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“Hey!” I interrupt before Luc can say anything. “I’ve only been talking that way for the past week or so!”
This whole time, Emma has been standing back, watching. There’s a big, careless smile all over her face. She looks almost like she’s proud of me.
“I think it’s a perfect plan,” Emma announces, finally. “And I, for one, think we should congratulate Finn for thinking of it.”
I feel a warmth in my chest when Emma announces that, a pleasant feeling I hadn’t expected at all. I’ve spent so much of my time thinking about what Emma would do and how she would deal with things that it’s almost weird to hear her tell me I did a good job. It’s taken a lot of work to get here, but this feeling is one I could get used to.
“Well, I guess I’m in,” Damien says, finally. “I care about this firm, and this looks like the best chance we’ve had of saving it. Besides, I’m not gonna let Finn and a paralegal be working harder than I am. Luc, what do you say?”
“So if I say no, I’m the only one who’s going to say it?” he asks.
“It looks that way,” I tell him. “But it’s okay. We’ll only talk about you behind your back a little bit.”
“I’ll do it, I’ll do it!” he says. “For the sake of the firm.”
“Then that’s everyone!” I do a little golf clap for us. “I know Raven pretty well. She’s stubborn and she’s a jerk. But she’s got plenty of weaknesses too. And that’s how we’re going to beat her.”
“What kind of weaknesses?” Emma asks.
“Well, for one thing, she’s plenty vain,” I answer, thinking back to my days of dating her. “Combine that with the stubbornness, and it means that she doesn’t change up her tactics much. So once you’ve figured out how to beat one thing she does, she’ll just kind of keep doing it and get mad at you when it doesn’t work. And when she’s mad is when she makes bad decisions.”
That was precisely what happened with the song. Once I resisted it, she didn’t try anything new. She kept expecting it to work, and when it didn’t, she got unpleasant.
Damien looks interested. “Bad decisions like what?”
“Well, I don’t know that part yet,” I admit. “All I know is that she’s trying her one trick. And this is the way we can beat that one trick. Once she figures out we’ve done that, then we’ll have our chance to get her back.”
The room is quiet for a second as everyone absorbs that. They all seem to agree that I’ve thought this out pretty well.
“Come on,” Emma protests. “No one’s gonna congratulate Finn?”
“You have to understand,” Damien explains. “The three of us are brothers. We’ve spent our whole lives around each other. Asking us to recognize that one of us did a good job is extremely difficult.”
“It’s actually kind of oppressive,” Luc adds.
“For once, I’m on their side,” I say. “If this idea had come from one of them, I’d be a huge snot about it too.”
“Oh, now watch out!” Damien snaps. He grabs a piece of paper off the printer, crumbles it into a ball and throws it at me. I duck behind the desk and the ball of paper rolls off into the wall.
“I’m going to get you back for that,” I promise. “Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but I will get you back.”
“Of course you will,” Damien says. “I’ll be waiting.”
But even as he says it, another ball of paper flies at me from the other direction. Luc has grabbed the wastebasket while I had my focus on Damien. I slide open the desk drawer and pull out a pad of blank, yellow legal paper. “This means war.”
At that moment, Emma grabs a whole bunch of papers from the printer and dives to the side of my desk. I duck behind it, rip off the first page and crawl to the edge. Two balls land on the desk and fall off as I wing mine directly at Damien. A perfect shot.
“This isn’t especially professional!” Luc calls out. He’s met by a rain of paper as all three of us concentrate our fire on him.
“My debt is repaid!” I cry, as a piece from Emma’s direction lands on my head. That girl has a deadly aim with a paper ball. She should have included that on her resumé.
“To war!” comes Damien’s voice. Every time he throws a paper ball, he makes a little pew pew sound to go with it.
After a few minutes, the office is a mess of crumpled paper and the four of us are lying on the ground. The Battle of Finn’s office has no conclusive victor, but no one feels upset about it either. It’s just the kind of little release we all needed after agreeing to take on a bunch more complicated work.
“Do you think anyone heard us during all that?” Damien asks.
“Pretty thick doors,” Emma answers. “Gretchen has tried listening to conversations through them, and she says it’s pretty hard.”
