The agency smelled like brewed coffee and stale ambition—the familiar combination that had been Emma's professional perfume for the past six years. Her desk was the usual island of controlled chaos: a stack of social calendars on the left, a mug with a chipped handle memorized with to-do scrawl, a lipstick case she kept for client dinners but rarely used. She had arrived early to prepare; the meeting with Liam had been penciled into her morning like a small, precise appointment she hoped would not topple the day.
He arrived ten minutes late. Of course he did. Not because he meant to be disrespectful but because his life was seeded with too many places a watch couldn't keep—investor calls, last-minute pitches, an ecosystem of obligations that had sculpted him into someone who moved fast and apologized gently.
"Emma?" He looked at her as if the name answered something. Up close, his features were less composed than from the train: the hair undone in a deliberate way, a faint shadow of stubble, laugh lines that deepened when he smiled. He carried a tablet now, and a nervous energy that sat oddly with the composed exterior.
"You're Liam." She offered her hand out of reflex and said, "Thank you for coming." That was true—if he'd stayed on the train, the deck might have been lost forever to a subway bin or a less considerate commuter.
They took a corner table by the agency window. Light flooded in sideways, catching on the fine dust in the air and making the office look like a place where ideas could be luminous for a moment before pragmatic hands shaped them. Liam set his tablet down and opened to the slides—there was a cover page that read HEART & Hart Ventures in small type, a mission statement that sounded instantly corporate, and a deck that, structurally, wanted to convert curiosity into capital.
Emma skimmed. Format first: headline, problem, solution, growth metrics—clean and competent. But something in the storytelling felt absent: an emotional center that made a user care beyond the promise of ROI. She scribbled notes in the margin.
"I need someone who gets audiences," Liam said when she put the tablet between them. "Numbers are persuasive. But numbers alone don't make a community."
She found herself nodding more than she expected. A marketer's first instinct is always to translate product into story—to humanize features into moments people could see themselves in. "This is interesting," she said honestly. "But the story is missing an actual user thread. Everything here is about what you do, not who you do it for. Start with a single person, and the rest of the deck will follow."
He listened like a person used to being heard but rarely corrected. There was a brief flicker that could have been relief—relief at being understood—then he asked, "What if the 'single person' is more of an archetype? We don't want to narrow too fast."
"You don't narrow by losing heart," Emma said. "You narrow by choosing which hearts you hand a key to."
He smiled then, the expression softer. "You're good at this."
"You could say I've been practicing being convincing for a living," she teased, and the atmosphere warmed. Their conversation threaded into the practicalities: a campaign structure, key metrics, the tone of voice the brand might carry into the market. By the time the coffee cooled, they had sketched a campaign that felt viable—lean, human, honest.
Emma sent a follow-up email after lunch with a bulleted list. She expected the usual corporate thanks-and-ghost that followed one-off consultations. Instead she got a reply that included an attachment—a sheet titled "POI — Audience Profiles." There was one extra line at the end of the message: "Also—sorry—this might be of interest. I accidentally sent this to the wrong email last night when I was cleaning my inbox. If it's sensitive, tell me and I'll delete it."
She opened the attachment. On the bottom of the second page, in a smaller font and tucked like something admitted in a whisper, she noticed a line that changed the tone of the deck: "Potential acquisition conversation — Series B." The date next to it put the action only a week away.
Emma felt a professional twinge that bordered on alarm. Acquisition chatter meant rapid changes, shifting leadership, a potential rewrite of priorities. Already she imagined deliverables rearranging themselves like dominoes. She typed back a measured response—No worries. Thanks for sharing. If anything sensitive appears, just flag it—and hit send.
Two hours later, when the agency slack pinged with internal news, the rumor that Hart Ventures was in talks with a major platform flared across their desks like a headline. Somewhere between the meeting and the ping a draft had leaked—a rough draft of a press release that matched the date in the attachment. Emma's stomach dropped with the small, precise panic of someone who could see how a few words could affect careers.
She called Liam without thinking. He answered on the second ring.
"Hey," he said. He sounded calm in that way that made the world around him feel like a machine still functioning—useful, but not comforting.
"Is it true?" Emma asked.
A pause, just long enough to register as something like a breath. "Yes. We're in preliminary discussion."
"And you—did you know this deck would get out?" Her voice was practical, but something under it was sharpened. Leaks got messy fast.
"No," he said. "Not that I know. I ran a draft to a handful of advisers. Someone must've forwarded. I'm sorry."
"You said it might be the wrong email." She remembered the line. "It was?"
He hesitated. "I meant I'd sent it to my partner by mistake. Not—this."
Emma pressed her phone to her ear, the city's white noise filtering through the line. She felt both annoyance and a strange protective tilt on behalf of something she'd only just begun to care about—not the company per se, but the art of a campaign and whether it would be bulldozed by a hurried acquisition. "Okay," she said. "Keep me updated. And if anything changes, tell me before someone else does."
She ended the call and sank back into her chair. The day moved like weather—updates and approvals, a client who wanted a last-minute tweak to a visual. But the leak had shifted the texture of everything. Where there had been curiosity there was now caution. Where there had been the possibility of a neat, professional exchange there was now the slow creep of consequence.
At home that night, Emma sat with her habit of making lists and thought of the card she'd put on the counter the night before—Liam Hart's neat email like a small promise. She liked the way he asked for help. She disliked how a simple, wrong send could ripple into rumor. She told herself the professional thing: be careful with your time; readability in the market is a currency; don't mix hearts with deadlines.
Still, when she closed her laptop she found her finger hovering over his address in her contacts. She'd replied to his morning message, suggested a point-of-contact for a press scenario, and tucked the exchange away as both a professional courtesy and a small, oddly intimate thread. Outside, the weather shifted toward snow again, as if the city was still deciding whether to remain gray or to soften into white.
Emma didn't know it yet, but the wrong email—the small human error between elastic bands and morning rushes—had placed both of them inside the same story. The question was whether they would write it as allies, or as two people who'd learn to hurt each other in the margins.