Chapter Fifteen
Fifteen
It’s like we’ve crossed the threshold of another dimension when we step out of the bakery and into the bright morning sun.
The city is waking up around us now, the area a chorus of balls bouncing and children laughing, the hum of people out enjoying the weekend.
The whole morning has taken on a surreal quality, like I was living my life when I walked into the bakery and living someone else’s by the time I walked out of it.
The rules at Krumes were absolute: strictly one box per customer.
As per the conditions of our wager, I buy a box of cookies that will be saved for our team meeting tomorrow. Connor’s box is for eating today.
He points me toward a stoop across the street, and we dodge traffic as we wander toward it, settling down with our two cookie boxes keeping a respectable distance between us.
“Well, Annie,” Connor asks me, “are you ready to be changed forever?”
“I’m not sure,” I say, peering inside the box as soon as he tips open the lid. “They do look good. But they also just look like cookies.”
“We’ll check back on that opinion in five,” he says.
Not sure if I mentioned, but these cookies are enormous.
Famously almost half a pound of dough goes into each one.
They look more like mini hamburgers than your garden-variety cookie.
Every inch of space is covered in something, like chocolate chips, or cookie crumbs.
I’m certain if you tried to eat a whole cookie in one sitting you’d die.
We agree that for the purposes of taste testing, we’ll break each cookie into quarters and sample them all one piece at a time.
“What do you want to start with?” Connor asks me.
“Which flavors were the guys fighting over?”
Connor points into the box. “That one is white chocolate, Martin’s favorite. And the one with the pistachio bits is Ben’s favorite.”
“Let’s go with white chocolate,” I decide.
Connor breaks a piece off for each of us, then holds his up and gives me a jaunty cheers before popping it in his mouth. I do the same.
It only takes a single bite to understand what the fuss is about. “I think I get it now,” I say between bites.
“Worth giving up your Sunday morning for?”
“One hundred percent,” I say. “Though whether it will be worth ever giving up a second Sunday for is another question.”
I decide we need to try more flavors before we can make a full assessment. We agree to keep eating until one, or both, of us feels sick.
Connor hands me a napkin. “OK, what’s next?”
“Pistachio, one hundred percent,” I tell him. “It’s time to try the flavor that got me into this mess.”
He laughs, breaking off a piece of pistachio and handing it to me.
It only takes a single mouthful to convince me. That might be the best cookie I’ve ever had in my life.
“Oh my god,” I say with a whimper. “I am one hundred percent team Ben. White chocolate has been completely forgotten.”
“I always forget how good these are,” he agrees. “They look so intense but they’re really not that sweet.”
He pulls his phone out of his pocket, snapping a picture of the box between us. Texting it to the group chat, he informs me.
“You guys have a group chat?”
“Of course,” he says, like this is the most obvious thing in the world.
“Wow, thanks for the invite,” I say.
“No girls allowed.”
“What do you guys talk about?”
“You, mostly.”
I level him a look. “Very funny.”
He doesn’t say anything. Just ducks his head and smiles to himself.
“Did you know all the guys before working here, or just Ben?”
“Just Ben. Naomi poached John from Google. Marty was originally in Engineering but moved across to our team a few years ago.”
“Is Ben your bestie?”
“Kinda,” Connor says.
“Just at work, or out of work too?”
“Is there a difference?”
I shrug. “Sometimes.”
“Both, then, I guess. We were roommates in college. We’ve always worked together.”
“Sometimes I don’t think Ben likes me that much,” I admit.
“It feels like he’s always got his eye on me.
” Sometimes I get the niggling sense—usually, honestly, when I’m flirting with Connor—that he doesn’t approve.
But I’m never quite sure if his objections, if you can even call them that, are personal or professional.
“He does, for the record,” Connor says.
“How do you know? Has he told you?”
“Yes,” Connor says. “Multiple times.”
“That’s a lie.”
