Her phone buzzed sharply against the bed.
As if reading her mind all the way from Minneapolis, a text from Jennifer flashed on her screen—her most senior employee, the one she’d left in charge.
Hey boss, know you’re busy but board pre-read goes out before lunch, could you just verify? Thx! J
Emma stared at it. Leah’s voice from earlier still hovered in her mind:Don’t you dare touch your email.
She considered ignoring the text. But if something was wrong, and she’d skipped the chance to fix it? Adam trusted her to keep things solid. With the new financing round coming up...
With a sigh, she went to fetch her laptop, impatiently chewing her thumb while the VPN connected.
She opened the slide deck. Scanned.
Froze.
Emma knew the profit forecast in her sleep, and this wasn’t it. Pulse surging, she opened the Excel file attached to Jennifer’s email.
Her breath hitched. Wrong template. All the numbers were wildly off, a whole alternate reality of financials—one where the companywas somehow thriving. If this went out to the board and had to be walked back, it would tear their credibility to shreds.
Emma swore under her breath. The midday San Diego sun threw bright stripes across the carpet. Her lunch meet-up with Leah was closing in fast, which meant she had about fifteen minutes to save the company from impending doom.
It wasn’t exactly Catlyn-scale heroics, but it needed doing.
gig
Three phone calls, one heated Slack thread, and a thorough read-through later, Emma finally exhaled and confirmed everything to Jennifer.
She closed the laptop and pressed her palms over her eyes, trying to will the gears in her brain to slow down. Her body wasn’t buying it—still firing on all cylinders. The sharp turns from Comic-Con panelist to gushing fangirl to Darren’s dating history to corporate crisis management left her with emotional whiplash.
But there was no time to dwell on that, not unless she wanted to go to lunch in her Ravenclaw jammies. Which, granted, she could probably get away with during Comic-Con.
In the elevator down to the lobby, she caught her reflection in the mirrored walls. Her hair was still a little wild despite the few brush strokes she’d made time for, her cheeks faintly flushed from the adrenaline spike. She’d thrown on a comfy pair of jeans and the same navy blouse from before, though it was a little rumpled. The woman in the mirror looked—if she was being generous—exactly like someone who had swapped lives three times before lunch.
She smoothed her hair with limited success. Oh well. It was only lunch with Leah.
The elevator doors slid open, and Emma immediately spotted an aggressively pink blazer near the entrance.
Leah’s eyes sharpened the second Emma reached her.
“You worked. I can smell it on you.”
“There was a literal, board-adjacent emergency. Trust me, you don’t want to know.”
“You’re absolutely right, I don’t.” Leah tilted her head toward the doors, and Emma followed her out in the sunlight.
“So, there’s been a slight change of plans,” Leah said as they turned down the street, weaving past a trio of Ghostbusters. “I’ve rescheduled our lunch.”
Emma frowned. “Rescheduled?”
“Upgraded technically. Because you and Darren Cole seem to be the secret recipe to some kind of hot sauce the world didn’t even know it craved. And because the casting for Lucen is still very much open, so this isn’t just about watching you spontaneously combust—though I do enjoy that part too.”
Emma stopped dead in the middle of the sidewalk. “Wait. What are you saying?”
Leah turned, all bright innocence. “You’re meeting him for lunch.”
Emma’s mouth fell open. “What the actual hell, Leah? My nervous system already feels like Chernobyl today. I can’t do that.”
By some miracle, she had gotten through the panel. Talked in coherent sentences, pulled a few laughs, not fainted in front of Darren Cole. Mission damn well accomplished. She was nowhere near ready to launch straight into another round with him, even if it was just the two of them this time.
