Page 56 of Spearcrest Queen

She turns, gesturing for me to follow as she moves further into the office. The man with the coffee falls in beside her. Despite his age—he looks to be in his mid-fifties—there’s a liveliness to him, a weird energetic spring in his step. He takes a seat at a desk that’s absolutely cluttered with books.

“Patrick Calloway, our Marketing Director,” Inés says over her shoulder. “Patch is the reason anyone outside of an Ivy League faculty lounge has heard of our books.”

“I do what I can with what I have,” Patch says, nodding with exaggerated humility. “Which is not a lot.”

“I know,” I say. “I’ve looked at the numbers.”

I didn’t so muchlookat the numbers as spend the entire weekend poring over them, doing my best to wrap my head around the information I was given. I even called Adele to help me, and we ended up working on a massive shared document.

Maybe I needn’t have bothered: Patch is right. The biggest problem is that nobody’s buying academic books, and since there’s barely any money coming in, there’s barely any money going to marketing, which means even fewer books are being sold, which, in short, leads back to what my dad had so simply put as:failing.

Inés doesn’t slow as she moves from one side of the office to the other, gesturing at desks as we pass them by.

“Mina Chaudhury, one of our junior editors,” she says, indicating a young woman sitting cross-legged on her chair, a red pen tucked behind her ear and an annotated manuscript spread across herlap.

She’s the youngest person in the office so far, which is to say, she looks to be in her late twenties, with dip-dyed hair and smooth brown skin. She looks up when I walk past, sinking back into her chair.

“Whoa,” she says. “That’sthe heir?” She hauls herself up to look at Patch over the towers of books and papers separating them. “You owe me fifty bucks.” And then she points at me with her pen. “Let it never be said I didn’t have faith in you.”

Another man’s head pops up from behind a desk. I hadn’t even noticed him because he’s crouching by a cardboard box full of books, one arm still inside.

“Faith?” he says in a thick Brooklyn accent. “You said he was gonna turn up just to pin Inkspill to the floor while it’s being put out of its misery.”

Mina shrugs at me.

“No offence,” she says without much feeling. And she follows that up with an appraising look. “Didn’t expect you to look so…” She trails off, twirling her pen in the air like she’s trying to catch the right word.

“Lost and confused?” Patch offers.

“Unreasonably well-dressed,” Mina counters.

I stare down at myself. This time, I didn’t make the mistake of wearing anything that might draw too much notice: no watch, no pin, no cufflinks, just a plain grey suit. Although, looking around at the team, Patch’s T-shirt and blazer combo, Mina’s corduroy dress, the guy on the floor’s worn jeans and trainers, it looks like I’ve still managed to overdress.

Even Inés, who’s wearing a blouse and black trousers, still has a million silver rings on her hands and a pair of cherry-red lace-up boots on her feet.

“He looks like a summer associate we have to babysit,” says the man on the floor, standing up with a groan and a pile of heavy, glossy hardbacks in his arms.

“Play nice, Matt,” Inés snaps, and, throwing me a look, she says, “Matteo Moretti. Production Manager. He’s normally the nice one, but you’vealsocost him fifty bucks.”

“Sorry about that,” I tell Matt.

“I thought I was the nice one?” says Mina, pouting at Inés.

“You’re the thorn in my side.”

“A nice thorn?”

Inés ignores this and walks away, and I follow, lowering my voice to say, “I can take my tie off if it’ll help?”

But privacy doesn’t seem to be a thing in this place.

Patch answers loudly, “It’s a slippery slope, kid. First you take off the tie, then you show up in shorts and a wife-beater.”

Inés ignores this too. She stops near a desk in the corner. It’s covered with a thin layer of dust, and one half of it is stacked with boxes. She starts moving the boxes, and I hurry to help her, following her instructions to prop them against the wall wherever there’s space.

She grabs a tissue from Mina’s desk, swipes it unconvincingly across the desk, leaving one slightly less dusty line in the middle of the rest of the dust, and sighs.

“This is your desk. I would’ve had it cleaned, but, well—”

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