Page 142 of Sugar & Shadows

Fuck. I pinched the bridge of my nose. Fucking Gabe. Interrupting my dinner with Ethan like a drunk caveman. I needed information, dammit.

“What else can we do?”

“Get the proposal finished. Save the town. You know me. I like to unravel threads. I’ll keep tugging.”

“Mama!” a toddler screamed.

“Okay, go,” I said, looking at my whiteboard. I had three days to pull this off.

By the time the rest of the team had arrived, I was delirious and starving. But progress had been made. My mom took me to the break room to feed me while Harper cleaned up my wild notes and Nina added talking points about the economic data Meg had found about Timbersport events.

“This handwriting is terrifying,” Harper said, squinting at my wildly scribbled notes.

“Serial killer–esque,” Nina added, cracking open an energy drink.

“It’s strategy. And I was just trying to get all my ideas down,” I said, eating another granola bar. Damn, I was really hungry.

“You underlined the word tourism seven times,” Harper said.

Nina peered over Harper’s shoulder, frowning at my work. “And you drew an… alien?”

“It’s a bear,” I said with a sigh. “A potential mascot concept.”

“Is that a knife in its paw?” My mom asked, getting in on it.

“It’s supposed to be a musket. You know, Revolutionary War history and all?”

Harper burst out laughing. “We could do a town wide self-defense initiative.”

“I’d buy the T-shirt,” Nina deadpanned, sitting in her rolling chair.

“We need to get focused,” I said between giggles. The war room was a mess, with coffee cups, various tangled chargers, and dry erase markers everywhere.

And people. My people. The ones who’d shown up for me day after day. Because we were building something together.

And now I was getting teary. “Thank you so much,” I said with a sniffle.

Mom slid a box of tissues to me. “Hormones,” she said.

Harper looked at me in horror.

“I just”—sniff—“appreciate”—sniff—“you all so much.” As the last word left me, big, fat tears started rolling down my cheeks. “You’re all awesome.” I plucked a tissue from the box on the table and blew my nose ungracefully. “Harper is skipping lunch periods to build social media campaigns. And Nina, you’re gathering economic data between gel manis.”

“We believe in this,” Harper told me soberly.

“And in you,” my mom added, which only made me sob harder.

“You know I’d commit all kinds of felonies for you,” Meg piped in from the speaker phone. “I’ve done it before and I’ll do it again.”

After working with twelve-hundred-dollar-an-hour consultants who didn’t give a shit for years, this change felt revolutionary.

My phone buzzed on the table, and another message from Gabe appeared. Just seeing his name made me smile. It should have been irritating, but instead, it might have been the most comforting sensation I’d ever experienced. These fucking hormones were clearly changing my neurons.

“Just check it,” Nina said, flipping through my pages of wild notes. “We know you want to talk to him.”

Harper snorted without looking up or slowing her typing.

Gabe: