Nora sighed, knowing Dee was right. When Austin had first started Verdant Media, his mission had been crystal clear: to become the premier digital design and marketing agency for sustainability-focused brands. Ten years ago, it’d been boutique, but now it was pretty much booming—Nora herself was currently maintaining thirty-five different major websites and had seven projects in the queue for build-out. Most of her accounts were corporate, but recently Austin had started bringing in clients like this one—“eco-influencers,” he called them, people who did things like stage Instagram photos of homemade cleaning products in pretty spray bottles.

Nora didn’t love this new trend, but it was Austin’s company, and Austin had given Nora her first shot as an intern when she was only twenty years old. Because of Austin, she was one of only a handful of people who’d had a job in hand when she graduated. Because of Austin, she’d gotten to have a front-row seat to the small firm’s success for almost ten years. And because of Austin, she got to keep doing what she loved, what she was good at, even though she wanted to do it from all the way across the country.

“I’ll talk to him,” Nora said, closing out all the eco-influencer-related windows she’d had up on her second, larger monitor, and blinked in relief. She still hadn’t gotten the setup right in here, still felt like everything was too close to her face when she worked.

Over on her laptop screen, Deepa went out of frame for a second, and then came back in, resettling in her chair with a small metallic pouch in front of her. Nora smiled at this new version of an old routine. When she’d still worked in the office, she and Dee would often debrief in the office building’s third-floor bathroom, which was almost always deserted. Dee would touch up her makeup and they’d chat about work or life or whatever. They did the same now, only with the video-call app serving as the makeup mirror. Nora supposed it was a little odd, talking to someone who was doing an extreme close-up of her mascara or lipstick application, but then again, Dee was really good at makeup.

“Okay,” Deepa said. “Give me the update. What happened with the new guy?”