Chapter 4 Casper the Friendly Ghost #2
“Morning,” I say slowly. “Did we open a nightclub while I was gone?”
She laughs nervously. “Influencer casting for the Fulton project, sir. Tech said they got approval before you left.”
Of course they did.
“Two weeks on planes and this is what happens,” I say under my breath, heading for the elevators. “I leave to close three clients and come back to South Beach.”
That’s our split in practice: I’m the one racking up miles and handshakes; Kelley’s the one who’s supposed to keep home base from spontaneously combusting while I’m gone. Supposed to.
The doors are almost closed when a manicured hand wedges between them. They slide back open to reveal Rebecca.
Of course.
“James,” she says brightly, stepping in. The elevator fills with the clean bite of her perfume. “I didn’t know you were back.”
Lie. She definitely knew.
“Red-eye last night,” I say. “Trying to pretend I sleep.”
She laughs a little too eagerly. “Well, welcome home. We missed you.”
I arch a brow. “Did you?”
“Peterson did,” she amends, smiling. “And the interns. And Tech. And… Creative. Things get a little wild when you’re not here to growl at everyone.”
There it is.
I lean against the back rail. “If grown adults can’t handle two weeks without Daddy in the office, that’s a separate problem.”
Her gaze flicks over my open collar, lingers half a beat too long. “Some people just respond better when you’re in the room.”
I ignore the bait with a polite half-smile. “Then they’re going to have to learn to respond to my calendar invites.”
The elevator dings for the creative floor. She hesitates.
“I’ll see you in the Peterson sync,” she says, fingertips brushing my forearm as she passes. “I pulled the latest numbers for you.”
“Thanks, Rebecca.”
She walks out, hips a little extra for the hallway. I scrub a hand over my jaw.
When I’m in town, people pretend they know what they’re doing. When I leave, they start booking bootleg castings and losing six-figure accounts. And apparently Rebecca thinks my presence is the missing KPI.
First stop is the team meeting.
Forty minutes in and it’s clear: the second I boarded a plane, everyone forgot how to work. Creative is blaming Tech. Tech is blaming Accounts. Accounts is blaming “scope drift” and “client confusion.” I’m five minutes away from flipping the table.
Kelley sits across from me, long legs stretched out, half-listening, half-texting under the table.
People look at him and see “rich white boy with amazing hair” and an deep trust fund.
He’s got that is he mixed or is he just tan?
face that makes strangers comfortable assuming whiteness.
They’re half right about the money. The rest of it?
If they knew his dad, they’d hear Kobi in the way he speaks and how deep mocha his skin is. You'd flip your opinion immediately.
It helps that his family’s money is quietly tied up in this place. The Whitmore – Wilde capital came in early, when JWM was just a deck and two idiots with matching egos. People forget he actually works; they assume he’s just the board’s favorite bad idea.
“Kill me,” flashes on my screen. I don’t disagree.
“Okay,” I cut in finally, voice slicing through the noise. “Enough.”
Heads snap toward me. Rebecca straightens in her chair, angling her body in my direction like I’m a spotlight.
“We are not a daycare,” I say. “We are an agency. Our job is to make clients happy and make money doing it. If the Peterson account falls apart every time I leave town, that means we don’t have a system. It means you’re relying on me being physically in the building, and that’s not sustainable.”
A murmur moves around the table. Rebecca jumps in.
“I agree with James,” she says quickly. “We need stricter protocols when leadership is traveling. I can help formalize that for Client Services, if you want.”
Smooth. Always volunteering herself as the solution that sits next to me.
Before I answer, Kelley leans forward, putting the stress ball he stole from my office down on the table like a paperweight. Co-CEO mode, engaged.
“Protocols, yes,” he says. “But this is bigger than travel. We’re running a national portfolio from one city. Peterson’s on the East Coast, half our new business is West Coast, and everyone’s tripping over time zones and approvals.”
He glances at me, then back at the room.
“If every fire needs August in the building to put it out, that’s a structural problem. Not just a feelings problem. We have to assume he’s on a plane half the time. That’s literally his job.”
I can feel half the table flinch at structural. Good.
