Out of Office

Chapter 1: Party Number One

The thing about Greenfield & Penrose was that the building smelled like regret and toner, and no amount of cinnamon-scented candles could fix that.

Nolan Wilson stood in the doorway of the third-floor break room—which had been rechristened "The Winter Wonderland Lounge" by someone with a laminator and no shame—and surveyed the annual catastrophe. Paper snowflakes dangled from fluorescent light fixtures. A folding table buckled under the weight of a sheet cake that read HAPPY HOLIDAYS FROM YOUR G&P FAMILY in frosting so red it looked like a crime scene. Dottie Lambert, the receptionist who had been with the company since before Nolan was born, was adjusting a crooked menorah next to a plastic Santa, muttering about "balance" and "representation" and "why does nobody ever bring the good cheese."

Nolan took a sip of the punch—which tasted like Hawaiian Punch mixed with floor cleaner and the faintest whisper of vodka someone had smuggled in—and considered his options. He could mingle. He could network. He could pretend that writing copy for a greeting-card company in Rochester, New York, was the thrilling creative career he'd imagined when he graduated from Syracuse with a portfolio full of spec ads and the unearned confidence of a twenty-two-year-old who'd once been told by a professor that he had "a real voice."

Or he could stand here, drink the terrible punch, and quietly judge everyone.

He chose option three.

"You're doing the thing again," said Tariq Osman, materializing at his elbow with the silent precision of a man who spent his days crawling under desks to fix ethernet cables. Tariq was the IT department—the entire IT department—a tall, thin Pakistani-American with wire-rimmed glasses and the calm demeanor of someone who had accepted that the universe was fundamentally broken and had decided to fix it one help-desk ticket at a time.

"What thing?"

"The thing where you stand in a corner and look like you're composing a scathing internal monologue about everyone in the room."

"I'm not composing it. It's fully composed. I'm just editing for clarity."

Tariq shook his head. "You know, most people come to holiday parties to have fun."

"Most people also think Comic Sans is a legitimate font choice. I don't trust most people."

Across the room, Colton Briggs—because of course his name was Colton Briggs, because the universe had a sense of humor about these things—was holding court near the punch bowl. Colton was the kind of guy who used words like "synergy" and "ideation" without irony, who wore slim-fit suits to a greeting-card company, and who had somehow convinced upper management that his mediocre card concepts were visionary. He was currently explaining his "vision" for the spring line to a cluster of junior designers who nodded along with the glazed enthusiasm of hostages trying to keep their captor calm.

"—and I said to Bridget, I said, 'The future of sentiment is experiential.' You don't just read a card. You feel a card. You become the card."

Nolan turned to Tariq. "Did he just say 'you become the card'?"

"He did."

"I want to die."

"You say that every year."

"And every year I mean it more."

Bridget Penrose, the CEO and granddaughter of the company's co-founder, was visible through the glass wall of her corner office, where she was on the phone and gesturing with the kind of expansive arm movements that suggested she was either closing a deal or directing air traffic. Bridget was forty-six, perpetually tanned from weekends on Lake Ontario, and possessed of the particular brand of cheerful disinterest that comes from inheriting a company you never wanted. She'd rather be selling yachts. Everyone knew this. She'd said it, explicitly, at last year's party, after three glasses of champagne. "I should be selling yachts," she'd announced to the room. "Do you know what the margins are on yachts?" Nobody knew. Nobody cared. But she'd told them anyway.

Nolan was halfway through his second cup of punch and his fourth silent observation about Colton's hair product choices when Dottie appeared at his side.

"Nolan, honey, have you met the new girl?"

Dottie Lambert was sixty-three years old, four feet eleven inches tall, and possessed of an institutional memory so vast and detailed that she could tell you not only who had been fired in 1994 but what they'd been wearing and whether their severance package had been fair. She had attended thirty-one consecutive Greenfield & Penrose holiday parties. She had outlasted four CEOs, two mergers, one small fire, and the great Envelope Shortage of 2008. She was, in every meaningful sense, the company.

