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“I can bring it to you, if you want. One of my agent’s assistants delivered a bunch of it last week. Fortunately, she sorted it first. I’m paying someone in her office to handle the fan mail, and of course all my bills and financial stuff go directly to my accountant. Everything that’s left is what my agent calls ‘action items,’ as in stuff I’m actually supposed to do something about.”
“I’m glad it’s been sorted, that’ll make it a lot easier.”
“It’s still pretty bad. I’ll go get it and meet you in the kitchen.”
“Okay, but why not the office?”
“Because you’re going to want to make a pot of coffee. I know you said you just want to take a quick look at this stuff, but I know you. There’s no way you’re walking away from that paperwork without going through every bit of it.”
He was probably right about that. I headed to one end of the house while he went in the opposite direction, and when I reached the kitchen I found everything had been rearranged. The coffee maker was still in its little fold-out bay, because the kitchen was too fancy to just leave it sitting out. God forbid. But the coffee was no longer in the drawer right beneath it. Apparently that was too logical.
I was still opening and closing drawers and cupboards when Harper joined me a couple of minutes later, and I said, “Your new chef hid the coffee.”
He placed a large cardboard box on the kitchen island and said, “Yeah, Tris has a system. He explained it to me, but I wasn’t really paying attention.”
Harper took over the task of searching for the coffee while I began unpacking piles of papers. His agent had fastened stuff together with binder clips and added sticky notes to some of the bundles with her input. They said things like, “Don’t blow this off. Good PR.” One just said, “Meh.”
Once everything was piled onto the island, I sat down and started going through it. A few moments later, Harper triumphantly announced, “I found the coffee! It was in this weird, industrial-looking canister for some reason.” That was followed with, “Damn it, they’re whole beans. Where the hell is the grinder?”
I started to sort the bundles by type of event while the search for the grinder commenced. “You get invited to a hell of a lot of weddings,” I murmured, as the pile of invitations grew.
“Say no to all of them, then send an expensive gift,” he said.
“We have to go through these one-by-one. You can’t just make a blanket statement like that.”
“Sure I can.” After a moment, he exclaimed, “Oh wait, the grinder is built into the coffee maker! Okay, but how do I get the beans in there, and why the fuck is this so fancy? All I want is a cup of coffee, but this thing looks like it was reverse-engineered from alien technology.”
“What happened to your old, normal coffee pot?”
“Tris convinced me this one would produce a superior cup of coffee, so I got rid of the other one.”
“Can you actually taste the difference?”
“No. Not even a little.”
As Harper finally got the coffee ground and brewing, Kel joined us in the kitchen and said, “All the animals have been fed, walked, groomed, and so on. Is it okay if I go ahead and call it a night?”
“Absolutely,” Harper said. “Thanks for everything this weekend. I loved all the photos of Loco.”
Kel smiled shyly. “Thanks for trusting me with her, we had a lot of fun. She’s in the living room, by the way. I gave her a ball to play with.”
After we said goodnight and he left the kitchen, Harper said, “Will you please make a note to call my accountant and give Kel a hundred percent raise? I don’t want to forget.”
“That’s very generous.”
“He’s a good kid, and he deserves it.”
As I composed an email on my phone for the accountant, I said, “Kid? You’re only four years older than he is.”
“He seems so much younger, though,” Harper said, as he sat on the barstool beside mine.
“And we’re five years apart, not four. I’m turning twenty-nine in just a few weeks, remember?”
“Oh, that’s right. Should I upgrade your homeowner’s insurance, in anticipation of another massive, out-of-control birthday bash?” I was only sort of kidding.
“No. I’m not having a party this year.”
I sent the email and asked, “Why not? You throw one every year. They’re legendary.”
“The same reason I’m planning to say no to every single one of these events,” he said, as he picked up a thick handful of papers. “Like I said before, I’m fucking tired, Phee.” He unceremoniously dropped the papers back onto the kitchen island. “Besides, my birthday lands right in the middle of a promotion circuit for that sci-fi action movie I filmed last year, which is about to hit the theaters. It’s going to be totally chaotic.”
