“Don’t you have homework?” Tess said to them, finally looking up from her laptop, “Walker, did the school not—oh!” She started when she saw me. “I thought you were your brother.”
“Where is he?”
Walker strolled over, phone in hand from just finishing up a call. He smiled at our sisters.
“While you all are back there baking, can you make a cheese and spinach tart? Holly was out of them this morning.”
“Yes,” Enola said happily, her face lighting up.
My heart melted a little bit. I hadn’t quite realized it when I had first met her the day Crawford dropped her and our sisters off, but Enola had been extremely stressed. She’d had too much responsibility placed on her at a young age with taking care of our younger siblings. Seeing her excited about something as childlike as baking was nice. She seemed younger and way more relaxed. As much as I might think they were an annoyance, I was so happy my little sisters weren’t in the cult. I was going to do everything to make sure they had the chance to have a happy childhood.
“I want to make a unicorn bread,” my other sister whined.
However, as much as I wanted my sisters to be happy, Owen was right. The current situation was chaotic. Our little sisters could not just live in the lobby.
“Tess, can we talk upstairs?”
“I have the best idea for the AstraDrone contract,” she said, grabbing her laptop and following me to the elevator.
“Really?” I asked warily.
“It’s still a surprise,” she said, practically bouncing up and down. “It might be a total disaster, so I’m not going to tell you what it is until I have a draft.”
We stepped off the elevator and headed to my office.
“The marketing people emailed me,” she added. “They want you to go to several schools as part of the recruitment drive. Stanford, Harvard, and MIT are obvious choices, but did you want to go to Georgia Tech and Northwestern as well?”
“Let me think about it.”
“Let me know soon because I need to make custom presentations for you for each school.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because each school has a different history and focus, and you need to make sure your presentation speaks to those local elements. You want the students to feel engaged. Otherwise, they’re just going to take their talents elsewhere. With a computer science degree, every one of them, but especially the top performers, are in high demand. They can basically write their own ticket in life.”
“I’m not sure if I’ll be able to do that much traveling,” I admitted when we arrived in my office. “My sisters seem to be taking up a lot of my bandwidth.”
“They should be back in school soon,” Tess said with a sigh.
“I already know where it’s headed,” I said. “They’re not going to make it another month before they’re full-on expelled. I’m surprised it hasn’t already happened.”
Tess snorted.
“No,” I continued. “I know that you have work to do, so I came up with a great idea for the girls, since they like baking so much. Owen’s brother’s girlfriend has a bakery. She always needs helpers. The girls could go decorate as many cookies as they want, and maybe I could sign them up for some baking classes.”
I was expecting Tess to jump up and down and tell me what an awesome idea that was. But instead, she gave me an angry look.
“So your solution to your bored sisters is to have them bake cookies for the next ten years until what?” Her eyes narrowed.
“Why are you acting like this? I thought you would think it’s a great idea?” I was confused. “Besides, you like to bake.”
“Yes, as a hobby,” she said slowly.
“People run bakeries as jobs,” I argued.
“You mean like Chloe and Holly?” Tess said in annoyance. “They are small business owners. They manage franchises. That’s marketing, finance, investing, real estate, logistics, and computer coding so they can design their own systems.” Tess ticked off on her fingers. “If the girls want to run a bakery franchise statewide or, hell, nationwide, they need to learn more than baking. And you need to provide it. You’re a CFO, and you have access to resources. You could at least spend some time with your sisters.”
“But they’re happy baking.”
