Loose Cannon

Chapter 4

The voice memo from Wren is six minutes long. For a Saturday morning at eleven, it’s a lot to take.

I listen on speaker with Arson snuggling possessively on my chest. It opens, like all Wren's voice memos do, with the words okay so, delivered while breathlessly doing something else. Usually she’s walking, but there was one time when I was almost certain she was having s*x.

okay so, says Wren's voice memo, you are not going to believe what river did.

In all my years of co-dating Wren's boyfriends, I have never once been surprised by their actions. River, for instance, does things with alarming frequency: he forgets whose turn it was to buy oat milk, he makes a comment about her work in front of his friends, he plays a set at a warehouse party until 4 a.m. and then wakes her up to talk about it. Wren is processing all this in a six-minute speed-memo. And I am listening diligently, because she is the love of my life.

She pivots to a story about a guy at the tattoo shop who keeps stealing her tracing paper. She pivots again to wonder if she actually likes the Wicked soundtrack anymore. She does not ask me about yesterday.

The voice memo ends with: anyway. brunch tmrw. i'm not asking, i'm telling.

She’s going to make me talk about it, in a booth eating eggs, like a civilized person.

I text back: fine. tom's. eleven.

She sends a heart.

Tom's on Washington has been around since before we were born, and it’s been our go-to meeting place since college. Wren is in the back booth wearing an enormous denim jacket and a t-shirt that used to be mine. She has already ordered.

"Egg sandwich," she announces as I sit down. "I told them no tomato."

"I love you."

"Mm-hm."

Wren doctors her coffee like someone who’s knows that Tom’s half-and-half is a gamble. After our food arrives, she says "Tell me everything."

I tell her almost everything.

I tell her about Tank and about saying the word billable in a voice so snotty it needed a Kleenex. I tell her the meeting ended with him walking out on me. But I do not tell her about the fire escape. Or about him standing on the railing, counting his breathing. I feel like if I don’t tell it, then it won’t be a thing.

When I’m done, she sets down her fork.

"Babe."

I roll my eyes.

"Nora." She hits me with the censorious eyes, her most lethal weapon.

"I know what you're going to say.” I’m already leaning in on myself, hunched over my coffee cup.

"You went after him."

I shrug and look away.

"You know you went after him."

I release the sigh of the long-suffering. "Okay," I say.

"Okay what?"

"Okay. I went after him."

"There it is."

"It wasn't about the timesheet."

"There you go, baby."

"Could you not baby me about my interpersonal failures over brunch?"

"I'll baby you about your interpersonal failures any time I want," she snipes back with a grin.

She drinks her coffee and doesn’t push further. That’s the thing with Wren-she’ll tell you the truth and then stop. She doesn’t need a performance or a thank-you. She tells you the thing, and that’s the end of it.

Her phone buzzes and I see the name river on the screen. Her face does that thing it does, a little half-second flicker only I would notice. She picks up the phone and turns it face-down.

"All good?" I ask.

"Yeah."

"Wren?"

"Yeah, no, it's fine."

I do not push. She did not push. This is the deal we’ve had for over a decade.

"Eat your eggs," she says.

I eat my eggs.

Monday morning at ten o’clock, Joel sends out a calendar invite titled Quick All-Hands. It has no party-popper emojis.

Tomi appears around the wall that separates our desks.

"It could be anything.” Her upper lip is stiff.

"It could be a layoff," I whisper. My chest feels hollow.

"It could be a layoff. Or it could be nothing."

I want to tell her they don’t call an All-Hands for nothing, but I bite my lip instead.

We file into Beast at 10:00. Adam is sitting along the back wall in the chair that no one uses, with his Stanley cup on his knee and his laptop closed in his lap. He looks like a man who already knows what is about to happen in this room. When I walk in, he doesn’t look up.

Mira and Joel come in last. Mira is wearing a new blazer. Joel is wearing the Patagonia vest. Mira is the one who speaks.

"Hi, team. Thanks for coming in on such short notice. We have some good news."

The room audibly exhales.

"WellNest came to us on Friday."

Tomi makes a small choking sound.

WellNest is a direct-to-consumer mental health brand that has become what Joel would call fire. Their therapy app is on a billboard in Times Square this month. Their supplements use the tag YOU'RE FINE, AND ALSO, in a custom font I want to marry. Their journal, according to Wirecutter, gently judges you. They are a huge get.

"They want a full brand campaign," Mira says. "TV, OOH, social, the works. Pitch is in six weeks."

A heavy pause blankets the room. For a campaign this size, six weeks is insane.

"Yes," Mira says to the silence. "We know it’s a big ask. They know it, too. Their CMO wants to move fast, and we think this team can do it."

She looks around the room and lands on me.

"Nora, we want you on this as lead copywriter."

I order my face to stay sober and professional, but I’m pretty sure it looks derpy as hell.

"And," Joel says, "Adam is going to be running the pitch process. Timeline, deliverables, the entire production. He's going to make sure we don't make this hard for ourselves."