"What new girl?" Nolan asked.

"HR. Britta something. Scandinavian. Very organized. She's got a clipboard."

"A clipboard? At a party?"

"She's taking notes on 'employee engagement metrics.' I heard her say it. With a straight face."

Nolan looked in the direction Dottie was pointing and saw her. Britta Solberg was standing near the dessert table, and she did, in fact, have a clipboard. She was tall—taller than him by maybe an inch, which he noted with the specific discomfort of a man who was five-foot-nine and had feelings about it—with pale blonde hair pulled back in a bun so precise it could have been engineered by NASA. She wore a navy blazer over a white blouse, as if she'd dressed for a Senate confirmation hearing rather than a party where someone had taped mistletoe to the fire sprinkler.

She was studying the room with the focused intensity of an anthropologist observing a previously undiscovered tribe.

"She looks like she's about to audit the fun right out of this party," Nolan said.

"Be nice," Dottie warned. "She's from Minnesota."

"What does that have to do with anything?"

"Minnesota people are sincere. It confuses you. Go say hello."

Nolan did not go say hello. He went to get more punch. But the punch bowl was near the dessert table, and the dessert table was near Britta Solberg, and so fate—or, more accurately, his dehydration and the gravitational pull of mediocre sheet cake—intervened.

She looked up from her clipboard as he approached. Her eyes were a very specific shade of blue that reminded him of the Lake Superior postcards in the company's discontinued "Greetings From" line.

"Hi," she said. "I'm Britta Solberg. I just started in Human Resources."

"Nolan Wilson. Copywriter. I've been here four years, which in this place is roughly equivalent to a life sentence."

She tilted her head. "You don't like working here?"

He ladled punch into his cup. "I like writing. I tolerate working here. There's a difference."

"That seems like a sad distinction."

"Welcome to Greenfield & Penrose, where sad distinctions are our specialty. We literally sell sympathy cards."

Britta looked down at her clipboard, made a note, and then looked back up at him with an expression that was either amusement or clinical assessment. "I actually think this company does something meaningful," she said. "People buy greeting cards at the most important moments of their lives. Births. Deaths. Weddings. Apologies. The whole range of human feeling, distilled onto a five-by-seven piece of cardstock. That matters."

Nolan stared at her. "Did you rehearse that?"

"No."

"Because it sounded rehearsed."

"It sounded sincere. I understand that might be confusing for you."

He laughed—actually laughed, which surprised him, because nothing at these parties ever made him laugh. "Okay. Fair. But you have to admit, the company is not exactly thriving. Have you seen our Q3 numbers? We're getting murdered by e-cards and those apps where you can send someone a dancing cartoon of themselves."

"I've seen the numbers," Britta said. "That's why I'm here. To help fix things."

"With a clipboard?"

"With strategy. The clipboard is just how I organize my thoughts."

"Most people use their brains for that."

"Most people's brains are disorganized. Mine isn't."

Nolan took a sip of punch and regarded her. She was, he had to admit, interesting. Not in the way that Colton was interesting, which was the way a car accident was interesting—you couldn't look away, but you wished you could. Britta was interesting in a way that made him slightly uncomfortable, the way a mirror is interesting when you're not sure you want to see what it's showing you.

"So what's your strategy, Britta from Minnesota? How do you save a greeting-card company in the age of the internet?"

"I don't save it alone. I help create systems that allow talented people to do their best work."

"And if the talented people don't want to do their best work? If they've given up and are just running out the clock until something better comes along?"

She looked at him steadily. "Then I'd say those people are cowards who are hiding behind cynicism because it's easier than trying."

The room seemed to go very quiet, even though it hadn't. Colton was still pontificating. The cake was still bleeding red frosting. Dottie was still adjusting her menorah. But something in the space between Nolan and Britta had shifted, the way the air changes right before a storm.

"You don't know me," he said.

"I know your type."

"My type."

