Here is what Margot knew about Wes Delacroix, which was more than she wanted to and less than she needed.
She knew he had come to Farrow & Lisle five years ago from a big agency in the city. She knew he could not make coffee without spilling it and could not make a storyboard without making it beautiful. She knew he hummed when he was concentrating and that he didn't know he did it.
She knew that, a year and a half ago, during the summer of the Lindqvist Outdoor pitch, they had worked late eleven nights in a row on a campaign about a family of tent makers in the north, and that on the twelfth night, when they'd won, they had climbed the fire stairs to the roof with a warm bottle of champagne someone had left in the fridge since a previous win, and sat with their legs dangling over the parapet's inner ledge, and talked until two in the morning about nothing and then about everything. Her father's hardware store, closed when she was fifteen. His mother, who sang in a choir and had wanted him to be a dentist. The kind of work they'd do if nobody was paying for it.
She knew that in the stairwell going back down he had stopped two steps below her, so that their faces were level, and said, "I'd like to take you to dinner. Not a work dinner. A dinner where I don't have to pretend I'm not thinking about you." And she knew that she had kissed him, there, in the stairwell, under the green exit sign, and that it had been the first time in a very long time that she had done something without first making a list of the risks.
They had agreed on Friday. Casa Albuquerque, the Portuguese place on Wexley Street with the blue tiles and the grilled sardines, seven-thirty.
At ten past four that Friday, she had received a text. *Can't tonight. I'm so sorry. I'll explain.*
He had never explained.
On Monday, a memo had gone out from Mr. Farrow's office with a revised staffing chart. Wes Delacroix was being moved off three accounts: Lindqvist, a regional bank, and a chain of veterinary clinics. Margot's three accounts. His associate would handle them from now on. Two weeks after that, the announcement: Wes Delacroix, Creative Director. A cake in the break room. Margot had eaten a piece of it. She had shaken his hand in front of everyone and said "Congratulations, it's deserved," and it had been, which was the worst part.
She had spent a long time afterward assuming she had imagined the stairwell. That she had misread a man tired and giddy from a win. That he had woken up on Friday and looked at her across the floor and realized it had been a mistake, and had been too much of a coward to say so, and had asked to be moved so he wouldn't have to see her face. It was easier to believe that than to believe nothing, so she believed it, and she built the courteous version of them on top of it, brick by brick.
That would have been enough, on its own. But there was also Halloran.
Halloran Dairy was a hundred-year-old family company two hours west of the city, run by a woman named Agnes Halloran who was the granddaughter of the founder and drove a truck with a cracked windshield and a calf hutch in the back. Last March, Farrow & Lisle had pitched for the account against two bigger shops. Margot had led the account side. Wes had led the creative. And Anil, who was a senior copywriter and the best writer in the building and also Margot's closest friend at work, had written the line.
*Still Here.*
That was the whole campaign. Black-and-white photographs of the Halloran family and the people who worked for them, the old ones and the young ones, in the barns at dawn, and two words. A hundred years of dairies closing, of farms sold to developers, of family names coming down off signs, and here was this one, still here. Anil had written it at two in the morning on a Tuesday and texted it to Margot and Wes at the same time, and Wes had called him right away, at two in the morning, and said, "That's it. That's the whole thing. I'll go to the wall for this."
Margot had heard him say it again, the next day, in front of the whole team. *This leads. I'll go to the wall for it.*
On the morning of the pitch, Mr. Farrow had come in early to preview the deck, as he always did, and at nine-thirty he had stepped out of the conference room and said, to no one in particular, that "Still Here" sounded like an obituary, and that a dairy should sound fresh, and that the backup line, "Fresh Since 1924," which a junior had written as a safety, should go first. And Wes had nodded. And at ten-fifteen, in front of Agnes Halloran and her two sons, when the first concept slide came up and it said *Fresh Since 1924*, Margot had watched Anil, sitting beside her, find out.
He had not made a sound. He had sat very straight and taken notes on his legal pad for the next forty minutes, and his handwriting had been perfectly steady, and she knew because she'd looked.
They won the account. Agnes Halloran chose "Fresh Since 1924" because it was the one she'd been shown first and because it was fine. Wes had given Anil a gift card to a bookstore with a note that said *Thank you for everything you brought to this.* Anil had used the gift card. He was not a dramatic person. He had simply stopped going to lunch when Wes was going, and stopped texting his best lines to anyone at two in the morning, and become, at work, a man who did exactly what was asked of him and nothing more, which for Anil was a kind of grief.
So, no. When Margot had said, in the booth, *I thought that was your specialty*, she had not only been talking about Casa Albuquerque.