V2: The Glass Conservatory

It had been raining in London for what Clara Beaumont suspected was the entire month of October. Not the dramatic, torrential rain of movie scenes - just a persistent, patient drizzle that seeped into everything and made you question, at some point around week three, whether the sky had simply given up on the concept of blue.

Clara's office on the fourteenth floor of a building on Cannon Street had windows that proved the rain existed, but only as a suggestion. From inside, the city was a watercolor painting done by someone who remembered what London looked like but couldn't quite manage the details.

"You're staring at the rain again," said Priya from the next desk over. "It's going to rain tomorrow, too. I checked."

"I wasn't staring," Clara said. "I was thinking."

"About the Ashworth deal?"

"About whether glass has memory."

Priya paused, her finger hovering over her keyboard. "You're going to have to explain that one, because I'm not sure I want to."

Clara turned back to her monitor and opened the Ashworth file. She'd been working on it for three weeks - a corporate restructuring that involved moving assets from one entity to another in a way that was legal, technically sound, and made Clara feel like she was arranging furniture in someone else's house while the owner watched from somewhere else entirely.

"The client wants the conservatory project included," she said, reading from the document. "But the conservatory project hasn't been approved. It's still in the proposal phase."

"The client always wants what isn't approved," Priya said. "That's what makes them clients and not just people who've already bought everything they wanted."

The meeting with the client was scheduled for 3 PM. Clara prepared her presentation with the methodical care she applied to everything, knowing that in her world, preparation was the closest thing to control anyone ever got.

At 2:47 PM, the elevator doors opened and a man walked into the conference room before the client had even arrived. He was tall, wearing a coat that had clearly survived the walk through rain without showing a single drop of dampness, and he carried a small potted plant in one hand as though it were the most normal thing in the world.

"Sorry I'm early," he said, setting the plant on the table. It was a small fern, delicate and green and impossibly alive in a building that had felt like a tomb that morning. "I'm Sebastian. Sebastian Hart. I believe we're about to become very familiar with each other."

Clara looked at the fern. She looked at Sebastian. She looked back at the fern, which was now apparently the most important thing in the room.

"You brought a plant to a corporate meeting," she said.

"I brought a friend," he corrected. "Plants are better listeners than people. They don't interrupt, they don't check their phones, and if you're wrong, they just quietly continue growing, which is honestly a better strategy than most I've seen in this building."

The fern, Clara decided, was going to be the most insightful member of the negotiation team.

Author Note & Copyright: