She nods. “HR has a list. I bookmarked it in your onboarding doc.”
“Do I get to see the onboarding doc?” I ask, and she smirks.
“I was going to make you beg. But yes.” She turns the monitor back toward me. The doc is there, a nested outline of everything from IT to espresso machine instructions. The level of detail is absurd and beautiful. “I built this last night,” she says. “Don’t read it all now. You’ll dream in bullet points and wake up angry.”
“I already dream in bullets,” I say. She laughs again, a little less guarded now.
There’s another knock, and a woman with a cart looks in. “Coffee?”
“Please,” Caterina and I say at the same time, then exchange a look. The woman wheels the cart in: two silver urns, a row of mugs, a plate of biscotti lined like soldiers. “You’re the first to get coffee on this floor,” she tells me proudly. “We’re testingthe lines.”
“An honor,” I say.
“An experiment,” Caterina says, pouring. The coffee smells good, rich without the burnt edge. She takes a sip and gives the woman a thumbs-up. The woman beams and leaves with her cart.
Caterina sets a mug in front of me. “Tell me what I’m not asking that I should be.”
“Approval chain,” I say. “What I can sign, what you sign, and what goes above you.”
She hesitates the smallest fraction, a pause that another person would miss if they didn’t know her.
“You sign contracts up to twenty-five,” she says. “Above that, you bring it to me.”
Twenty-five is a little lower than I expected. I wonder why, but try to shrug it off as a precaution for a new business.
I roll the pen once between my fingers and decide to let it fall. “Okay.”
“Anything else?” she asks.
We spend the next half hour in the trench of details. I ask questions, she answers, and vice versa.
At some point, my stomach growls. Loudly. I press a hand to it, mortified.
“Have you eaten?” she asks.
“I had pretzels on the plane,” I say.
“That’s not food.” She stands, crosses to a drawer, and pulls out a wrapped package. “Bianca sends these because she thinks I forget to eat too often.” She unwraps a loaf of something golden and dense. “Lemon ricotta. No one leaves this office hungry.”
“You were right. I do love her,” I say, meaning it more than I expect. She slices pieces with a plastic knife and hands me one on a napkin. It’s perfect. Bright and soft and not too sweet. I nearly moan at how delicious it is. “If she cooks half as well as she bakes, I’m already obsessed with her.”
Cat leans in. “Better,” she whispers.
“Impossible,” I say. She just nods and sticks another bite in her mouth.
When the crumbs on my napkin are the only proof there was ever a lemon ricotta loaf, she taps her watch. “Walk?”
“Yes,” I say, and stand, shoulders loosening. I go for my carry-on out of reflex; she waves a hand.
“Leave it. You’re not getting mugged between here and the elevators.” There are two men stationed at either end of the hall who look like security even out of uniform. A little odd for a hotel that’s not open yet.
We step into the hallway. The plastic over the carpet crackles under our soles. She points out offices as we pass: legal, HR, accounting, a conference room currently housing a stack of chairs and a single plant that someone put there to make it homey, I assume.
“You’ll have your own office in the marketing department down the hall,” she says. “It’s fine if you hot-desk on the floor in the early days. But you’ll have paint choices and a stipend for furniture. Those decisions have to be made soon. I can’t have management worrying about paint samples leading up to launch.”
We reach a set of glass doors. The sign says CASINO — UNDER CONSTRUCTION. A man in a fluorescent vest opens it for us. “Watch your feet,” he says. “We’re still laying.”
Inside, the space is huge and raw. Even unfinished, it has presence: the ceiling high, the lines clean, the sightlines purposeful. The floor is a grid of taped squares with chalk notes—PIT HERE, LIGHTS, HOST. In one corner, a team is unspooling wire. In another, someone is measuring out steps with a counting motion that reminds me of choreography.
