“Dassi.” It was a statement, and she thought her stomach had sunk to her toes, but it managed to sink even further

There was really, really nothing Dassi loved more than quarterly meetings when her sales team knocked their projections out of the park. Meeting mornings were her favorite; she always swung by the coffee shop early and bought fresh coffee and a box of mini muffins, then gave her Google slides a last once-over in the conference room before everyone else filed in. They might have their Monday faces firmly in place, but Dassi was at peace, feeling calm and confident.

Her stepfather-slash-boss opened the meeting with his usual motivational introduction, and Dassi surveyed her team with a little twinge of satisfaction for the well-rounded staff she’d curated, a job that had taken the better part of the last year. Now, finally, they got along well, strategized together, complemented each other’s strengths. It was nice when the pieces fell into place.

Her stepfather wrapped up his intro, so she plugged the conference room’s HDMI into her laptop. The huge wall-mounted screen blinked awake and mirrored hers; she set her slides to full screen and jumped in.

“Good morning, everyone! I’m starting, as always, with good news. ROI for this quarter on marketing and sales expenditures is up to 9:1, after a particularly successful targeted campaign with Beechwood Hospital. This year we did an administrator breakfast with a make-a-wish component, donating prizes to causes that were important to the administrators themselves, which resulted in a record-breaking—”

Her phone rang, the ringtone cutting into her train of thought. “Sorry, guys.” She grinned and reached for her phone to reject the call and silence her phone. That was strange. Why was Ari calling her in the middle of the morning? They’d only really spoken on the phone twice, both brief calls to set up dates, and that was usually after their workdays. She shrugged mentally and clicked to the next slide on her laptop. The huge screen on the wall mimicked her movements.

“As I was saying,” she continued. The screen showed a truly impressive number, and she was excited to give her team the public recognition they deserved. Suddenly, a flurry of incoming push notifications crowded the lower left corner of her screen, each delivered with its own smug little ba-bum!

Wait! WhatsApp Web was open?

A Steiner: Call me

A Steiner: Pick up the phone

A Steiner: Hello??

You have new messages, the notifications wizard said unhelpfully, and mercifully the pinging stopped.