"Smart. Talented. Bitter about it. You write greeting cards for a living, and you think you're above it, so you do B-minus work and tell yourself it's the company's fault."

"It's a company that sells paper rectangles with poems about kittens on them."

"It's a company that helps people say 'I love you' when they can't find the words themselves. And if you can't see the value in that, then maybe you're not as good a writer as you think you are."

Nolan opened his mouth to respond, found that he had no response, closed his mouth, and took another sip of punch.

"This punch is terrible," he said.

"I know," she said. "I've had three cups."

And just like that, despite everything, he almost smiled.

* * *

The photocopier on the second floor had been broken since October. It was a Xerox WorkCentre 7855, vintage 2011, and it made a sound like a dying whale whenever anyone tried to use it. A service request had been filed. A follow-up had been filed. A follow-up to the follow-up had been filed. The machine remained broken. It had become a kind of monument to institutional dysfunction, a sacred ruin around which the employees of Greenfield & Penrose organized their daily complaints.

Nolan was standing next to it at 9:47 PM, trying to photocopy a draft of a Valentine's Day card he'd been working on—something about hearts and time and the way love makes fools of everyone, which he'd written with the detached professionalism of a surgeon performing an operation he'd done a thousand times—when Britta appeared.

"It's broken," she said.

"I'm aware."

"Then why are you trying to use it?"

"Because I'm an optimist."

She actually snorted. "You are literally the least optimistic person I have ever met, and I once worked with a man who kept a countdown to his retirement on his desk calendar. He had eleven years left."

Nolan jabbed the START button again. The machine groaned, shuddered, and produced a sheet of paper that was entirely black. He held it up.

"See? It works. It just has a very dark worldview."

Britta took the black page from him and studied it as if it contained meaning. "What were you trying to copy?"

"Valentine's Day card. Draft seven. It's not right yet."

"Can I see?"

He hesitated, then handed her the original. She read it, her lips moving slightly, and he watched her face for a reaction the way a defendant watches a jury.

"It's good," she said.

"But?"

"But it's safe. It reads like a greeting card."

"It is a greeting card."

"Right, but the best ones don't feel like greeting cards. They feel like someone whispering something true in your ear. This feels like it was written by a committee."

"It was written by me."

"Exactly. You wrote it like a committee because you're afraid to write it like yourself."

He took the card back. "You've been here three weeks and you're already giving me creative notes?"

"I'm giving you honest feedback. There's a difference."

"There's that word again. Difference. You love differences."

"I love clarity."

They stood there, next to the broken photocopier, in the fluorescent hum of the second floor, and looked at each other with the particular intensity of two people who are either about to become best friends or worst enemies and can't yet tell which.

The moment was interrupted by Bridget Penrose, who appeared in the hallway with the slightly unsteady gait of a CEO who had discovered the spiked punch.

"There you two are!" she said, pointing at them with a champagne flute that was, confusingly, filled with punch. "Just the people I wanted to see. Well, not wanted, exactly. Needed. The board wants to relaunch the romance line. Cards for couples. Anniversary, Valentine's, 'just because I love you,' all that stuff. It's our worst-performing category and it used to be our best. I need a team. Creative and operations. You two."

Nolan and Britta looked at each other.

"Us two?" Nolan said.

"Together?" Britta said.

"Co-leads," Bridget confirmed. "Nolan, you write them. Britta, you manage the rollout, the market research, the systems, whatever it is you do with that clipboard. I want a full proposal on my desk by February. And it better be good, because I'll be honest with you both: this company has three years to become profitable or I'm selling to Pinnacle Media Group, and they will gut this place like a fish and turn it into a content farm. Three years. Starting now."

She raised her punch-filled champagne flute in a toast to no one in particular, turned, and walked back toward the party.

Nolan and Britta stood in silence.

"Three years," Britta said.

"With you," Nolan said.

"With you," she agreed, and her tone made it clear that this was not a compliment.

The photocopier groaned one final time and produced another entirely black page, as if in commentary.

Nolan picked it up. "At least the machine understands how I feel."