. With an uneasy sensation, I sat down at my computer, shifting in my seat, adjusting my jacket, adjusting my hair, touching up my hairclip, checking myself in my phone camera and making sure my makeup still looked nice, used a breath mint spray, checked my manicure to make sure the polish was still staying nicely, and I took a sip of my coffee, spitting it back into the cup. It was cold. And coffee after a breath mint spray was always gross. I never learned.

I went and got more coffee, and I repeated the whole process when I sat down again, minus the spray, and between it all, I already had a message from Miranda when I opened my computer.

Bayton Video is the name of the team. Good luck with getting anything useful out of that. It’s probably all broken up.

One quick google search confirmed it had gone under four years back, and I scrunched up my face, picking through the wreckage of their digital footprint until I found one Liam Danielson, animation lead for Bayton Video, operating with a new group now, ECR Animation and Videography.

“Oh, bingo,” I said, humming happily to myself as I pulled up their website, suddenly filled with visions of glory. I’d do more than just present a bunch of names and tell them to pick. I’d intelligently track down our leads and find the exact match for what we’d had before, and I’d even start communications with them. Anna would be amazed when I showed up with the work half done already, and she’d probably talk to Lucy about how much I was really shaping up and turning into an office star, and it would probably get to Veronica, and she’d think about how much she missed out on with me, and she’d know I wasn’t dumb at all—I was great at what I did, and what I did was not thinking about Veronica. What was I doing? I pushed her out of my mind again and dug up the contact for ECR and put down the phone number, pushing away from my desk and closing my laptop as I stood up.

This called for a coffee, a muffin, and a very fruitful phone call that would make turn me into the office superstar. And everybody would be jealous.

Nobody in particular. Just everybody.