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Chapter One

ARIA

Two sugars or one.

That’s the question currently destroying my life.

Not rent.

Not whether my car will pass inspection.

Not even the fact that my father called me "the pretty lady" twice this month before remembering my name.

No. The thing that has me showing up at 6:47 a.m. before anyone else in the office has even considered work is Everett Kauffman’s coffee preferences. Which is why I’m standing in the executive kitchen on the fourth floor of the Hawkeyes Hockey arena, staring at the sugar bowl like the fate of the morning depends on how sweet he takes his liquid caffeine.

Six months. I’ve been making this man coffee for six months. Every single morning, I ask how he takes it, and every single morning, he waves me off mid-conference call like his coffee preferences are sensitive intel, and I failed the background check.

So I keep guessing.

One sugar, no cream. Grimace. Two sugars, a splash of almond milk. Grimace. Black with half a sugar—which, by the way, is a psychotic way to drink coffee. Grimace.

He grimaces at everything I bring him. And then he drinks it anyway, which is somehow worse, because it means I’m not even failing dramatically enough to get a real reaction out of the man. I’m just slightly wrong. Every day, in a way that he tolerates.

And by tolerates, I mean that he doesn’t tolerate me well, and he’s made those feelings known.

I’m redundant, is the word he used.

It follows me every night into my dreams. I hear it every morning in the bathroom mirror while I brush my teeth before work.

I’m redundant because he already has an assistant—Jeremy. A male assistant who was his father’s assistant’s intern before Conrad Kauffman’s untimely death. And now he’s Everett’s assistant. Jeremy was given the great honor after Conrad left his assistant enough money in the will to retire.

Phil Carlton—the previous owner of the Hawkeyes hockey team, the man who actually had a pulse and social skills—would never have called me redundant. I spent two and a half years as his assistant with never a bad day. He absolutely would have told me his coffee preferences on day one, and he would’ve done it with a smile. He would’ve said "good morning" like a human being instead of staring through me like I’m a piece of office furniture he didn’t remember ordering.

But Phil sold the team, and the man who replaced him is a six-foot-two wall of expensive suits and emotional unavailability, and if I don’t figure out his coffee order soon, I’m going to lose my mind. Or my job. Possibly both, and I genuinely cannot afford either.

Because here’s the thing about this job that Everett Kauffman doesn’t know—and that I will never, ever tell him, because I have exactly one shred of pride left and I’m gripping it with both hands:

Phil bumped my salary.

Quietly. Without asking. Without me telling him that my father’s care facility costs more than my entire existence. Somehow Phil found out about Brookhaven, about the accident, about the fact that insurance covers a place where my dad sits in a hallway staring at walls instead of the place where he’s actually getting better. The place with memory doctors who are making progress, physical therapists who now have my father out of a wheelchair, walking on his own again. Phil just fixed it. Adjusted my paycheck so I could keep Dad where he needs to be.

Everett inherited the team. He inherited the roster, the arena, the marketing department, and me. But he doesn’t know about the arrangement. He doesn’t know that my salary is inflated because of the personal needs that Phil saw fit to provide for me, even though the pay structure would never be offered at any other corporation, even one of this size. Everett has no idea that every cup of coffee I bring him is a small act of professional survival disguised as hospitality.

Which is why the sugar situation is reaching critical mass.

If I get fired, my father goes back to the place where good days didn’t exist. Where he couldn’t walk to the bathroom with a wheelchair or a walker. Where no one figured out how to reach him.

One sugar or two.

I go with one and a half—splitting the difference on the second sugar. Add a splash of cream because yesterday he drank the cream version slightly faster than the black version, which is forensic analysis that should probably concern me, but doesn’t because I am past the point of shame.

The mug is warm in my hands, the office is still quiet—that particular hush of a building right before the entire place begins to buzz with life. I got here thirty minutes early, as usual. Beat the rest of the staff, finished the marketing packets, reorganized the filing cabinet he’ll never notice I reorganized, and pre-drafted two emails he hasn’t asked for yet.

Anything to prove I’m useful. Anything to make myself un-fire-able.

I’m heading for his office to drop off his coffee on the warmer, knowing that he’s like clockwork too and will be here in at least two minutes, when I hear a voice.

It’s low. Not raised—Everett Kauffman doesn’t raise his voice, and the quieter he gets, the more dangerous the conversation is.