Chapter 9

Chapter 9

Cassie

“Come on,” I laughed, pulling my coat tighter around me as the wind picked up, nipping at my ears. Haven Street was quiet right now, but the few people who were strolling through Garden Square and out towards Haven Street were all laughter and chatter, and the smell of coffee and hot chocolate wafted from cafés. “You’re not afraid of heights, are you?”

“I’m afraid of mornings,” Parker groaned, rubbing her eyes.

I put my hands on my hips, turning towards her. “It’s almost ten, Parker.”

“Which is a good time to wake up if I need to be somewhere early.” She sighed, looking up at the elegant construction of Heron’s Watch ahead of us. “I thought you said this was a coffee shop I was asking her to meet up at.”

“There’s a coffee shop on the thirtieth floor,” I said, gesturing her towards the building. “Hustle, Parker. We’re taking the stairs.”

“Like hell we’re taking the stairs,” she said, her voice rising in maybe the second or the third inflection I’d ever heard from her, but I’d already spun on my heel and started across the snow-dusted stone plaza of Heron’s Square. Railings lined the far edges over the broad shimmering view of Parson River, and long, stone garden planters filled with snow-capped bushes stretched back to the entrance.

Heron’s Watch was a beautiful sapphire-blue building that stood high at the innermost point of the bend in Parson River, built just five years ago with the rising name recognition of Parson River as shorthand for all the beautiful things about Port Andrea. I’d been inside the place a million times with the other girls for a million photoshoots, but this time it was just me and Parker stepping up to the glass doors at the front. It certainly put stunning architecture high on its priorities, stretching up forty floors and widening at the top into a viewing platform, with crisscrossing blue metal making a striking statement.

But when I’d told Parker about it, she’d just shrugged and said, “Who cares about a blue building?”

Well, I cared about a blue building. When we stepped into the entrance, a massive space that stretched upwards eight stories with walkways all around, the vaulted ceiling spanned the way across to glass elevators carrying groups of people laughing and chattering back down to the dark wood floor and dark-leaf plants below. And Parker’s expression, like I’d banked on, betrayed a little bit of being impressed. Her gaze fixed on the massive fountain in the center of the space, a sculpture of two herons with one about to take flight at the top, and I gestured to it.

“We can sit at it, if you like. The fountain.”

“We’ve got places to be,” she said, slowly tearing her eyes off the space. “And an elevator to get there by.”

“Come on. The stairs. It’ll make great content. We post about it and laugh about how grueling the trip up by stairs was, and share a little anecdote about how you were huffing and puffing but you insisted you were fine—”

“I’m starting to rethink this plan of talking about me on your page.”

“And we say, like, definitely taking the elevator back down! And we record a video through the glass elevator. Look, my followers love Heron’s Watch! Just give them this.”

“Your followers love everything if it’s legally within the city limits of Port Andrea,” she mumbled. “How about a personal anecdote of how I refused to take the stairs?”

“I’ll buy you a pastry at the coffee shop if you take the stairs.”

We took the stairs.

Sure enough, Parker was huffing and puffing by the tenth floor, but all it did was get more obnoxious comments from her. I was starting to realize the obnoxious comments were just a sign she liked someone, so every dry joke and sarcastic comment just put another little spring in my step.

“Hold on,” I said, once we reached twenty-nine. “Let me take a picture of us.”

“Are you trying to make your followers think I’m some miserable, lazy lump?” she groaned, leaning against the wall.

“No, no. They’ll totally get it. They’ll think you’re cute and funny and relatable.”

“I think they’re annoying.”

I grinned. “I’ll tell them you think so. They’ll laugh about it.” I whipped out my phone and snapped a picture of us next to the floor marker, filing it away for later. We hadn’t posted anything about the two of us yet. That was for after the meeting.

Parker at least stopped complaining for a little bit once we got to the thirtieth floor and saw the view out the long hallway windows, a snowy Port Andrea cityscape sprawling out below us. When we came up on the coffee shop, a cute little place called Café Bella, the smell of coffee and pastry wafted out through the open-air front of the shop, and sure enough, there was Parker’s friend Tatiana sitting at one of the few tables that wasn’t bar seating at the massive windows.

She was a pretty woman, an undercut with deep black hair and clean, sharp makeup, wearing a faux leather jacket and fitted jeans. She raised a hand in a lazy wave to Parker, giving a confused look at me, and once Parker collapsed in the chair across from her, Tatiana looked over at her and said, “I see you brought your roommate…?”

“Hey,” I said, sitting down across from her. “It’s really nice to see you.”

“I shouldn’t have,” Parker groaned. “She made me take the stairs.”

“The stairs are good for you,” Tatiana said. “A little exercise will do you good.”

“I’m okay with a little exercise. Thirty floors up is not a little exercise.”

“Technically,” I said, “you started on floor one, so it was only twenty-nine floors up.”

Parker sighed. “I really wish I could express to you how little that distinction matters. Now, buy me a cinnamon roll. You promised.”

“Oh, you bribed her to get her to take the stairs,” Tatiana laughed. “That makes sense.”

Tatiana’s side of the table was empty, and I gave it a pointed look. “Have you not ordered anything? I hope we didn’t keep you waiting long.”

