The memo came on a Thursday at 4:47 PM, which was Alderman & Park's institutional way of ruining a weekend.

Nadia Reyes was midway through a presentation deck — the Calloway Hotel rebrand, fourteen slides that had taken her three days and two bottles of wine to build — when the calendar invite dropped into her inbox with the subject line: URGENT: Whitmore Client Weekend. All senior creatives required. Read immediately.

She read it.

Then she read it again.

Whitmore Holdings was the agency's white whale. Family-owned luxury development group, privately held, sixty-seven years of brand heritage, and a CEO named Gerald Whitmore who had been dangling a potential retainer in front of Alderman & Park for eleven months. The kind of account that reordered careers. That turned a senior creative into a Creative Director with a corner office and a business card that actually meant something.

The memo was from Harriet Park herself. In bold.

Gerald Whitmore has graciously invited key members of our team to his private lake property in Carrow Lake this weekend — Friday through Sunday — for an informal working retreat to determine cultural fit before finalizing a retainer agreement. Attendance is mandatory. Gerald's family will be present. He has expressed that he considers personal character and stable personal lives to be primary indicators of professional character. Please come prepared to present not only your work but yourselves. Partners and significant others are warmly encouraged to attend.

Nadia lowered her laptop screen.

Partners and significant others.

She was currently, as of six weeks ago, spectacularly single after a two-year relationship with a man named Aaron who had told her she was "a lot to keep up with" before walking out of the apartment they'd shared and leaving her with a lease she couldn't quite afford and a succulents collection she didn't know how to keep alive.

She had been doing well. She had been telling everyone she was doing well, and she had mostly believed it, and then this memo had arrived and now she was sitting in her office on a Thursday afternoon confronting the particular problem of having no person to bring to the thing that could change her career.

She pressed her fingers to the bridge of her nose.

"Bad news?"

The voice came from the doorway. She didn't have to look up to know who it was — that particular tone of relaxed, faintly amused confidence belonged to exactly one person in this building.

Callum Drake, Head of Brand Strategy, had the specific gift of appearing in doorways at moments of maximum inconvenience. He was leaning against the frame with his jacket off, his sleeves rolled to the elbow, holding a coffee mug that read World's Okayest Strategist in a font that suggested whoever had given it to him had done so with real feeling. He was also, incidentally, the person at this agency who she most consistently wanted to win an argument against, and the person who most consistently made that difficult.

"Nothing that concerns you," she said.

"Whitmore memo." He lifted his own phone. "I got it too."

Nadia looked at him properly. Callum Drake was, objectively, an irritant. He had been for the three years they'd worked adjacent to each other at the agency — not quite in the same department but close enough to compete for accounts, to sit across from each other in client meetings, to disagree publicly and precisely about strategy versus execution and which discipline should be leading the work. He had strong opinions about brand architecture that he was never reluctant to share. He had the particular quality of being right just often enough to be annoying about it.

He also had a jaw like it was cut from something specific, and the kind of dark eyes that landed on a thing and stayed there without flicking away, and she had spent three years categorizing these as irrelevant data points.

"Gerald Whitmore," he said, coming into her office uninvited, which he always did, "is a sixty-eight-year-old man who built his company from one hotel in rural Vermont and has never, in any documented interview, hired a vendor he didn't personally like. The account is ninety percent relationship and ten percent creative."

"I'm aware."

"You don't have a partner." He said it without cruelty — just that flat, strategic delivery that she imagined he used when presenting competitive analysis.

"Observant."

"Neither do I." He sat in the chair across from her desk without being asked, which was another thing he always did. "I have a proposal."

Nadia looked at him over her laptop screen. The late afternoon light was coming through the window behind him, which put him mostly in silhouette, which was honestly better for her concentration.

"If this is what I think it is," she said, "the answer is no."

"We go as a couple." He said it plainly, like he was proposing a project scope. "Three days. We present well, Gerald sees two stable, professionally serious people in a functioning relationship, we both have a better shot at the account. I have the strategy background he'll respond to. You have the creative vision that will excite him. Between us we're actually the strongest pitch in the building."

She let the silence sit for a moment.

"You want me to pretend to be your girlfriend."

"I want us to pretend to be in a relationship, yes. In service of a professional outcome we both benefit from."

"This is insane."

"This is Whitmore Holdings. The retainer is worth two point three million annually. Harriet will lead with you on creative if we land it. You've been in the same senior role for two years, Nadia. This is the thing that moves the needle."

She hated that he knew that. She hated that he'd framed it correctly. She hated that he was sitting in her office looking irritatingly calm about proposing they spend a weekend lying to a client about their personal lives. Most of all she hated that her brain had already run the calculation and arrived at possible before she'd consciously decided to consider it.

"Rules," she said.

He blinked — just barely, which was as close to surprised as Callum Drake ever looked. "You're considering it."

"I'm establishing parameters. If I do this, there are rules."

He set his coffee mug on her desk and leaned forward slightly, elbows on his knees, and she was aware of the shift in the room — the small reduction in distance between his side of the desk and hers.

"I'm listening," he said.