Nora looked past Deepa’s shoulder to the conference room door. Maybe Austin would come back after a few minutes, but honestly, she doubted it. The guy wasn’t known for showy displays of temper, so even a slight frown followed by a request to “pick this up later”—before their meeting timer had even sounded!—meant he’d well and truly had it. By now he was probably back at his ruthlessly tidy desk, squeezing the Verdant Media–branded stress ball he kept in a box on the upper-right corner.

“Well, we’re doing our best,” said Nora, trying to keep up the breezy, unbothered tone she’d maintained through the last forty-five minutes of this video call. It was her “business-as-usual” tactic, the one she’d been honing since Austin had grudgingly agreed to let her work remotely. As long as she acted like nothing important for her had changed, she figured, there’d be no reason for him to second-guess his decision. “It’s not like the client is making it easy.”

“Ugh,” Deepa said, rolling her eyes. “You don’t know the half of it. At dinner last week she asked whether we should consider building a game app. She showed me the bitmoji she uses of herself as an ‘inspiration pic.’”

Nora shifted in her uncomfortable desk chair, suppressing a wince. Some of her discomfort was definitely about this bitmoji story, but most of it was about the you don’t know the half of it. She didn’t know the half of it, because she never went to client dinners or lunches or coffees or juices now. She herself didn’t miss them—they’d always been the worst part of the gig—but she knew that Austin missed her at them. More than once, Austin had privately lamented to Nora about Deepa’s F-grade poker face. That eye roll Nora had just watched through the screen of her laptop probably made an appearance at the dinner table, too.

“What if we try redoing the color scheme?” Nora offered, trying to stop herself from wading into this particular tide pool of guilt. She lived here now, and that was all there was to it. Austin needed to get used to not having her in San Diego, and the only way to make that happen was to keep doing what she was good at, and showing him how indispensable she was. “She’s always seemed lukewarm ab—”

“She’s not a good fit for us,” said Deepa. “She’s going to henpeck us to death before she realizes that she wants to be a celebrity more than she wants to save the world.”