Updated Apr 6, 2026 • ~9 min read
Chapter 8: The United Front
Declan
The email from HR was six paragraphs long and contained the phrase “unique interpersonal circumstance” three times.
Declan had read it twice, put his phone face-down on his desk, and gone to make coffee. When he came back, the phrase was still there. He read it a third time and sent a single-sentence reply: *I understand. I’ll be available to meet this week.*
He could, in theory, have predicted this. He had in fact predicted something like this — he’d had three months to anticipate it, three months of knowing the announcement was coming and watching it get closer with the specific dread of someone who knew the weather was turning but hadn’t packed for rain. What he hadn’t fully accounted for was the industry.
The industry was San Francisco’s creative sector, which was small and professional and deeply invested in its own drama.
He’d told Marcus first, because Marcus had been with Parallax since the beginning and because there was no version of this Marcus didn’t deserve to hear directly. He’d sat across from him in the conference room with the glass walls — which he had retrospectively identified as a poor venue choice — and said, with the specific efficiency he brought to creative briefs: “Scarlett Hayes and I are expecting a child. She is four months pregnant. I’m telling you directly because I want you to hear it from me and because it will affect my schedule going forward.”
Marcus had looked at him for a long moment.
Then: “Scarlett Hayes. From Lumen Creative.”
“Yes.”
“Your —”
“Professional competitor. Yes.”
“How long has this been —”
“Five months, approximately.”
Marcus had covered his mouth with his hand. Then he had uncovered it. “The industry conference.”
“Yes.”
“The one where you both got the —” He made a gesture. “The best campaign award for different categories.”
“We were at the same afterparty,” Declan said. “Some things occurred.”
Marcus had made a sound that, had the glass walls not been what they were and had three members of the account team not been walking by at that exact moment, would have been a full laugh. As it was he compressed it admirably and said: “How is she?”
“She’s —” Declan thought about Scarlett at seven-fifteen with his sister’s borrowed ginger chews, Scarlett at the ultrasound gripping his hand, Scarlett in his kitchen in November methodically disassembling a creative brief she found suboptimal. “She’s excellent,” he said. “She’s completely fine.”
“Is she going to try to destroy us in Q1?”
“Almost certainly.”
Marcus nodded. “Good. I’d be concerned if she stopped. The Halcyon campaign was very strong.”
This was, Declan reflected, why he’d hired Marcus.
Lumen Creative found out three days later.
He knew because he got a text from Priya Mehta at eight-fourteen a.m. that said: *Congratulations from us over here. Very professionally impressed. Also we know now, FYI.* Then a pause of approximately four minutes. Then: *Marcus texted one of our account managers apparently. Just so you know the vector.*
He sent back: *Thank you. Please tell Scarlett I’m sorry for the vector.*
Priya: *She already knows. She’s fine. She’s alphabetizing the Q2 projections and I think she’s okay.*
He sat with that for a moment and then sent back a single thumbs-up, which was the smallest possible acknowledgment that did not require him to have feelings about Scarlett Hayes alphabetizing things under duress.
By noon, three people in the industry had texted him. Two were curious. One was a client, which was the one he’d been dreading, and the client was — to his relief — not upset, exactly, but was clearly working through a question about how this affected the Parallax account relationship, which he answered with such absolute professional clarity that the client seemed slightly chastened for having asked.
By four o’clock, it was industry gossip.
He knew because Marcus came to his office door — knocked, which Marcus rarely did, Marcus was a threshold-lingering person rather than a knocker — and said, “You and Scarlett Hayes are trending in the Pacific Coast Creative Slack.”
He looked up from the Stellaris deck. “Trending.”
“Someone called it ‘the biggest crossover event in agency history.'”
He put his pen down.
“I’m going to need you to close the door,” he said.
Marcus closed the door.
“Thank you,” Declan said, and then he sat in the silence of his office with the Stellaris deck in front of him and thought: Scarlett is going to find this either very funny or extremely problematic, and the determining factor will be who brought it to her attention and in what register.
He picked up his phone. He texted her: *I’ve been told we are trending in the Pacific Coast Creative Slack. I want you to hear it from me before someone in your building mentions it while you’re holding your coffee.*
She took four minutes to respond.
*Three people have already mentioned it. One said “iconic.” I’m handling it.*
He stared at the word *iconic.*
*That’s one word for it,* he typed back.
Her response came in thirty seconds: *The other word is “inconvenient.” We need to discuss the unified front.*
The unified front, as it turned out, was Scarlett’s term for a concept she had clearly been developing since the HR emails. She explained it on a Tuesday evening in his loft over takeout from her favorite ramen place, sitting across from him with a notepad and the expression she wore during client strategy sessions.
“We are public knowledge,” she said. “That’s done, there’s no managing it back. What we can manage is the narrative.”
“The narrative,” he said.
“Industry colleagues having a baby is manageable. It happens. What’s not manageable is two competing creative directors appearing to be at war while also pregnant with each other’s child. It reads as a liability.” She tapped her pen on the notepad. “So. When we appear at the same industry events — and there are three in the next six weeks, I’ve checked the calendar — we attend together as a unit. Not performatively. Just visibly coherent.”
He looked at her. She was four months pregnant and she’d been tired today — he could see it in the set of her shoulders, the slight tension she got when she’d been on her feet too long — but her eyes were sharp and her voice was completely steady and she was, in this moment, conducting a strategy session about their own relationship.
“You’re pitching me,” he said.
“I’m presenting a framework.”
“With a notepad.”
“I always have a notepad.”
He reached across the table and stole one of her dumplings. She watched him do it with the expression she had when she was deciding whether something was worth the fight.
“The three events,” he said. “The Craft Awards, the CCSF mixer, the Pacific Coast summit?”
“Yes.”
“And we just — arrive. Together. Leave together. Maintain a united front in between.”
“Correct.”
He looked at her. The notepad. The strategic competence of the woman. “Scarlett,” he said.
“Yes.”
“We are also having a baby. I want you to know that I am aware that the unified front and the baby are two distinct things and I’m not conflating them.”
She looked at him.
He said: “The baby is not a strategy. The unified front is a strategy. I’m in on both, but not for the same reasons.”
Something moved across her face. The notepad sat between them on the table, very organized, very Scarlett. She looked at it, then at him.
“I know that,” she said.
“Okay,” he said. “Then I’m in.”
She picked up the notepad. She wrote something at the bottom of it. He couldn’t see what, and he didn’t ask.
He stole another dumpling. She did not fight him for it.
That, he had learned, was its own kind of language.
The Craft Awards were on a Thursday. He picked her up at six-thirty — she’d been precise about six-thirty — and she was ready at six-twenty-eight, which was the most Scarlett thing possible, ready before the agreed time because she had accounted for the possibility that he would be early and had not wanted to be caught not ready.
She was in a burgundy dress that did not apologize for being on a four-months-pregnant body. He’d been halfway through a sentence when he saw her and had finished it — he was professional enough to finish sentences — but the rest of him had gone somewhere quieter.
She’d caught it. She noticed everything. “Don’t,” she said.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You were going to.”
“I was going to say the dress is —”
“I know what the dress is,” she said. “Let’s go.”
He went. He filed the sentence for later.
At the Craft Awards they were photographed twice — once by the event photographer and once by someone who appeared to be doing it for social media, the particular angle of their phone giving them away. Declan put his hand at the small of her back for the first photograph and kept it there, light and steady, and she did not remove it.
He was aware of keeping it there. He was aware of her being aware of it. He was aware that this was the thing about the unified front that Scarlett had not accounted for in her strategic framework: that performing coherence with someone you found compelling was not, in fact, performance.
He kept his hand at her back. She kept accepting it. They moved through the room and talked to people and were visibly, coherently a unit, and he thought: this is the most honest thing we’ve done at an industry event in three years.
Walking out at the end of the evening, she said: “Fourteen distinct reactions. Counting the Slack person who took the photograph.”
“I had fourteen too,” he said. “We’re developing a consensus read.”
“We are.” She was quiet for a moment in the October air, her coat held at the lapels against the cold. “It went well.”
“It did.”
She looked sideways at him. “The hand on my back. Was that for the photographer or —”
“No,” he said.
She looked forward. “Okay,” she said.
He opened the car door. She got in. He came around and started the engine and said nothing, and she said nothing, and the city moved past them in its orange-lit Friday-night way, and the hand had not been for the photographer and she knew it and he knew she knew it, and that was, for tonight, enough.
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