Loose Cannon

Chapter2

By Wednesday, Adam has sent me eleven calendar invites.

I’ve counted. They arrived in tidy hourly batches across two days — Workflow Alignment, Process Audit: Copy, Tools & Stack: Initial Conversation, 1:1 — Adam & Nora (Intro) — each with a Google Doc agenda pre-attached, with the kind of pleasant optimism that suggests their author has never been stood up.

Our 1:1 is on Friday at 2:00. The agenda has three bullet points. The first one is Get to know each other! with an exclamation point, which I find appalling.

"He uses the word cadence," I splutter.

"Mm-hm," says Wren.

"He typed the word cadence into a calendar invite."

"Mm-hm."

"Like he's a metronome. Like we're a band."

"Babe, you’re spiraling."

I’m spiraling about a man's vocabulary on a Wednesday night in Wren's apartment, sitting cross-legged on her second-hand dumpster rug. Wren is on the couch in a t-shirt that says Panic at the Costco, painting her toenails a somewhat sloppy burgundy. Bartholomew the corn snake is doing what corn snakes do, which appears to involve sitting inside a heated rock. I’m eating cold sesame noodles from a takeout container with my fingers.

"He sent the timesheet reminder at seven a.m."

"That’s when working people send emails."

"He sent it from his phone, though. I checked the metadata."

Wren stops painting and looks at me.

"You checked the metadata."

"On sss you can —"

"Nora."

I lay my forehead against my knee. Thankfully, the sesame noodles remain upright.

"I'm having a hard week," I say into my knee.

"I know, baby."

"He saw me at my worst."

"He saw you at your Tuesday."

"He saw me at my Monday," I cry. "I haven’t been seen at my Monday by a hostile party in years."

Wren caps the nail polish, then slides off the couch and onto the rug next to me without a sound. She lays her head on my shoulder and pulls the takeout container into her lap, taking one (1) sesame noodle with her fingers in solidarity. "He's not a hostile party, you weirdo."

"He's wearing pleated chinos in my dojo."

"My Nora," she says, "he’s just a man doing his job."

I close my eyes. I met Wren in 2014 when she sat down across from me in 11th-grade pre-calc and said that's a sick scrunchie, but actually meant I have decided we are going to be friends for the rest of our lives. And she was right. When she says things like he’s just a man doing his job, she sounds like the only sane person in a building that’s on fire. For the record, she is never the sane person in any building. Wren is the person who attempts to dye her hair using beet juice. She’s the person who adopts a corn snake. Wren is the least qualified to be giving anyone perspective on anything.

And yet, she is correct about everything, always.

"He's just a man doing his job," I repeat, slowly.

"There you go."

"But he has a job were he surveils me."

"Nora. Eat the noodles."

I eat the noodles.

The thing I’m not telling Wren is that I have spent the last forty-eight hours googling Adam Whitlock like the deranged little stalker I am.

His LinkedIn is immaculate. Penn State undergrad, Wharton MBA, which he completed part-time, (like a psychopath) while working full-time at Edelman. He’s looking slightly off-camera in his headshot, smiling like a CrossFit model.

His i********: is set to private. The profile picture is a chocolate lab wearing a bandana printed with dog bones. I wonder if this is Adam Whitlock's dog or someone else’s. Maybe it’s the family dog. Maybe it’s clip art.

Nora, get a grip!

And I’m definitely not telling Wren that his Spotify, for some reason, is not private. Ergo, I have creeped all over his Spotify.

His playlists are named, in order: Mornings, Working, Driving, Running, Cooking, and — I want to be clear that I am reporting this, not judging it — For Sleep.

The man has an entire playlist titled For Sleep, and the songs on the playlist aren’t the kind of white-noise tracks that single women like me play to drown out the intrusive thoughts. The songs are real songs. Phoebe Bridgers. Bon Iver. Sufjan. This is the sleep playlist of a man who has never lain in the dark and considered moving to a different city under a new name.

I have looked at his playlist for longer than I have looked at any other playlist on Spotify this year. Wren can never know.

Thursday, I get to the office at 9:42 a.m., which is early for me. I’m early because I have decided that I’m going to win the 1:1 by sheer force of preparedness. I am going to walk into Adam Whitlock's calendar event having read the entire onboarding doc he sent. I’m going to use the word cadence in a sentence, with confidence, as if it lives comfortably in my mouth.

Tomi clocks me at the door with an iced matcha and a healthy dose of skepticism.

"You’re here before the sun."

"The sun has been up for hours, Tomi."

"You’re here before Joel."

This is actually alarming. Joel is a 7:30 a.m. man. He sends his just circling back emails from his Peloton.

"I’m preparing," I say.

"For what?”

"My one-on-one."

Tomi, who has known me since I was afraid to eat with a fork in front of men I found attractive, looks like she’s just identified a pattern.

"Nora."

"Don't."

"Nora, are you crushing —"

"I will set fire to your desk. Shut it."