“Exactly,” I say. “Here’s what’s happening next.
Rebecca, you’ll partner with us on Peterson.
Kelley will map out the cross-team workflow; I’ll handle client expectations and approvals.
We’ll bring you a structure that doesn’t fall apart the second my boarding pass prints. Then it’s on you to run it.”
That’s our rhythm when we’re on our shit: he sketches the machine, I sell it and make sure it doesn’t shake itself apart.
Kelley gives me a little salute he thinks I don’t see. Rebecca smiles like she’s just been handed front row tickets to my life.
By the time we break, the room looks properly chastened. I’m not thrilled, but at least everyone has homework.
In the hallway, Rebecca falls into step beside me.
“Hey,” she says lightly. “If you want to do a smaller working session later, just you and me, I can—”
“I’ll have Sadie set something up with the entire team,” I cut in. “Appreciate you flagging the gap.”
There’s a split second where I see the flicker of annoyance, then the smile snaps back on. “Of course.”
I duck into the elevator before she can latch onto anything else. Up to my floor, back into my own air. My office smells like coffee and lemon oil polish, familiar and clean. Floor-to-ceiling windows frame the skyline; the lake glints in the distance.
My hand goes to my pocket. I check my phone.
Still nothing.
That stupid, hollow little kick under my ribs hits again. Annoying.
Pathetic.
Fuck it. One more.
Me: Okay, so maybe you don't need help with a shelf right now. But what about a picture? Do you need any images hung?
Send. Phone face-down.
“Since when do you do double texts, lover boy?” I mutter, dropping into my chair.
I try to bury myself in email. Peterson. West coast. Legal. A flagged thread about that influencer casting downstairs that definitely wasn’t on any calendar I signed off on.
There’s a knock at my door.
“Come in,” I call.
Sadie appears, red cat-eye glasses perched like a warning label. Rebecca hovers just behind her in the doorway, pretending she just happened to be walking by.
“August,” Sadie says, the only other person in this office to not call me by my surname, “your eleven is in the conference room. Also, Rebecca wanted to confirm if you’d seen the revised agenda she sent over for the client dinner.”
Rebecca leans into the sightline, smile dialed up. “If you’d rather, I can come in and walk you through the changes now.”
“I saw it,” I lie smoothly. “Looks good. We can touch on it after Byron.”
A tiny crack in her smile, then: “Perfect. I’ll be around.” She disappears, heels clicking down the hall.
Sadie’s eyes follow her, then cut back to me. She doesn’t say anything, but her face says yikes.
I ignore that too. “Patch Byron through in here?”
“Line two in two,” she says, and attempts to close the door.
Kelley doesn’t bother knocking. He slides in sideways as it closes and drops into the chair opposite mine, grabbing the stress ball I took after the meeting off my shelf.
“Uh, what the fuck was that?” he asks.
“You’ll have to be more specific,” I say. “You ask a lot of stupid questions.”
“In there,” he says, jerking his chin toward the bullpen. “You turned into everybody’s disappointed dad in under ten minutes. And Rebecca is about one bullet point away from writing ‘Mrs. Augustus James’ in her notebook.”
“That’s your fault. The office seems to fall apart the second I leave town,” I say.
“If they can’t function without me physically breathing in the building, that’s a management problem.
And Rebecca can keep all that—blonde hair and ambition—to herself.
She’s excellent at her job. I’ll give her that.
But that kind of hunger for proximity to power?
That’s a liability I’m not entertaining. ”
He squeezes the stress ball, watching me. “Or,” he says slowly, “it’s a signal we’ve outgrown one office. Too many people fighting for proximity to power.”
I give him a look.
“Not this again.”
“Yes, this again.” He leans forward, elbows on his knees.
Co-CEO hat still on. “We’re juggling New York, Atlanta, LA, Seattle, Austin.
Our ‘Chicago or bust’ model made sense when it was ten of us in a borrowed WeWork.
Now? Half our talent is flying in or Zooming in.
We’re bleeding time on travel and approvals. ”
“We’re not ‘bleeding’ anything,” I counter. “We’re profitable as hell. Our margins are healthy. We reinvest in people and tools instead of shiny addresses on both coasts. That’s the point.”
