68. Emma
Chapter Sixty-Eight
EMMA
S he finished sorting the mini cups of green coffee beans in order of quality before checking her cheat sheet from the ICI, International Coffee Institute.
“Yes!” She pumped one hand in the air and did a celebratory jig around the kitchen island.
Ever since she’d decided to pursue coffee roasting as a career, she had been researching all aspects of the business, including pursuing a Q-grading certification.
These were the people who were able to sort beans by type and quality before they were roasted. It was a crucially important skill set to have, and every roaster and green coffee importer employed at least one.
She’d gotten the idea from her husband. Every time he drank a cup of something she’d selected and prepared, he would compliment her, saying she knew how to pick a bean. Once she realized just how important that skill was to her career plans, she had begun to research whether that was true. And according to the kit she’d had specially couriered by the ICI, it was.
This was significant. If she could refine this skill, she could build a business around it. A little importing and bean roasting enterprise. Garrett kept encouraging her to try, offering himself and his friends up as a sounding board whenever she needed.
At first, Emma had fielded these offers from him with skepticism. That was before. Now she accepted them because that was how they had succeeded.
Garrett’s friends didn’t spring forth from the womb as titans of industry. Even Rainer and Elias, who had been raised with family money, took what they’d been given and pushed it to new heights. And they’d done it by helping each other.
Like them, she had that desire to create, to work toward something bigger than herself. Her little enterprise didn’t have to be huge, just hers.
Yes, her husband was going to provide a little seed money. But Emma was going to be smart. It was going to be a one-woman operation while she laid the foundation. Once she had things in place, she’d hire one or two others.
Both Kyle and Bethany had expressed an interest in getting on board. They both wanted to be ‘on the ground floor’ of something.
“Woman, I don’t want to be shlepping coffee to people in five years,” Bethany had told her.
The tattooed barista had been serving at De Olla café at the time. She ignored the uncomfortable looks of the customers she’d just handed coffee to. “By then they better be bringing it to me .”
Emma warned Kyle and Bethany to keep their expectations low. She didn’t intend on building the newest coffee empire. It wasn’t going to be the next Starbucks. But they could carve out a niche that could sustain and fulfill them and still leave time to have a life. To enjoy their families. Because no matter what happened, Emma would be there for Stella.
She also wanted to be there for herself. It wouldn’t be much of a life if she worked herself into the ground. Which meant she needed a solid plan. She wouldn’t rely on hopes and wishful thinking.
Emma was continuing her associate degree in business, taking classes remotely for the time being. She’d also had lunch with a few of Garrett’s friends, including the owners of Auric, who were involved in many entrepreneurial efforts, not just their security company.
Until last week, she hadn’t known Elias was a founding investor of one of those DNA ancestry sites. He’d talked to her about it and a few of his other businesses, letting her pick his brain with a patience she wouldn’t have expected from such a tough, taciturn guy.
Elias had been open and full of helpful suggestions she could apply to any fledgling business.
It had been, in some ways, easier than talking shop with Garrett. Not that she wouldn’t take her husband’s advice. But that must be the nature of marriage—it was easier to accept that kind of guidance from an impartial third party.
Garrett seemed to instinctively understand this. Or at least he pretended to, she thought with a wry grin. She knew he was dying to overload her with advice but was making a superhuman effort to restrain himself.
Instead, he offered the rare suggestion, pointing to a resource she would find helpful, then standing back to let her figure things out for herself.
Happy wife, happy life. A motto to live by.
Satisfied with her progress on the bean test, she checked a few more things off her list: research into eco-friendly pour-over filters and Scandinavian coffee cheese, Kaffeost. That sounded like the weirdest combination. But it combined two of her favorite things so she wasn’t about to write it off.
Just where did one find Scandinavian cheese in the most southern part of Southern California?
After bookmarking likely cheese shops, she began to clean up the kitchen in preparation for dinner. Stella and her mother were at the zoo with George’s father, Ephraim, who was Mariana’s neighbor on the floor below them.