She holds up her hands, which is Tomi-speak for fine, but I'm right.

"Okay, we’ll see,” She says it in a light, sing-song voice, crafted to irritate.

"Actual fire, woman. With gasoline and a rag."

"Mm-hm."

I sit down and open the onboarding doc.

The onboarding doc is forty-one pages long.

Forty-one pages, Wren. My thoughts are somehow addressed to Wren even though she’s in Bushwick, asleep.

I read three pages. They contain the words throughline, workstream, and stuck in our silos. There are flow charts. Plural. I suddenly want to die.

Change of plans. I close the doc and open Slack. I’ve decided that the way to win the 1:1 is no longer through preparedness but through psychological warfare. I’m going to send Adam Whitlock a Slack message of careful, plausibly deniable warmth. I’ll be the kind of woman who spills iced coffee on a man and moves past it like an adult.

I type:

hi! looking forward to friday :)

I look at the message. The smiley face — colon, close-paren — is a smiley face from 2014. In 2026, in this economy, it looks sloppy. Lazy. To him, I can’t be either.

I delete the smiley face.

hi! looking forward to friday

This is so much worse. This is a woman who’s being marched to her own execution. I add the salute emoji, which is the universal sign of I know this is a deeply uncool message so I’m being self-aware about it.

hi! looking forward to friday 🫡

I look at it for a long time, then send it with a punchy thumb.

I watch the seen indicator appear. Seen. Seen. Seen.

He starts typing.

Stops typing.

Starts typing.

Stops typing.

My God. He’s workshopping it.

After approximately two minutes his message arrives:

Adam Whitlock: Likewise.

That's it. Likewise.

I stare at it for a long time. Then, in a moment of extreme sanity and perspective, I screenshot it and send it to Wren.

wren: are you having fun at work right now

wren: nora

wren: nora hello

wren: nora i can SEE you typing

I’m typing because I’m defending myself. I’m also, against my will, enjoying this, and Wren, of course, can tell.

I write back: i am working. i am LITERALLY working. this is professional correspondence.

wren: he sent you a one-word slack.

wren: BABE.

I close my laptop with the care of a woman handling an unexploded grenade. Tomi, without looking up, slides her iced matcha three inches to the left in a gesture that reads I am witnessing this.

I want to hit Tomi.

I decide to reopen the onboarding doc. I read all forty-one pages of it. I take handwritten notes, in my notebook, on the page after the page where I scribbled over the word DAMN. The notes are good. I note that the briefing flow chart has redundancies. I note that the proposed timesheet system is more granular than necessary for a creative agency of our size. I note that the kickoff template he's drafted is better than what Joel uses, which is an unformatted Google Doc with the words PROJECT NAME??? at the top.

By the time I look up, it is 4:30 p.m. The sun, through the warehouse window, is doing the thing it does in November, the gold-on-brick thing that makes Dumbo look like a place where someone could fall in love. Tomi has gone to a meeting. Across the office, in the glass-walled corner that has been designated Adam's office, Adam Whitlock is on the phone.

He’s laughing.

He’s laughing with his whole face, with his shoulders down, with one hand running through his hair so that it’s no longer behaving. Whoever he’s talking to has said something funny enough that Adam Whitlock has forgotten where he is.

I cannot hear the call, but I can see his mouth. I can see him say, very clearly, the words no, no, you didn't.

He is talking to someone he loves.

It is a disorienting feeling, watching a man you’ve decided to dislike laugh on the phone with a person he loves. That he has a family. That somebody calls him in the middle of the day at his new job and tells him a story funny enough to shake his shoulders.

I look back at my screen. I’m not breathing in the way I normally breathe.

I write, in the margin of my notebook, the words: He has a sister.

I don’t know if it’s true, but for some reason, I want it to be true.

That night, in bed, with Arson on my chest in his usual configuration of fat f*****g loaf, I look at the For Sleep playlist again.

It has been updated. A song was added at 6:14 p.m. tonight. The song is Pink Moon, by Nick Drake.

“What the...?” I whisper.

I’ve listened to Pink Moon over a thousand times in my life. I listened to it in my mother's kitchen, at age nine, watching her brown ground beef. I listened to it in a parked car with my first boyfriend, the day I turned sixteen. I’ve listened to it on every device I have ever owned, in every apartment I have ever rented, in every iteration of myself I have ever been.

I lie in the dark. For tonight, the song is absolutely off-limits. Tonight it belongs to someone else. I will not be the woman who lies in the dark and listens to a song because a man she barely knows has put it in the same category as I have.

I am not that woman.

I do, however, lie awake for a long time. The radiator in the corner makes its little Brooklyn-radiator sound, the sound my mother would have hated because she hated old radiators on principle. Somewhere inside my chest, the part of me that I usually don’t let speak — the part of me that is forever seventeen — sits up and listens.

But I still don’t let it speak.

I close my eyes and picture a chocolate lab in a bandana.

I fall asleep.