I look at Adam.

Adam looks at his Stanley cup.

"Kickoff at one," Joel says. "Beast. Bring snacks."

The kitchen is the size of a small closet, and Adam Whitlock is in it.

I am watching the back of Adam Whitlock's neck while he puts creamer in his coffee. He hasn’t seen me yet.

I could leave.

I don’t, though, because that would mean I cannot be in the kitchen when he’s in it. I am a grown-ass woman. I am a professional. I will get a drink whenever and wherever I damn well please.

I cross to the refrigerator and aggressively swing the door open. Glass jars and bottles sway noisily. I grab my probiotic drink, carefully keeping a healthy distance between me and Adam’s elbow.

He throws his straw-stirrer in the trash and turns to me. He has his Stanley cup in one hand and a small ceramic coffee cup in the other. He looks at me for one full beat.

"Nora."

"Adam."

"Excited to work on this with you."

He uses no inflection or warmth in his words-but no hostility, either. It’s the tone of a man delivering a line he has rehearsed.

I match his inflection because I’m a coward who has decided we’re handling Friday by not handling Friday.

"Likewise," I say.

He moves to leave the kitchen. With his back to me, he says: "Have a good rest of your morning, Nora." And then he’s gone.

I leave the kitchen, forgetting my probiotic drink on the counter. When I get back to my desk, I grab my Bob’s Burger’s calendar off the wall and circle the box for December 20th.

Six weeks.

It’s one o’clock, and the WellNest team has assembled: me, Tomi, Priya from accounts, our senior designer Priya (whom we Big Priya, with her consent), a junior designer named Cole, and our strategist Mae. Adam is at the head of the table.

He’s brought a giant org chart that I find deeply triggering.

"Hi, everyone. Thanks for being here. I'm going to walk us through the working calendar, then we'll hand it over to Mae for a look at the competitive landscape, and then we can open up a working session for the rest of the afternoon."

"Behave," Tomi mouths at me.

I don’t react.

Adam walks us through the calendar, riffing hard on the project management jargon. Mae’s taking notes, and Cole is leaning forward like he has Opinions he’s prepared to deliver whether we ask him to or not.

Mae takes over with the competitive landscape-Calm, BetterHelp, Headspace, Talkspace. She breaks the entire thing down in eight minutes. She is the adult in the room.

"Okay," Adam says. "Open floor. What's our angle?"

I don’t say anything either, but I do write the word unembarrasing in my notebook.

"Nora," Adam says. It’s the first time he’s said my name in this meeting. “What are you thinking?”

I look at the room. Tomi looks at me and dips her chin, which is Tomi-speak for get it, b***h. I touch the word I’ve written in my notebook.

"I think," I say slowly, "that WellNest doesn't want to be a wellness brand."

Cole immediately opens his mouth to speak.

"Hold up, Cole," Mae says, still scribbling in her notebook.

He sits back with a huff.

"Wellness," I say, "is what you lean on when something is already broken. It's the candle you light after the week from hell. It's the green juice you drink on Monday after a weekend of partying. It's damage-control. WellNest, I think, should be the thing you do before. Attainable. Regular. The unflashy rhythm of living."

I take a breath. I’m talking with my hands like I do when I’m selling a pitch, "It's not yoga. It's flossing."

The room’s quiet.

"It's flossing," I say again. Don’t they get it? "It's the thing you do every day that you don't mention to anyone. The thing nobody compliments you for. It's the thing you do because you like yourself enough to do it. It's not a practice or a journey or a moment. It's…flossing."

"That’s good," says Priya.

Mae nods. Once.

Cole glances at Mae to see if he’s allowed to speak, then glances back down at the table.

I look, for the first time, at Adam.

Adam’s looking back at me.

He’s looking at me like he has something to say, but he’s choosing not to. He looks for half a second longer than is professional.

He says: "Let's keep going."

The meeting goes for two more hours. By the end, Cole looks wrung-out. Priya will be handling the timeline. Big Priya has a mood board assignment. I have the next forty-eight hours to draft a one-pager on my unembarrassing thesis.

We file out at three thirty, but I file right back in because I left my notebook on the chair. (I’m incapable of leaving a room with all the things I came with).

The whiteboard at the front of the room has the words our group landed on as core themes — daily, regular, small, unflashy, honest. I don’t remember writing them, so I assume Mae did when I was overexplaining my pitch.

At the top of the list, in handwriting block, capitol, not-Mae handwriting, is the word UNEMBARRASSING.

Adam left the room ten minutes ago. But on his way out, he wrote down the word I said.

Huh.

Believe it or not, I do not take a picture. Nor do I tell Tomi or Wren. I do, however, make a pass by Adam’s office. He’s on the phone again, but he’s not laughing this time. He’s saying mm-hm and I understand and no, I'll call her back tonight. His shoulders are doing the clenched thing they do.

I leave the office at three forty-five.

On the train home, I lean back, closed my eyes, and wish to be unembarrased.