Page 2 of A Conflict of Interest

“Okay,” I said, hopping up to my feet. “Well, I hope your date tonight goes great! And that you’re able to get up to something you enjoy in the middle of it all. You know, anything, really.”

“Mm-hm. And you’re going to do your work? Actually focus on it and get started, make some progress?”

Oh yeah. I forgot about that. I bounced on the balls of my feet, nodding. “Yeah! I’ve already got an idea how to start.”

“Oh… good.” She relaxed in her seat, opening her laptop again. “Then I look forward to hearing how it goes. I mean it, any—specific—questions you have, you can reach out to me. Don’t be afraid. We want to be helpful. Talk to you later, Kelce.”

“See you, Boss Anna,” I said, drifting towards the door, and she sighed, hard.

“Kelcey. Your laptop. And don’t call me that.”

Ugh, that thing was always slipping away from me! I turned around and snatched it up and turned back to the door, heading out into the office, the energy level low today. With Christmas around the corner, everybody was already in Christmas vacation mode, and everything was quiet right now, people tapping lazily away at computers. I strolled through the maze of desks and made my way to the perfect place to start: Miranda’s desk.

She kept her head down, focusing on her laptop. I tapped on the desk, rhythmically tip-tapping my fingernails for herattention—just, you know, letting her know I was there—and she turned to look at me, eyebrows raised high.

“Kelcey?” she said. “What do you want?”

“Hi, Miranda. How are you doing?”

“I’m busy. What’s going on?”

Miranda was sure grouchy today. I tried to be cordial, but some people just weren’t having it. “Anna gave me a project and I don’t know where to start it.”

She furrowed her brow. She was a lean, wiry woman with puffy auburn hair, always dressed in shades of gray, with a charcoal sweater vest over a white shirt today. Some days I think it represented the amount of personality she had too. “Ask her where to start it, then,” she said, turning back to her computer.

“No… I did. And she said, um… that she, um, was busy. And to ask you.”

“She said to ask me?”

A little white lie never hurt anybody, right? I smiled sweetly. “She said you’re really good at showing people through things!”

She scowled at me, brow furrowing, before she went back to her computer. “What’s the project?”

“You know the new hiring drive picking up. They want a new onboarding video to replace the one from, like, the year I was born.”

“Wasn’t that long ago,” she muttered under her breath, and I? The magnanimous one here? I chose to pretend I did not hear it. Let it be said Kelcey Huntington was a generous soul.

“So, can you help?”

She sighed, hard, pushing back from her desk looking up at me with an exasperated expression, like the whole world was arrayed against her. That was kind of how Miranda operated, though—we ran out of coffee in the breakroom and she took it as a sign that there was no God, and if there was, then He hatedher personally, that coffee production was going down by the wayside and that the earth would be flooded and the breakroom would never have coffee again. She was a little depressing sometimes. But she was better at her job than I was, so here I was, making puppy-dog eyes that got her to fold her arms and say, “You’ll have to get in touch with a team for videos. All the rest of our onboarding videos are animated, so you’ll probably want to contract some people for an animation. You should already have the requests from HR on what they want the video telling people, so… just figure out a way to express that in video and pass that along to the team.”

“I don’t really know any animators off the top of my head.” I bounced on my heels, hands clasped at my waist. “Pixar?”

“You probably could afford to contract them,” she muttered, and she cleared her throat. “Let’s aim smaller. I’ll dig up who we’ve used before, but it’s a vicious market and everyone falls apart in the market before long, and it’s been ages, so fat chance of the team actually still working together. And good luck tracking any of them down.”

“Okay, well,Ibelieve in us,” I said. “Just give me what you can find. You’re the best, Miranda. How’s life, by the way? How’s your big kitchen reno project?”

She sighed miserably, going back to her computer. “It was a mistake, is what it was. We’ve been walking around on bare flooring and there’s all these faults in the flooring and the whole kitchen is just a nightmare, so I’m having to fix everybody else’s mistakes, and I wish we’d never started. The previous owner really screwed up the windows and we didn’t notice until we were fixing them.”

Okay, this was the wrong conversation starter. I was getting sad just listening to her, like gravitational misery. “That’s rough,” I said, inching backwards a little.

“And of course, nobody wants to lift a finger to help. So I’m here doing this by myself and everybody’s just walking around me like they couldn’t give a rat’s ass about the kitchen, like they’re all just happy to keep cooking in a kitchen with bare floors.”

“That’s… that’s rough,” I said, kind of out of other words, inching a little further back. I should have asked David for help.

“That’s what I want for Christmas,” she said. “Someone to give a damn. Maybe help out with something. It’s exhausting having to pull everyone’s deadweight.”

“That is… definitely… rough. Well, I hope it gets better soon—”

---