19. Cora
CORA
The vendor discrepancy landed on my desk the following week disguised as the most boring problem in the world, which in hindsight should have been the first thing that worried me, since nothing that actually mattered in my life had ever announced itself as boring first.
"It's a paperwork thing," Beckett said, sliding the folder across my desk with the mild irritation of a man dealing with a filing error rather than anything worth losing sleep over.
"The vendor's registered under two different names, one on the summit contract and one on the invoice that actually got paid.
Happens more than you'd think. Somebody's assistant fat-fingered a business license number, or the company got bought out and nobody updated the paperwork. "
"That's it? Two names?"
"Two names, same everything else. Riverside Event Supply on the contract, Riverside Provisions on the invoice, same address, tax ID that's off by one digit from what I'd expect, probably just a typo somewhere upstream.
" Beckett tapped the folder twice, the way he always did when he considered a subject closed.
"I already called the number on file. Went to voicemail, which, sure, mildly annoying, but half my vendors don't answer their phones during business hours on principle.
" He shrugged, already moving on to the next item on his list, because to him this was routine, this was ordinary, this was the kind of thing that happened four times a season and got fixed with one strongly worded email.
"I'll chase down the real business license this afternoon. Not exactly breaking news."
"Should I be worried?" I asked, mostly out of habit, the question I'd started asking about everything lately without entirely meaning to.
"About a typo? No offense, but you've been weird about paperwork all week." Beckett tilted his head, studying me with the mild concern of a man who noticed things but rarely pushed on them. "Is this a Chicago thing?"
"It's a me thing. I'm being paranoid."
"You're allowed to be paranoid. You run a business that depends entirely on four hundred strangers not ruining each other's night. I just don't think this particular paranoia has a home yet." He tapped the folder one more time for good measure. "I'll have it sorted by end of day. Promise."
I wanted to feel as unbothered about it as he did.
I mostly managed it, filed the folder under things to follow up on, and moved on to the seventeen other fires currently burning across my desk, because that was the job, that was every week of my professional life, an endless rotation of minor catastrophes that all eventually resolved themselves into a functioning event.
I told myself this was exactly like every other minor catastrophe.
I told myself that more than once, which in retrospect was probably a sign I didn't fully believe it the first time.
Naomi arrived twenty minutes later in a state I can only describe as tactical distress, hair escaping its clip in three separate directions, mascara doing something asymmetrical under her left eye, and a look on her face like a woman who had personally witnessed a small, specific war.
"Don't," she said, holding up one hand before I'd even opened my mouth. "Don't ask. I need a minute before I can talk about it without my voice doing the thing."
"What thing?"
"The thing where it goes up an octave and I start crying in a professional setting. Give me a minute."
I gave her the minute. Beckett, wisely, did not.
"How was the fitting?"
Naomi closed her eyes like she was praying for strength from a god she'd recently stopped believing in.
"The bustle broke. Not a little. Not a minor thread situation a seamstress fixes with a single pin.
The entire back panel came loose while I was standing on the little platform in front of the mirror, and my dress just sort of exhaled itself onto the floor in slow motion, right as my Aunt Carol walked in from the bathroom. "
"Oh no."
"Oh, it gets so much worse. Aunt Carol has opinions about bustles.
Strong ones. She's been to a dozen weddings in the last four years, she informed everyone in the room, and she has never, not once, seen a proper bustle fail like that, which she said in a tone that very strongly implied it was somehow my fault for choosing a dress with a structurally inferior spine. "
"It is not your fault the bustle broke."
"I know that. Aunt Carol does not know that.
Aunt Carol has never known that about anything in her entire life.
" Naomi dropped into the chair across from my desk, finally starting to laugh instead of cry, the particular hysterical laugh that shows up right after a disaster stops actively happening.
"The seamstress, God bless her, an actual saint, just knelt down in the middle of all of it and started repinning the whole panel by hand while Aunt Carol narrated her own opinions about my hemline, my venue, and apparently my choice of fiancée, none of which she was asked for. "
"How's the dress now?"
"Fixed. Gorgeous. Perfect. I cried again, but the good kind that time.
" She wiped under her eye, smearing the mascara further instead of less, and looked entirely unbothered by that fact.
"The seamstress deserves a medal. Possibly a small government pension.
I asked if I could tip her directly and she just looked at me like I'd offered her a great personal insult, so I'm sending flowers instead. "
"And Aunt Carol?"
"Aunt Carol has now personally requested to give a toast at the reception, which might be a peace offering or might be a threat, I honestly cannot tell, and I've decided I'm too tired to find out before the wedding actually happens.
