“I smell my panny cakes!” Chris shouted from down the hallway.

Annie smiled.

“Little guy’s up,” she said in a furry voice.

Nimec winked at her.

“I hope you mean the kid,” he said, and reluctantly pulled himself back to the stove.

“ ‘Plunge telecom giant into choppy seas,’ ” Megan Breen read aloud, her head bent over the Journal piece, an errant tress of hair slipping across her cheek. “ ‘Navigate rough waters . . .’ ”

“ ‘Beware of sinking beneath those shifting currents’ happens to be my favorite,” Roger Gordian said.

“Ouch.” Megan tucked the loose strands behind her ear. They were the rich reddish brown color of mid-autumn leaves. “Talk about stretching a metaphor, I can almost hear this one groaning.”

“And begging in vain for a merciful end,” Gordian said.

“Until it lapses into tortured incoherence,” Megan said.

Gordian turned from where he stood by the coffee maker in a corner of his office.

“We’d better quit while we’re ahead,” he said. “You’d almost think the article was written by our old friend Reynold Armitage, wouldn’t you?”

Megan sat nodding in front of Gordian’s desk. She put her hardcopy down on it.

“Now that you mention it,” she said. “What was it he called us in print? ‘A growing monstrosity’?”

“ ‘A growing, failing monstrosity,’ ” Gordian said. “You know, I actually found myself looking for Armitage’s byline after scanning the article. But he seems to have pretty well faded from sight since we beat the Monolith takeover attempt.”

“Amen,” Megan said. “May destiny’s sails sweep him along a course far from ours—”

“Megan—”

“Sorry,” she said. “It scares me to think I’m becoming so impressionable . . . could be it’s all that time on the ice.”

Gordian opened a tin of green tea beside the coffee maker, spooned some into his cup’s ceramic filter, held the cup under the machine’s hot water tap, and ran steaming water over the loose tea leaves. Then he covered the teacup with its lid and looked halfway around at Megan.

“Like some coffee?” he asked, and nodded toward a pot on the warming tray.

“What’s the roast?”

“Excuse me?”

“The roast,” she said. “I was wondering if you can offer me any of that great Italian coffee you always used to make or if it’s more of that weak stuff your dear, sweet, gustatorily desensitized personal assistant’s been brewing.”

“No idea, I stick to my ocha these days . . . strict orders from Ash,” he said, sounding oblivious. “I can ask Norma—”

Megan hastily flapped her hand.

“That’s okay,” she said. “I’ll pop out to Starbuck’s later on this morning.”

Gordian shrugged, returned to his side of the desk, sat. There was a box of assorted doughnuts to his right. He peered inside, selected one with chocolate frosting and rainbow sprinkles, and took a bite as the tea steeped on his blotter.

“Are the doughnuts permitted by Ashley’s dietary edicts?” Megan asked.