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“They dipped. They’re going elsewhere. After five fucking years making more money for them than anyone else could offer.” Trace raked a hand through his hair, leaving it mussed. “I don’t fucking get it.”
“Wait, are you talking the Goodwyn account?” Fear lined the edges of Axel’s voice, but it was so faint I barely caught it. “They couldn’t have left.”
“It’s the Goodwyn account,” Damian confirmed softly.
“How did this happen?” Axel spat. “Why didn’t you guys tell me?”
Trace cleared his throat, and something else swelled in the air between them. Like the conversation had suddenly taken a swerve, but I’d been thrown from the car.
“It happened when we were at lunch,” Damian said. He’d always been the one to reel Axel in when he started careening. And Axel had started to careen. “We ran into Rob himself, which was weird timing because just before lunch they’d informed the office of their intent to withdraw from our services.”
“Except we hadn’t gotten the memo yet,” Trace clarified. “So we were chatting him up like a couple of fools.”
Damian sent Trace a weary look. “It was awkward as fuck.”
“We didn’t know,” Trace added with a groan. “And so hetoldus to our faces. And then we spent the next hour backpedaling and trying to get more information out of him.”
“Did you hijack his lunch?” Axel demanded. “I would have fucking hijacked his lunch.”
“Oh, we hijacked it. Emergency negotiations were held. We pored over numbers while he ate his fucking soup, man.” Trace shook his head, looking more defeated than I’d ever seen him. “They’re gone.”
Axel sputtered. “What reason did he give?”
Damian drew a deep breath, studying something on the ceiling. “Our practices are not aligned with their vision.”
A strange silence snaked through the kitchen. The brothers spoke volumes in the serious looks they traded.
“What could they possibly know about that is questionable?” Axel asked in a low, threatening voice.
Finally, Trace glanced my way. “I don’t know. Maybe we should go over this later. I need to change.”
Some of the urgency cracked and shattered around them. Axel heaved a sigh, shaking his head. “I’m going to call him.”
“Don’t,” Damian warned him. “We beat that horse already. All we can do is exit gracefully.”
“But—” Axel started.
“He’s right,” Trace said. “We did all we could do. They’re gone. Now we just need to pick ourselves up and hunt the next big client.”
The brothers went their separate ways, leaving Axel pacing the kitchen with his hands on his hips.
“I’m sorry, Axel,” I said softly. “You guys will recover, though. I have faith.”
Axel tutted, focusing on something invisible on the floor. “They were a quarter billion of our yearly revenue.”
I winced. This wasn’t chump change. And it wasn’t easy to replace a client like that. Even though we were in different industries, I felt the sting of this loss just as hard. “Fuck.”
His gaze moved around the kitchen, but he focused on nothing, as if he were studying something in a different dimension altogether. “I just don’t understand what they could find questionable. It doesn’t make sense to me.”
“Client turnover at this level is common,” I started.
“We have the highest retention rate in the industry,” Axel said, chewing on the inside of his cheek. When he finally looked at me, a thunderstorm brewed in his eyes. “I’ve got to figure this out.”
“And you will. I know you will.”
Axel roamed the kitchen for a while longer as I sank bank into my seat, tension in the air. Damian reappeared in the kitchen, dressed in basketball shorts and an NYU T-shirt. If it weren’t for the longer hair and the small lines at his eyes that betrayed the stress he lived with, I’d have mistaken him for the college version of himself.
“Cora, I completely forgot about this. I’m sorry.” He held a file folder, which he waved in the air. “I have some information I think you’ll want to see.”
