27. Fifty Bucks
27
Fifty Bucks
Evan
The building is tucked away on a quiet street in the West Village, wedged between a secondhand bookshop and a café that makes the entire street smell like cinnamon and burnt espresso.
From the outside, it doesn’t look like much: four stories of weathered brownstone, narrow windows, a faded sign above the door, the once-gold lettering of Inkspill Publications now a dull, peeling brass.
If I didn’t know what I was looking for, I’d have missed it entirely.
I stand on the pavement despite the fresh flurry of rainfall beating against my umbrella.
This place couldn’t look more different from KMG: no glass towers, no security guards, no sleek marble lobbies—my surname nowhere to be seen.
Thank fuck.
I let out a slow breath, muscles easing in my back and shoulders.
And I push open the door.
Inside, it’s even less like KMG than outside.
I make my way up a steep wooden staircase to an office full of bookshelves and overstuffed desks.
The air, which smells of paper and leather and old wood and black coffee, sends a sudden wave of nostalgia through me: it smells like the Spearcrest library used to.
There are manuscripts piled everywhere: on desk corners and in chairs and on a rickety table in a coffee area.
Half-empty mugs litter every available surface, some resting on stacks of proofs, others shoved behind old keyboards.
A dying plant droops in one corner, its leaves yellowing under the light of mismatched desk lamps.
Sophie would love it here.
The thought hits me before I can stop it.
In another life, Sophie might have curled up in one of the brown velvet armchairs shoved against the wall, reading through a manuscript, eyebrows drawn in concentration, fingers absently tracing lines of marginalia.
“Can I help?”
A voice like a whip cracks through my thoughts, snapping me—thankfully—back to reality.
I turn to find a woman standing in a doorway to my left, arms crossed.
She’s sharp-featured, with inky eyes and big tortoiseshell glasses, her curly hair pulled into a ponytail.
I immediately know who she is.
Inés Alfaro. The Editor-in-Chief, the woman whose toes I’ve been sent to tread on.
The captain of the ship I’ll be standing with as it goes down.
“Hi,” I say, extending my hand towards her.
“Evan Knight.”
“Ah, the heir.” Her grip is surprisingly firm; she’s wearing dark green nail polish and thick silver rings that dig into my fingers.
“So you actually showed up. We had a pool going.”
“You’ve set me back fifty bucks,” says a man, following her out from the room she just emerged from.
He’s wearing a crumpled blazer over a T-shirt and there’s a massive mug of milky coffee in his hand .
“Sorry about that,” I tell him.
And, mostly to Inés, I add, “Didn’t have much of a choice.”
She snorts.
“Right. Well, since you’re gracing us with your presence, let’s try to make some use of you, right?”
She turns, gesturing for me to follow as she moves further into the office.
The man with the coffee falls in beside her.
Despite his age—he looks to be in his mid-fifties—there’s a liveliness to him, a weird energetic spring in his step.
He takes a seat at a desk that’s absolutely cluttered with books.
“Patrick Calloway, our Marketing Director,” Inés says over her shoulder.
“Patch is the reason anyone outside of an Ivy League faculty lounge has heard of our books.”
“I do what I can with what I have,” Patch says, nodding with exaggerated humility.
“Which is not a lot.”
“I know,” I say.
“I’ve looked at the numbers.”
I didn’t so much look at the numbers as spend the entire weekend poring over them, doing my best to wrap my head around the information I was given.
I even called Adele to help me, and we ended up working on a massive shared document.
Maybe I needn’t have bothered: Patch is right.
The biggest problem is that nobody’s buying academic books, and since there’s barely any money coming in, there’s barely any money going to marketing, which means even fewer books are being sold, which, in short, leads back to what my dad had so simply put as: failing .
Inés doesn’t slow as she moves from one side of the office to the other, gesturing at desks as we pass them by.
“Mina Chaudhury, one of our junior editors,” she says, indicating a young woman sitting cross-legged on her chair, a red pen tucked behind her ear and an annotated manuscript spread across her lap.
She’s the youngest person in the office so far, which is to say, she looks to be in her late twenties, with dip-dyed hair and smooth brown skin.
She looks up when I walk past, sinking back into her chair.
“Whoa,” she says. “ That’s the heir?” She hauls herself up to look at Patch over the towers of books and papers separating them.
“You owe me fifty bucks.” And then she points at me with her pen.
“Let it never be said I didn’t have faith in you.”
Another man’s head pops up from behind a desk.
I hadn’t even noticed him because he’s crouching by a cardboard box full of books, one arm still inside.
“Faith?” he says in a thick Brooklyn accent.
“You said he was gonna turn up just to pin Inkspill to the floor while it’s being put out of its misery.”
Mina shrugs at me.
“No offence,” she says without much feeling.
And she follows that up with an appraising look.
“Didn’t expect you to look so…” She trails off, twirling her pen in the air like she’s trying to catch the right word.