Despite their age difference, Mariana and Ephraim had hit it off, becoming fast friends. Maybe because they both had daughters who had married absurdly wealthy men, who also happened to be best friends .
Ephraim was at least two decades too old to be a love interest for Mariana, which was a pity. Emma wanted her mother to find what she had. But falling for her new bestie’s father was asking for too much.
Nevertheless, the two bonded over their changed circumstances, normal people now one percent adjacent.
Ephraim was a big fan of the zoo, and San Diego had the best one as far as he was concerned. He had an annual pass and had suggested taking Stella on a special backstage tour that allowed them to feed the giraffes, which were her favorite animal.
Stella had been thrilled. So had Mariana because Ephraim had purposefully made it a grandparent thing, leaving Emma and George out of the invite so they could get some work done.
Emma planned on having Stella’s favorite dinner on the table when they got home—chicken fingers and buttered pasta. It was a dish simple enough for her poor cooking skills, leaving Chef Mohammed free to take orders from the other building residents.
Garrett was going to be bringing their favorite sushi home for dinner, a feast large enough for all the adults, save for Ephraim, who didn’t eat anything raw.
She had just taken the chicken fingers out of the freezer when the front door opened and closed. It was still too early for her mother and Stella to return. But Garrett was in the habit of rushing home unexpectedly if he got a spare hour or two at work, especially when he knew Stella would be busy with her grandmother.
Emma poked her head out of the kitchen, expecting to see him. But the living room and bar area were empty.
Rustling noises came from down the hall. But they weren’t coming from the bedroom.
“Did you forget some—” Emma stopped short in the office. The man rifling through the desk drawers wasn’t Garrett.
“Fletcher,” she said weakly when Garrett’s partner looked up, dismay in the deep lines of his face.
“Oh, hi, Emma,” he said, shifting to hide a box behind him.
Only a corner of it was visible, but the bit she could see was distinctive. It was that FedEx box that had arrived from Colorado this morning, the one from Sheriff Warner.
She rested a hand on the doorjamb. “What are you doing with that?”
Fletcher’s sudden smile was all wrong.
“This?” He moved his arm, holding the box out in front of him. “It’s nothing. Just some contracts Garrett asked me to pick up.”
“No, sorry. That’s the wrong box,” she told him. “That’s not work-related.”
The smile dropped off his face. “Oh, I know that ,” he said, scoffing. “The contracts are already in my briefcase.”
He knelt behind the desk and lifted a matte black attaché case. It looked like the kind used to store portable nuclear weapons.
“Legal needs these contracts today,” he continued, stuffing the FedEx package inside. “I’m taking the box to work as well because Ian is going to swing by to pick it up.”
She frowned. “I thought Elias said he was going to handle it.”
That’s what her husband had told her earlier.
Fletcher’s eye twitched. “No, that’s wrong. Ian handles logistics.”
“But–”
“It’s Ian ,” he snapped, his face hardening. “Ian does all the tech stuff.”
Emma’s lips parted, all the blood leaving her extremities, street racing to her heart which began to pound out of control.
When Auric was brand new, Ian was in charge of their technical division. But he had long since turned things over to Toya Almari, a security specialist who could make computer code sing and dance like a badass black pied piper.
But Fletcher wasn’t friends with the Auric men. They were polite to him, but not enough to make him privy to the inner workings of their company.
Toya didn’t like parties, preferring smaller, more intimate gatherings. The only reason Emma had met her was because she’d been to dinner at Elias’ house .
Contradicting Fletcher at this point would have been incredibly stupid. She pasted a smile on her face.
“Okay. My mistake,” she said, grateful that her voice was even. “I’ll just leave you to it.”
Emma had taken two steps back when Fletcher swore and hung his head. When he looked up, the wrongness in his eyes had grown, the black eating at his icy-blue irises like an oil spill in the arctic.
She needed to get the hell out of here . Now.