" Naomi pressed both hands flat against her face for a moment, breathing through it, and then dropped them, laughing again despite herself.
"My fiancée texted halfway through to ask how it went and I sent her a single photo of the bustle on the floor with no caption.
She has not responded. I respect that. There is nothing to say to that photo. "
"Anyway. That was my morning. Tell me something boring so I can recover."
"Vendor paperwork mix-up. Beckett's handling it."
"See, that's exactly the kind of boring I needed.
" She grabbed a proof sheet off my desk and started flipping through it, already three tasks ahead in her head the way she always was, the office rearranging itself around her energy the second she walked back into it, mascara still smudged, hair still escaping, entirely undefeated by any of it.
I laughed along with her, genuinely, because it was genuinely funny, and for a solid ten minutes the office felt exactly like it always had, chaotic and warm and entirely mine, phones ringing, Beckett muttering at a spreadsheet, four hundred small decisions a day that all added up to something I'd built with my own hands out of nothing but stubbornness and a business loan my mother shouldn't have signed.
It was the kind of morning I used to have before any of this, before ballrooms and folding tables and a man who moved through rooms like he already owned the exits.
That was when the draft found me.
It was not dramatic. Nothing about it announced itself the way Naomi's dress had.
I was simply sitting at my desk, half listening to Beckett read out vendor confirmations, half thinking about a summit guest list with a name on it that two different companies apparently wanted to claim, and I realized, with the kind of quiet clarity that arrives without asking permission, that I had absolutely no idea what I would actually do if that vendor confusion turned out to be something other than a paperwork error.
I did not know who to call. I did not know what the actual danger would look like if it showed up, or how fast it could move, or whether the people in this office, the people I loved, the people whose whole lives currently orbited a business built on wedding cake tastings and seating charts, would even recognize a real threat if it walked through our front door wearing something as ordinary as a delivery uniform, carrying something as ordinary as a clipboard.
Dmitri had an entire structure built to survive that kind of thing: Nik, protocols, twenty years of practice reading rooms for exits, a man in his office who could look at a folder and know within a minute whether it meant nothing or everything.
I had a color-coded notebook labeled Worst Case, a creative director who thought a broken bustle counted as the disaster of the week, and an assistant who considered a strongly worded email the appropriate response to almost any problem life presented him with.
It was not that my team was foolish. They were good at their jobs, better than good, the best I'd ever worked with, capable of solving in an afternoon what would have taken me a week alone.
It was that nothing in their jobs had ever asked them to imagine a version of danger that didn't come with a contract attached to it, a version that couldn't be smoothed over with an amended invoice or a firmly worded follow-up call.
It was not fear, exactly. It was something smaller and more humbling than that, the sudden, sinking realization that my entire professional toolkit, the notebook, the vendor contracts, the very strongly worded emails, had been carefully built to handle disasters that came with a return address, and whatever this actually was did not come with one at all.
I thought of Dmitri's study door standing open a crack in Chicago, his voice gone flat and unfamiliar on the other side of it, and understood, for the first time with my whole body instead of just my head, that the man I'd let this close kept an entire second set of rules for exactly this kind of morning, rules my office had never needed and now might.
"You okay?" Naomi asked, catching whatever had crossed my face. "You went somewhere."
"I'm fine. Just tired."
"You're doing the thing where you say fine and mean something else entirely."
"I'm allowed to have one unexamined feeling a week. It's in my contract."
She studied me a second longer, clearly not buying it, clearly deciding to let it go anyway because the office was still buzzing with a dozen other fires that needed her more urgently than my mood did. "Fine. Your one feeling. I'll allow it. But we're talking about it eventually."
"Noted."
My phone rang before I could decide whether that was a threat or a promise.
Sean's name lit up the screen, which was unusual enough on its own, since he texted more than he called and only called at all when something had actually gone wrong rather than merely needing to.
I almost let it go to voicemail out of pure habit, the same reflex that answered every one of his calls bracing for a number, an ask, an apology dressed up as an update.
This time the reflex was wrong before I'd even picked up.
"Hey. Everything okay?"
There was a pause on the other end, too long for a normal pause, the kind of silence that has weight to it before a single word gets said.
"Sean?"
I could hear him breathing on the other end, quick and shallow, and somewhere behind him a car door, or maybe just the wind, and the small hairs on my arms rose before I had a single actual fact to justify it.
Across the desk, Naomi went still too, watching my face the way she'd watched it a few minutes earlier, already reading something there before I'd said a word.
"There were guys asking about you outside my building, Cora," he said, too fast, too high, nothing at all like his usual flat, unbothered voice. "I didn't like how they asked."