6. Jade

CHAPTER 6

JADE

A fter another long day at work, all I want to do is climb into bed and spend the rest of the night watching rom-coms and eating popcorn.

As much as I want to go full hermit mode, though, I have a meeting with Paloma later this evening, and I wanted to head over to Queens and check in on my mom first.

She's sitting on the porch of her house when my cab pulls up, her gray hair pulled back into a messy bun and a book in her hand. She looks up and waves, beaming at me.

I lean over the front seat and hand the driver double the fare before getting out of the car and staring at the little brown house. The bricks are crumbling at the corners, and a couple of the shutters are missing pieces of wood.

Mom is getting older, and it looks like in the time I've been traveling, the house is starting to fall apart.

"I'm going to have to stay in town for more than a few months with the looks of the house," I say, tone bright as I walk through the little white picket fence and up the cobblestone path. "I miss you when I'm traveling."

"You're back in the city now." She pulls me into a tight hug, her arms wrapping around my shoulders like a vise. "I can't wait to spend some more time with you. You've spent too long jetting off all over the world."

I hug her back, the scent of home clinging to her. "I know, I know. While I'm here, we should look at getting some maintenance done."

She snorts and pulls back, keeping one arm around my waist as she leads me into the house. "There's no need. I have someone coming to look at the brick next week, and another man is going to fix the shutters the week after."

My cheeks warm as we head into the living room and sit down on the pastel floral couch. "Mom, are you sure that you don't want me to just pay someone to start coming around and taking care of things?"

She arches an eyebrow, giving me the stern look that used to send me running for the hills when I was a kid. "Jade, are you implying that I can't take care of myself anymore?"

I shake my head. "Not at all. I'm just saying I don't think it's out of the question to start letting me handle some things for you. I have the money to do it, Mom."

She tucks one leg beneath her, the leg of her linen trouser flaring wide. "You don't need to take care of me. I'm still young enough to take care of myself."

"I know you are, but I worry. I'm out of town or stuck in the city a lot. I can't just run home whenever I need to like I did in college."

"We've been having this same conversation for years." Mom pulls the emerald-green throw pillow from behind her back, launching it at me. "One of these days, you have to stop worrying about me and go out to live your own life."

"I'm always going to worry about you." My throat gets a little thick just thinking about her growing older.

After everything Mom did for me over the years, I don't know how to live a life without her. She's my best friend and I want to make her life easier, but every time I try to give her any of the money I've earned over the years, she makes a big show of either giving it back or donating it.

She seems to think that letting me help her would be a bad thing.

Mom puts her hand on my knee. "Tell me what's been going on at work. You sounded pretty tired of it all when you called the other night."

I groan and clutch the pillow close to my chest, curling into the corner of the couch like I used to when I was a child. "I've spent two weeks working with Grayson, and I feel like my head is going to explode."

"Grayson, huh?" She wiggles her eyebrows, pulling the blanket from the back of the couch and draping it over both of our laps. "You're going to have to tell me about him. What's he like? Is he cute?"

"He's infuriating, and he has to be the most stubborn person I've met in my entire life." I groan and shove the pillow to the side. "He questions me at every turn, but it's not because he actually has questions. It's because he thinks that if he does that, I'll quit, and his daddy will hand him the job he's been lusting after his entire life."

It feels like I can't get a deep enough breath as I look at Mom, trying to find peace in the way she smiles at me and shakes her head.

"You know, it sounds like he's a lot like you in some regards."

Wrinkling my nose, I bury myself deeper into the blanket. "That's not true at all. We're entirely different people. And he takes every opportunity he can to get under my skin."

She gives me a knowing look, the wrinkles at the corner of her eyes softening. "You also happen to be one of the most stubborn people I've ever met. And when you set your mind to something, you are impossible to get to bend."

"It's not my job to bend here." I wrap one of the tassels at the end of the blanket around my finger. "I was hired to revive the company, and Grayson keeps standing in the way of me doing that."

"Maybe you need to give him a little bit of grace. This is the company he's been working for his entire life, and you're coming in and looking to change everything."

I drop the tassel. "That's the thing, though. I'm not trying to change everything. I'm trying to bring back the energy the paper used to have. It was filled with community and connection before it started making a lot of money. The man who owns it made over a billion dollars from that company alone."

"And look at where it's gotten him." Mom reaches out and takes my hand, giving it a squeeze. "He's now looking at a failing company that had to bring in your brilliant mind to rescue it."

I roll my eyes but lean closer to her, tucking myself into her side as her fingers comb through my hair. "I don't know how I'm going to get through the next two and a half months."

"Give yourself and everyone around you some grace. You don't have to be the best at everything you do, and if you loosen the reins and allow this Grayson man to input some of his ideas, you might like what you come up with together."

"You might be right about that." I groan and close my eyes. "I wish I could stay here tonight, but I've got a meeting with Paloma later — she's helping me with the website design."

Mom gets up, tucking a couple pillows beneath my head in place of her side. "You just stay there and relax a little bit. I have dinner ready to go in the oven, and it shouldn't take more than twenty minutes to heat up."

When she comes back into the living room, she sprawls on the other couch, turning on the television to one of my favorite shows.

