5. Cora
CORA
A week after the signing, our office looked like a paper storm had swept through and given up halfway.
Mood boards covered every flat surface that wasn't currently a person, a half-eaten bagel anchored a stack of vendor invoices against the draft from the window unit, and somewhere under all of it was a conference table I hadn't actually seen in three days, though I trusted it was still there.
"Okay." Beckett stood at the head of that buried table with a seating chart the size of a windshield, color-coded in a rainbow that had clearly taken him all morning.
"I organized it by relationship dynamics instead of just families, because families sit together anyway, so why not solve for something harder. "
"Show me," I said, already regretting it.
He turned the chart around with the flourish of a man unveiling a car. It took me a full three seconds to understand what I was looking at, and another two to understand why my stomach had dropped.
"Beckett. You put the Kowalskis directly across from the Hendersons."
"Right, because they're both loud, high-energy tables, I wanted to balance the energy across the room."
"They're loud because they hate each other. The groom's aunt keyed the bride's mother's car at the engagement party. There's a restraining order, Beckett. An actual, notarized restraining order."
His face went through several stages of a man watching his own morning collapse. "The color coding didn't flag that."
"The color coding doesn't know anything. The color coding is markers."
"I cross-referenced it against the guest list twice."
"Did you cross-reference it against the notes column? It says 'court ordered, no contact' in bold red letters, which I know for a fact is a color you own, because half your chart is that exact shade of red."
He looked down at the offending column like it had personally wronged him. "I thought that was just, like, an intensity flag."
"It is an intensity flag. The intensity is a restraining order."
Someone near the printer laughed and turned it into a cough fast enough that I let it go.
Behind us, Naomi had her phone wedged between shoulder and ear, pacing a tight, furious lap around her desk while she talked, and had been climbing toward a rolling boil of narration for the last ten minutes, one none of us could tune out even if we'd wanted to.
"No, I understand the pipe burst, I'm not arguing that the pipe burst happened, I'm asking why nobody called me before they rerouted four hundred guests into a room that seats two hundred and eighty.
" There was a pause, during which her eyebrows climbed somewhere near her hairline.
"A tent. You want to put a tent. In the dead of winter. In this city."
"Fix the chart," I told Beckett, sliding it back across the table before the Kowalskis and Hendersons could start a war on paper as well as in person. "Family blocks. Boring is safe. We are not in the business of balancing energy."
"On it." He gathered the chart like it had personally betrayed him and retreated toward his desk.
"They can put up a tent," Naomi said into the phone, in the flat, deadly calm voice she used right before she won an argument, "or I can call the venue's insurance carrier and ask them how they feel about four hundred people in a structural code violation, and one of those options costs you a client relationship and the other one costs you a tarp. "
There was a pause. Something on the other end made her go very still, the kind of stillness that meant she was counting to five before she said something she couldn't take back.
"No. No, I don't think you understand what I'm offering you. I'm offering you a way out of this that doesn't end with my client suing your venue into a parking lot." Another pause followed, shorter this time. "Great. Glad we're on the same page. I'll have the amended contract to you by five."
She hung up, exhaled through her nose like a woman putting out a small fire with her own breath, and reached for her coffee without looking at it, muscle memory doing the work her hands were too tired to think through.
I loved her the way you love a person standing directly between you and a burning building.
The front door chimed, and I looked up expecting a vendor or a courier, and got my brother instead, hands jammed in his jacket pockets, doing his best impression of a man who had not come here to ask me for anything.
"Hey." Sean leaned against the door frame like he owned the building instead of just periodically needing money from the person who did. "You got a minute?"
"I've got ninety seconds and a seating chart apocalypse. What's up?"
"Rent's due. I'm short again. Work's been slow, I'll have it back to you by, I don't know, soon."
"How short this time?"
"Just the usual. Six hundred."
I was already reaching for my bag before he finished the sentence, the way I always did, the motion so automatic it barely registered as a decision anymore.
I found my checkbook, wrote the number without asking what it needed to be because I already knew what rent on his building ran, and held it out.
"Thank you. Seriously. This is the last time."
"You said that in the spring."
"This time I mean it."
"You meant it in the spring too." I said it without heat, because there wasn't any heat left in it, just the flat familiarity of a script we'd both been running for two years.
Naomi ended her call in time to catch the tail end of it, phone still warm in her hand. "I can cover half of that. I've got it sitting right there."
"I've got it."
"I know you've got it. That's not what I said. I'm saying you don't have to be the only one who does, every single time, forever."
