Page 25 of Bearly Out Loud

THIRTEEN

NARI

The text arrived at 7:43 on a Saturday morning, which was already suspicious. CEOs of billion-dollar entertainment companies did not text their lead voice actresses on Saturdays unless the project was on fire or someone had died.

Dojin:I’d like to show you the creative inspiration space. Available today?

Nari stared at her phone from the depths of her couch, coffee in one hand, legs tucked under her, Chet Baker spinning on the record player because Saturday mornings required jazz and zero responsibilities.

Creative inspiration space.

She’d been inside Keiser Tower exactly once—the lobby, on her way to a meeting that got rerouted to the Chelsea studios. The building was forty stories of glass and steel in Midtown. A creative inspiration space inside it probably meant a conference room with a whiteboard and motivational quotes in a tasteful sans-serif font.

Nari:Define “creative inspiration space.”

Dojin:Better experienced than described.

Nari:That’s either intriguing or a liability.

Dojin:2 PM? I’ll have coffee.

He would have coffee. Of course, he would. The man had turned caffeine delivery into a performance art over the past two weeks, each offering more precise than the last, and if she was being honest with herself—which she tried to be, even when honesty was inconvenient—the matcha latte had rattled her. Nobody memorized a recipe from across a room. Nobody with a casual interest, anyway.

Nari:Fine. But if this is a conference room with a vision board, I’m leaving.

Dojin:Noted.

She forwarded the exchange to Takumi.

Nari:He’s showing me his “creative inspiration space” today.

Takumi:Is that a euphemism

Nari:It’s a ROOM. In his BUILDING.

Takumi:A billionaire is inviting you to his private space on a Saturday and you think it’s about ARCHITECTURE

Nari:I think it’s about the project.

Takumi:Wear the good jeans.

She wore the good jeans.

The elevator required a biometric scan,which was the first indication that this was not a conference room.

The second indication was that the elevator went up. Past the corporate floors, past the number she associated with Dojin’s office, past everything recognizable, to a floor marked only with a small-engraved bee.

The doors opened onto the sky.

Not a room. Not a conference space. Not a whiteboard in sight. The entire top floor of Keiser Tower was a garden—enclosed by glass panels, some retracted to let in the February air, the space stretching from one end of the building to the other. Planters ran along the perimeter, dormant now in late winter but structured with the geometric care of a landscape architect who took their craft personally. Raised beds. Herb boxes. A gravel pathway winding between wooden trellises that would be heavy with green in a few months.

And along the south wall, arranged in a neat row with six inches of precision between each one: beehives. The ones she’d read about somewhere. White-painted wooden boxes with copper roofs, nine of them, each angled to catch the afternoon light. The bees were sluggish in the cold—early-season activity, workers beginning to stir after winter—but the hives were alive.

Dojin stood near the nearest hive with two cups of coffee and an expression caught somewhere between rehearsed casual and visible hope.

Nari’s observations began before she could stop them. They were a reflex. She’d been doing this since childhood—walking into a space and cataloging it aloud, narrating the world as if the world needed a voiceover.

“You keep bees.” She said this as if this was the first she’d heard of it.