I giggle along with her to the laugh track, starting to feel better about the way the last two weeks have gone.

As much as I want this transformation to be a smooth process, I came into it knowing that I was going to have an uphill battle on my hands.

It's finally time to embrace that.

Paloma opens the door to her apartment an hour after I leave Mom's house. She gives me a once-over, opening the door wider. "You better tell me that those are your mom's peanut butter balls in your hands."

"They are." I hand her the container and follow her into the industrial apartment. The polished cement floors are cold against my feet the moment I kick off my heels.

She grins and puts the container in the fridge. "Those are going to be good after a couple beers and working on the site."

"Thank you so much again." I drop down onto the burgundy crushed-velvet couch.

She follows me over with a couple bottles of beer, sitting cross-legged beside me. "How was dealing with Grayson today?"

"Well, he insisted on keeping the curtains in his office open, and since I haven't gotten any to hide my side of the wall yet, I was stuck looking at his stupid face all day."

She cackles and drags the coffee table closer, lifting the section that pops up higher. "You mean you spent the day thinking about how close the two of you used to be in college."

"No." I lean forward, peering at the initial designs on the screen as she opens the laptop. "Those look amazing! I really love this one."

Paloma scrolls through a few more designs, all of them clean and simple. She stops on one of them. "I thought this one would probably be your favorite."

The base color of the scream is beige, with a clean font in a deep black. The newspaper name is written at the top in a decorative font, but it's still easy to read.

Though the pictures are nice and big, they don't take up the majority of the space like some of the other designs. The headline story is still visible on the screen, and if you scroll down, there are two more stories that would be visible straight from the home screen.

I nod and point to one of the little icons on the sidebar. "What's that supposed to be?"

Paloma bounces in her seat as she brings up another design. "I think you should bring back a comic section and a crossword section, and I think you should be able to do them online, too."

"You're a genius!"

I lean in, looking at the designs for those pages. They look like something straight out of one of the company's old newspapers.

I pull out my phone and make a couple notes. "Comics could go back to being in the Sunday paper."

"Does that mean you're going to get them to go back to having a Sunday paper?"

I nod. "It was one of those papers that everyone of all ages used to look forward to."

"How many countries is the paper even in anymore?" Paloma switches to one of the mock-ups for a crossword.

"Just North America, the UK, and Australia." I jot down another note about expanding in the future, but that's not going to happen within my time at the company.

Paloma hums. "Do you think that they would carry it through the other countries, or are they just looking at rebuilding the United States branch?"

"They want to rebuild everything, but the focus is on this one right now. The website and app are going to be rolled across everything, though, which will likely change the physical papers slightly."

She flips to another mock-up. "Now, what do you think about a weeknight recipes section? I know you said when we first talked about this that you wanted to find more ways for people to connect, and this could be one of those ways."

I lean closer, squinting a little to get a good look at all the little design elements she's put to use. It looks like a little recipe card that could have come straight from someone's grandmother.

"I love it." I lean back into the cushions, drawing my knees up. "I think we should make the text a little better on that one, though. A lot of the people getting the physical paper will be older and might not be able to see it as clearly."

Paloma makes a few quick adjustments. "Do you think this is better?"

"Yeah. With the way you have it there, it shouldn't use too much extra ink when printing either, which is one of the costs that needs to be considered."

The ingredients list and instructions are designed to look like they've been written on a scrap piece of paper, while a photograph of the finished dish sits off to the side, the paper design overlapping it at the edge.

"This is going to be amazing! I don't know how to thank you for the amount of work you've put into this."

She laughs and closes the laptop, leaning back into the cushions and taking a sip of her beer. "Don't thank me yet. There's still a lot more work to be done once you're given the green light."

" If I'm given the green light." I lean forward, snagging my beer and cracking the top off it. "Grayson is doing whatever he can to get in my way. Mom thinks I should give him a little more grace."

"I don't think she's wrong," Paloma says softly. "I mean, you did ruin his chance at getting the internship. He might have been the one to start the battle between you two, but you were the one who went nuclear with it."

"Ugh, you're right." I take another long pull of the beer. "If I could go back in time and change everything about that year, I would. I never should have gotten into that stupid competition with Grayson. The internship meant more to him."

"Nope. You're not going to do that."

"Do what?" My eyebrows pull together as I look up at her.

"Pretend that you didn't need that internship more than he did." Paloma takes a swig of her own drink before grabbing the remote and starting to search for movies.

"I'm not pretending. He has something to prove to his dad." I smile at her as I nestle into the arm of the plush couch. "I don't have anything to prove to anyone other than myself."

"Maybe not, but you needed that internship. He's had more money to his name since he was a child than you have right now. He always would've been able to buy his way to the top while you had to work hard for everything you have."

The corner of my mouth twitches. "And here I thought you might have been turning to his side with the whole ‘give him grace' thing."

She scoffs. "Not a chance. The billionaire needs to be put in his place — and you're just the woman to do that — even if he does need to be shown some grace every now and then."

Groaning, I get up and head to her fridge, pulling out the cupcakes she bought for girls' night. "Now that the website mock-up is settled, let's spend the rest of the night trying to forget about Grayson."

Even as I say the words, I get the sinking feeling that it's not going to happen.