“I promise you it isn’t,” Connor says, then sighs. “You know Ben resigned the morning of the layoffs?”
“For real?”
“Yeah,” Connor says. He seems weary, somehow.
Like even talking about this is exhausting for him.
“He’d been threatening to do it for a while, but he still kind of blindsided me with it.
Our team has been understaffed for a long time.
And as you know yourself, our remit is kind of all over the place, even more so since Naomi’s been gone.
When the layoffs happened, and it was clear we weren’t going to get anyone to help us, Ben decided he was done with all of it. He wants to do other things.”
“Whoa.”
“But then you turned up,” he continues. “And I at least had a temporary solution. It was clear you’d be an enormous pain in the ass but also a really effective project manager.
I begged Ben not to quit, to just stick it out a little longer.
If things didn’t get better after you joined the team, then he could leave.
And as you will notice, he is still here. ”
“Oh,” I say, trying to reorganize my memories in light of this new information.
“If you’re getting a vibe off Ben, I promise it’s not because of you. It’s because of me. He’s just waiting to see what happens. Next cookie?”
We decide on a classic: chocolate chip.
“Can I ask you something else?” I say around a mouthful of cookie.
“I have a feeling you will either way,” he comments.
“How did you end up as acting department head? It just feels like…you hate it.”
“Well, Annabelle, when two people love each other very much—”
“Yes, thank you,” I say dryly. “I understand the concept of maternity leave. I mean why didn’t they hire someone to do it?”
“Naomi’s idea of a sick joke, I guess. She wanted me to push myself and go for a management role. She thought I’d like it,” he adds.
“Do you?”
“No,” he says, sighing deeply. “What’s there to like? I spend all day in calls and meetings and taking flak from my direct reports. That’s you, by the way.”
“No idea what you’re talking about,” I say. “You were one of the early people in at Taskio, weren’t you?”
“Employee number five.”
“Wow. So like, early early.”
“Yes.”
“Like ‘Taskio is my religion’ early.”
“We like to think of it as more like a family.”
“The best cults always do.”
I mull over how to ask him my next question. “I guess I’m just curious about what you like so much,” I say eventually. “Or is it just that you have equity and can’t leave?”
Connor shifts forward, resting his elbows on his knees and rubbing at his eyes with the heels of his hands, like he’s trying to scrub away whatever thoughts are behind them.
“I know you probably won’t believe this,” he says, “since everyone from Jotter hates Taskio. But it used to be different here. It was genuinely exciting, back in the early days, what we were doing.”
“I get that.”
“Maybe five years ago now, the leadership team decided to pivot and start aggressively going after enterprise clients.”
“And you disagreed?”
“No,” he says, surprised at my question.
“It made way more sense for us to get off the hamster wheel of funding rounds and try and turn a profit. As soon as we won a couple of those big enterprise contracts, everything got easier. But it also changed the vibe a lot. We had big clients and we had to service them. We weren’t some scrappy little startup anymore. ”
“You weren’t Jotter, essentially.”
“Before you start your sermon, just a reminder that Jotter sold out too. Literally. To Taskio.”
I look him over. “Hey, Connor? Want to know a big secret?”
“Yes,” he says.
“I like Taskio’s interface better than Jotter’s.”
He gasps. “Annabelle.”
“It’s true. I always thought it was better. So do a lot of people at Jotter. We just can’t admit it now because you’re our overlords.”
“Unbelievable. And after all the shit you’ve given me.”
“Someone around here needs to keep you on your toes.”
“You’re right, I’m doing such a great job of staying on top of everything otherwise.”
He says it like it’s clear he’s doing the exact opposite.
“You are,” I tell him. “Honestly.”
“Thanks,” he says. “Though I don’t believe you.”
We sit in companionable silence, watching life unfold on the street around us.
“Do you ever think about leaving?” I ask after a few minutes.
“Sometimes. Not really. And not now,” he adds.
“Why not now?”
He stands. “Shall we walk?”