"It's fine, Naomi." I was already tucking the checkbook back into my bag, already three thoughts past the conversation, already mentally back in the seating chart. "It's easier if it's just me. One line item instead of two people trying to remember who covered what."
"Mom doing okay?" I asked, because I always asked, and because it was easier to ask about her than to ask him why this kept happening.
"She's fine. Same as always." He said it too fast, the answer he gave whether or not it happened to be true that week.
"That's not what I asked."
"It's what you're getting." He shifted his weight toward the door, already halfway to leaving in his head. "You should come by. It's been a while."
"I will. Once things calm down here a little."
"You always say that too."
"Things are actually insane right now, Sean, look around." I gestured at the room, at Beckett rebuilding his chart from scratch, at the general condition of a business trying to survive its third year. "I'm not making it up as an excuse."
"I know." He said it gently enough that I almost believed he meant it. "You're always the one holding it together. I just wish you'd let someone hold something for you every once in a while."
"I let people help all the time."
"You let people offer. That's different from letting them help."
I didn't have an answer for that fast enough, and he seemed to know it, his mouth tilting into the small, satisfied smile of a younger sibling who'd landed a point he'd clearly been saving.
Sean pocketed the check without quite meeting my eyes, mumbled something that was probably gratitude wearing the shape of a goodbye, and let himself out. The door chimed again behind him, cheerful and completely tone deaf to the moment.
I pulled out the notebook I kept in the bottom drawer, the one with a black cover and no label on the outside because a label would have made it real in a way I preferred to keep private.
I'd started it the year I opened Walsh Events, back when I still believed a person could plan her way out of every disaster if she just wrote enough of them down in advance.
Worst Case, the first page said, in handwriting neater than anything I produced these days, and every page after it had proven the title right in some small, specific way.
Inside, tabs divided it by category: Loan, in blue, for the number my mother's signature was attached to; Vendors, in green, for the deposits I'd fronted out of pocket more than once when a client's check ran late; and Sean, in the black ink I reserved for things I didn't expect to ever fully resolve.
I flipped to his tab, added today's date and the number, and let the new total sit under the old ones without comment.
Two years of totals, written in a hand that got steadier the more practiced it became, which felt like its own small tragedy if I let myself think about it too long.
I didn't look at the sum at the bottom of the page anymore.
I'd stopped needing to. I knew it the way you know your own weight, a number you carry around whether you look at the scale or not.
"You know I'm not going anywhere, right?" Naomi said, watching me close the notebook. "If this whole thing ever actually broke you, I'd notice. You wouldn't have to ask."
"I know."
"You say that like it's a fact you read somewhere, not a thing you believe."
"I believe it." I did, mostly. Believing it and building my whole life like it wasn't true were apparently two different muscles, and I'd only ever trained one of them.
She looked like she wanted to push it further, and might have, if the front door hadn't chimed a third time, this one accompanied by an actual grunt of effort.
The courier who came through it was visible only from the knees down. Everything above that was flowers, an arrangement so large it had to turn sideways to clear the door frame, white and deep red roses spilling out of a container the approximate size and shape of a love seat.
"Delivery for Cora Walsh?"
"That's... me." I stood up slowly, the way you stand up for something you're not sure you're allowed to touch yet.
"Where do you want it?"
"Anywhere that isn't on top of a person," I said, and three separate teammates cleared desk space at a speed I had genuinely never seen them apply to actual work.
The courier set it down with visible relief, had me sign for it, and left before I'd fully processed the scale of what had just entered my office. Naomi walked a slow circle around the arrangement, whistling low.
"That is not a bouquet. That's a hostile takeover."
"It's a client. It's probably just a thank you." I said it more for the room than for myself, since the room had gone noticeably quiet, Beckett included, seating chart forgotten in his hands.
"Cora. I have worked eight years in this industry. I have received exactly one arrangement in that time that required its own delivery permit, and it was for a funeral with four hundred attendees and a genuine celebrity in the casket. This is bigger than that."
"It's not that big."
"It cleared the door sideways."
I didn't have a rebuttal for that, mostly because she was right, and because some small, traitorous part of my chest had already started doing something warm and unhelpful at the sight of it.
I found the small card tucked into the greenery, my name on the front in handwriting too clean to be the florist's, and slid it out.
I read it once, then again, standing very still in the middle of my own chaotic office while a small mountain of roses waited to see what I'd do about it.
The card read: "For the woman who ran a mob boss's afternoon without knowing it. D.Z."