“Lost and confused?” Patch offers.
“Unreasonably well-dressed,” Mina counters.
I stare down at myself.
This time, I didn’t make the mistake of wearing anything that might draw too much notice: no watch, no pin, no cufflinks, just a plain grey suit.
Although, looking around at the team, Patch’s T-shirt and blazer combo, Mina’s corduroy dress, the guy on the floor’s worn jeans and trainers, it looks like I’ve still managed to overdress.
Even Inés, who’s wearing a blouse and black trousers, still has a million silver rings on her hands and a pair of cherry-red lace-up boots on her feet .
“He looks like a summer associate we have to babysit,” says the man on the floor, standing up with a groan and a pile of heavy, glossy hardbacks in his arms.
“Play nice, Matt,” Inés snaps, and, throwing me a look, she says, “Matteo Moretti. Production Manager. He’s normally the nice one, but you’ve also cost him fifty bucks.”
“Sorry about that,” I tell Matt.
“I thought I was the nice one?” says Mina, pouting at Inés.
“You’re the thorn in my side.”
“A nice thorn?”
Inés ignores this and walks away, and I follow, lowering my voice to say, “I can take my tie off if it’ll help?”
But privacy doesn’t seem to be a thing in this place.
Patch answers loudly, “It’s a slippery slope, kid. First you take off the tie, then you show up in shorts and a wife-beater.”
Inés ignores this too.
She stops near a desk in the corner.
It’s covered with a thin layer of dust, and one half of it is stacked with boxes.
She starts moving the boxes, and I hurry to help her, following her instructions to prop them against the wall wherever there’s space.
She grabs a tissue from Mina’s desk, swipes it unconvincingly across the desk, leaving one slightly less dusty line in the middle of the rest of the dust, and sighs.
“This is your desk. I would’ve had it cleaned, but, well—”
“Let me guess.” I smile at her.
“I’ve also cost you fifty bucks?”
She gives a dry laugh.
“Doesn’t matter,” she says.
She meets my eyes, a silent challenge.
“You’re here to make us profitable, right? You can start by earning me back my fifty dollars.”
I grab a book at random from the last box I just moved.
The title reads The Republic of Letters: Intellectual Networks and the Birth of Modern Thought.
I flip the book in my hand, looking for the barcode, and look back up at Inés .
“This book’s fifty dollars.”
She crosses her arms and raises her eyebrows.
“That’s the challenge you’re setting me?” I ask.
“Sell one book?”
“That’s sort of how publishing works,” Matt says, leaning back against his desk.
“We print books; people buy them.”
“Look, Evan,” Inés says, “your father sent you here because it looks good to have his golden boy son step into our small, humble press. But none of us here are even remotely stupid. This imprint’s survived this long because your mother liked us, what we did, what we stood for. Now the well’s run dry, and even she knows we’re at the end of the road. So if you don’t realise this yet, I’ll tell you for free: your dad sent you here to supervise the end of Inkspill so that when Inkspill’s dead and buried, he can tell everyone he did everything he could to save it.”
I watch her as she speaks.
She’s austere and forceful, just like Sophie.
There’s no sarcasm or hostility in anything she’s saying, just a tired sort of acceptance.
And I understand her straightaway.
Inés, like Sophie, doesn’t hate me, not really.
She’s just trying to keep herself and her team safe.
She’s expecting disappointment—but it’s not what she wants .
What she wants, deep down, is for me to prove her wrong.
She’s passionate and fierce: she loves Inkspill.
She wants to save it.
Even if it means I get to prove her wrong in the process.
“I bet fifty dollars you wouldn’t turn up because if I were you, I wouldn’t have turned up,” she tells me.
“We only have enough money to keep going until December. That gives you less than three months to make us profitable.”
I glance at the whiteboard near Inés’s desk, where the production schedule should be.
The last column is December.
The months after that are blank, as if the world ends with the year.
My heart sinks.
Fuck.
Three months.
Every month since the gala has felt like a year, a century, an uncrossable expanse of time.
But now that I’m here, now that I know I’ve only got three months to save Inkspill—and myself—I realise how short three months is.
It’s nowhere near enough time.
“Even with all the best will in the world,” Inés continues grimly, “even if you were actually a secret business prodigy, which, no offence, I doubt you are, even under the best of circumstances, your chances of succeeding would still be infinitesimal.”
“Great,” I say.
“Look, I’m here now, and I don’t know what I’m doing, you’re right. But I’m going to figure it out. And if you guys are going down fighting, I’ll be fighting with you.”
“My hero,” Matt says drily.
I ignore him and turn to Inés, holding her gaze.
“Save your money and don’t bother starting another pool. I’m not going anywhere.” I shrug off my coat and toss it on the back of the linty desk chair, a cloud of dust rising from the desk, then settling.
“I’ll make you back your fifty bucks—and a hell of a lot more.”