All too soon, my lunch hour was over and I had gotten nowhere in my quest for information. With great reluctance, I closed my browser and went to the large meeting room to prep for our presentation to a local brewery, who wanted to revamp their brand. This was one of those meetings where I needed to assess the real ask. What did they want? Sales? Recognition? What problem were they looking to solve? This was my favorite part of the work, second to the designing, figuring out how we could help our client achieve their goals. Plus, I was very interested in watching my team perform.

Not to be all braggy, but we crushed it. My designers wowed our client, who it turned out was looking for a boost in sales, with their new packaging and we were happily signing an agreement, which was handled by Nyah and Trent, just before I walked our client out the door. It felt good to have a win under my belt, even if I’d only been operating in an advisory capacity this week. My team was ecstatic, and I was surprised by how gratifying it was to share a victory with others. I was so used to working alone, I usually just celebrated a new client’s acceptance of a finished project by having a drink with Jeremy.

Jeremy. Ugh. I’d been so busy trying to acclimate to my new life that I hadn’t really thought about him. I guessed that more than anything proved that he was not husband material, at least not for me. I felt an odd mixture of relief that I’d been right to end things and move away and guilt for the exact same reason. I wondered if Jeremy would ever speak to me again, but I honestly didn’t know. I supposed I should have been more upset. After all, he’d been my closest friend in Boston, but I just wasn’t.

Needless to say, it was a cheerful group that left work and tromped our way to happy hour. We happened to pick a place that specialized in burgers and beer and trivia. Luz, Shanna, and I grabbed a table while Booker and Christian ordered several pitchers of beer. Trent did buffet recon while Nyah went to sign us up as a team for trivia. If the questions were art history or pop culture, I was golden. Too bad we didn’t have an in-house librarian; those bookish ones knew their stuff.

We scored an extra-long picnic table just as the pitchers arrived. Trent followed with a tray full of chicken wings with a disproportionately low number of celery and carrot sticks. The trivia match had just begun, and Nyah logged us in as Team V2. The first category was movie quotes, and Trent knew them all.