If ornaments not recovered: Lila Sloane collection replaced in programming by expanded artisan market. Contact Trish Pender (Outer Banks Craft Collective, confirmed interest). Vendor fee waived. Showcase converted to panel discussion: “Art and the Coast.” Tessa to film. Elaine to host. Revised guest email by 3 PM today if needed.
If Margot Pine removed from event management: Hand off master vendor list to Jolene. Transfer active contracts to Elaine’s office. Notes on pending items: florist delivery window, sound check schedule, generator transfer time.
She stopped.
Read back what she’d written under the second heading. The careful, competent handover of everything she’d spent two weeks building. Written in the tone of someone who expected to be fired and was already making it easy for everyone else.
Preparing to be punished. She hadn’t named it that way until it was on the screen in front of her.
She closed that section. Opened a new one.
If both: what do we still have? Baking demo: Lou confirmed, still running. Florist installation: Dana confirmed, greenery arriving tomorrow. Fireworks: permit valid, Evan confirmed safety check. Gala programming: two hundred guests registered, catering contracted. Staff: Jolene. Always Jolene.
The list was longer than she’d expected. With David, she’d done the same thing.
She was still typing when the door opened.
Evan came in, carrying two cups from the dock shed camp stove. Without ceremony, without announcement. He set one cup near her laptop and looked at the screen.
She knew when he reached the second heading. His jaw set.
“The second section,” he said.
“Contingency.”
“You’re planning for them to let you go.”
“I’m planning for every outcome.”
He pulled out the chair across from her and sat. He didn’t have his tools. He’d come specifically here. “You told me you rebuilt from nothing after David. That’s not nothing. That’s what you actually did. Vendors, contracts, clients. Built back from scratch.”
“I know what I did.”
“Then why does this…” He turned the laptop toward him, reading the handover notes. “Why are you writing the instructions for your own exit before they’ve asked you to leave?”
She wrapped her hands around the coffee cup. “Because if I prepare for it, it can’t ambush me. If I’ve already done the worst-case version, the actual worst case is just a plan I execute, not a collapse I survive.”
He was quiet for a moment. Looking at the screen. “That’s not preparation. That’s preemptive punishment.”
She’d known that. She just hadn’t let herself call it that.
“You’re not going to get fired,” he said. “The ornament theft was planned by someone who knew this resort better than you’ve had time to know it. That’s not your failure.”
“Elaine doesn’t see it that way.”
“Elaine is scared. That’s different from right.” He pushed the laptop gently back toward her. “Make the contingency plan. Make three of them. I know you. You’ll feel better with the lists.” A beat. “But delete the handover section. You’re not going anywhere.”
She looked at him. The overhead light in the conference room was harsh and institutional, his coffee was going cold, and the parking lot outside the window was ordinary and dull. None of it was exceptional.
She deleted the second section.
She didn’t tell him it was the first contingency plan in two years that didn’t end with her packing a box.
Chapter thirty
Item Sixty-Three
Margotstaredatthebadge clipped to her lanyard. She’d watched this coming since the stairwell.