He smirks. “You know what else is a tool? A second office. LA makes sense, Aug. Half of our entertainment and tech prospects are there already. We plant a flag, we pull better talent, we stop asking juniors to take six a.m. calls from their kitchens.”
“LA is vanity,” I say. “You want palm trees and an excuse to eat by the beach three times a week.”
“First of all, don’t threaten me with a good time.” He rolls the stress ball in his palm. “Second, the Whitmore board threw more money at my dad’s team when they moved the front office to Manhattan because they understood optics. Sometimes presence is strategy.”
Of course he brings up the board. Of course he can. His family’s name is stitched into the silent investor line on our cap table; that safety net is baked into his DNA.
“You have a different tolerance for risk,” I say. “You grew up with a safety net. If a bet goes sideways, your last name catches you. I had a futon that wanted me dead. I’m not gambling our people’s jobs because LA looks good on a pitch deck.”
He studies me, lips pressed together. “You think I don’t care about our people?”
“I think you treat money like air,” I say, not unkindly.
“Necessary, everywhere, replaceable. I remember counting singles with my mom at the kitchen table to see what bill we could pay that week. So yeah, I’m conservative.
I’d rather add two more strategists and bump salaries than sign a lease on a glass box in West Hollywood. ”
Kelley blows out a breath, tipping his head back. “We can do both,” he says. “You know that, right? We’re not broke. We’re not scrappy anymore. Money sitting still is dead weight.”
He’s older now, less likely to shit where he eats, but the reputation lingers: the bad boy in Prada who used to blur every line he could reach and somehow come out of it with a headline and a pat on the head.
I rub a thumb along the seam of the football he abandoned in my chair last month. He’s not wrong about the numbers. He’s just not the one who wakes up at three in the morning thinking about payroll and health insurance and how many people are trusting us not to fuck this up.
That’s our balance: he throws the match, I build the fire pit so we don’t burn the block down.
“Put the plan together,” I say finally. “Real numbers. Space, staffing, clients we can actually land, not just vibes. You know the drill: you pitch, I poke holes. If it still stands, we move.”
A slow grin spreads across his face. “So that’s a maybe.”
“It’s a don’t make me regret giving you oxygen in my office,” I say.
He laughs, low and satisfied, leaning back in the chair across from my desk like he owns stock in the place.
“You good?” he asks. “For real. Not that I don’t have feelings bullshit.”
“Peachy.”
“You look like a guy who hasn’t slept…” He twists the cap off the green bottle he brought with him, taking a slow sip before setting it down on my desk. “…and definitely hasn’t gotten laid.”
I don’t answer.
Down the hall, someone laughs too loud. A door shuts. The low hum of the city bleeds through the floor-to-ceiling windows, muted but constant.
Kelley’s eyes narrow, clocking the way my thumb twitches toward the phone.
“Woman problems,” he guesses.
“I’ve got ninety-nine others on my plate,” I reply.
He grins, victorious. “You’re gonna send yourself to an early grave if you don’t bust a nut soon. It’ll solve the other ninety-nine. I promise.”
I open my mouth to fire back—
—and the red light on the phone starts blinking.
The background noise fades as the familiar instinct kicks in.
Time to work.
I hit speaker, sliding into the version of myself clients pay for: smooth, steady, already two steps ahead.
“Byron,” I say, voice easy. “How’s it going?”
“It’s going,” he answers, the faint echo of a conference room bouncing through the speaker. “I hear you just got back from New York. Trip was successful, I hope?”
I lean back in the booth, the leather creaking softly under my shoulder blades.
“Business is business,” I say with a practiced laugh. “And speaking of—is now still a good time to talk about that offer letter we sent over?”
As he launches into his answer, the familiar buzz kicks in.
Deals. Strategy. The dance I know best.
The music pulses behind us. A breeze rolls off the lake, carrying laughter and the smell of grilled meat from somewhere down the block.
Somewhere under all of it, a small, stubborn part of my brain is still waiting for my phone to light up with a single line from an unknown number saved as a stupid little ghost.
It’s been two days. This is embarrassing.