“I just got here,” she said, standing up. “I’ll go with you to order. Parker will probably sit here, because she’s never exerted herself in her life and she has to recover.”

“You say that sarcastically, but it’s true,” Parker grumbled.

The line was long for how quiet the building was right now, but it moved along swiftly, and before long, we placed our orders. We sat back down with Parker to wait, and by then she seemed to have regained her composure, sitting up higher.

“Tell me you still meant it with the elevator back down,” Parker said.

“I mean it. I promise. We’ll shoot some nice video together.”

Tatiana looked between us. “You said this was a business meeting. Is it actually a photography trip with your new roommate?”

Parker sat up straighter and said, “She’s the newest member of Express Coffee Logistics,” which was a lot more abrupt than I was expecting, and it felt like all the air pulled out of the room. Tatiana blinked.

“Hi,” I said. “Sorry for the, um… surprise introduction?”

“What do you mean, she’s the newest member?” Tatiana said. “Doing what?”

“It’s a little difficult to explain,” I said.

“Making us famous on Instagram,” Parker said.

“All right, I guess it’s easy to explain.” I sank back in my seat. Tatiana narrowed her eyes at me.

“Parker hired you as a social media manager?”

“Oh, that’s a lofty term,” I said, scratching the back of my head. “But since I’ve got some followers on Insta, I’m just sort of… a sponsor, to promote the Express brand.”

“When she says some followers, she means half a million,” Parker said, and Tatiana stared at me, slowly cocking her head.

“You’re… what, some kind of Instagram influencer?”

I nodded. “Sort of, yeah.”

She put a hand to her forehead. “So that’s what this is? This brilliant idea you told me about—we’re just going to try doing the exact same thing Gary is doing, even though there’s no way we can do it better than he is?”

“Yeah,” Parker said.

“I think we can do better,” I said. “Gary is really tactless, and ultimately, it’s all just a vanity project for him. He’s really in it to look good, not to grow a brand or anything.”

Tatiana’s expression softened a little. “So you’re familiar with him?”

Ugh. Much too familiar for my liking. I swallowed, but the lump in my throat didn’t go away. “Yeah, I, uh… I was actually a sponsor with him, over in Canderson, for another project. That was a bad idea on my part.”

“See, we’ve got insider information,” Parker said. “Unicorn here is good for something after all.”

“Excuse me. I also brought you Christmas croissants.”

Tatiana scowled, though, rubbing her temples. “No… look, Parker, I don’t know how to tell you this. This whole thing is a mistake. If we try to engage Gary on his territory, we’re just going to lose worse. It’s working for him because he has the capital to leverage it. We’d just be fighting two uphill battles then. We need to just keep doing what we do—”

“And keep heading where we’ve been heading,” Parker said.

“Gary is taking too many risks,” Tatiana said. “He’s overextending, and he’s diluting his brand talking about… morning magic and everything. What we need to focus on isn’t glitz and glamor, it’s doing our job really well. When he falls short on actually being there for his partner cafés when things get hard, they’ll see how reliable we are.”

“Oh, I gotcha,” Parker said. “You’re saying we should do nothing and hope the bad things go away.”

I winced. “I mean, you’re not wrong, Tatiana,” I said. “But—”

“Yeah, she is,” Parker said. “You’ve been harassing me to do something and make Gary go away, and now that I’m actually doing something, you think we should just stick with what’s been getting us into this position. Cass is our brand sponsor, and that’s that.”

“Oh, is that what we’re doing?” Tatiana half-stood, planting her hands on the table, and my heart jumped into my throat. I was the reason they were fighting. Guilt squirmed in my gut like a wriggling worm. “We’re going along with it because the boss said so?”

“Hey, we’ve all been feeling crap,” Parker said, and Tatiana narrowed her eyes, but the barista called out our order before she could say anything. She’d softened a little when she came back from the counter with our drinks and Parker’s cinnamon bun, but the look in her eyes was still dark.

“And if we’re breaking shit, our company is not the thing I’d like us to be breaking.”

Parker raised an eyebrow. “Oh yeah. That’s right. I forgot our business strategy was founded on the guiding principle of not taking any risks with anything.”

“Parker,” I sighed. “Please don’t pick a fight over this. I feel so guilty I’m going to die.”

“You can be a Christmas zombie too, then,” Parker said. “I’m not picking a fight, this is just how Tat and I resolve all our disagreements.”

“No—it really isn’t,” Tatiana sighed, sinking back in her seat and combing her fingers through her hair, agitation over every little part of her. “Parker, this whole thing with Gary Founders has been a shitstorm. You’ve been dragging your feet through all of it, and now that you’re finally doing something to address it, you’ve already pissed off Gary and your only answer is to try doing the same thing he’s doing, but worse? This is ridiculous. I’m not going along with it.”

“Oh, yeah?” Parker sipped at her drink, raising an eyebrow. “Going to tackle me to the ground and stop me?”

“I would love to,” Tatiana said. “No. Instead, I’m going to tell you that this is different from all the little fights over nothing. This is the entire company at stake, and you’re about to run it into the ground. Either you drop this whole thing, or I am handing in my two weeks’ notice effective immediately.”