Chapter 26 — Max's New Oven
Martin had predicted, with reasonable confidence, that Reed Parker would materialize Saturday morning.
He had not predicted the breakfast.
At six forty-five, returning from his run, he pushed open the apartment door and found a young man he'd never met sitting at the dining table with a plate of scrambled eggs and toast, eating with the comfortable ease of someone who'd decided the kitchen was available and had acted accordingly. Thin, slightly intense, the kind of person who'd been cast in something and taken the preparation seriously.
"Morning," Martin said, dropping his keys.
Reed Parker — the grad student, the backup, the human infrastructure — looked up and nodded. "Morning."
Martin went to make coffee. This was, he decided, simply the situation.
By seven-thirty, Leonard had emerged from his room for water and had done a full stop in the kitchen doorway at the sight of the dining table, gone through several emotional phases in approximately four seconds, and was now standing against the counter with his coffee mug looking like a man watching a weather event he couldn't control.
By eight, Penny had knocked — she knocked on Saturdays now, a development that had taken approximately six weeks and which everyone had welcomed — and been introduced to Reed Parker, who had pivoted immediately from eating toast to performing a version of his own personal history that bore a reasonable resemblance to Sheldon's character notes while incorporating sufficient genuine emotional texture that it functioned.
Martin watched from the kitchen, coffee in hand.
The performance was, objectively, competent. The young man had instincts. He understood pacing — when to be specific, when to be vague, when to let a pause do the emotional work. He'd made adjustments from Sheldon's original script in the direction of something more naturalistic, which had prompted Sheldon to appear at his shoulder and conduct what could only be described as real-time direction.
"The middle child dynamic should be more prominent here," Sheldon said, in what he apparently believed was a whisper. "Professor Bourbon's thirty-year longitudinal study established clear behavioral markers. You're underselling the parental neglect component."
Reed Parker turned and said, at an actual whisper: "I'm going off-script because the script reads like a psychology textbook."
"The script is a psychology textbook. That's the point. Peer-reviewed behavioral patterns are more credible than invented ones."
"Peer-reviewed behavioral patterns in a script delivered by a person to another person in a living room don't — that's not how—" Reed Parker stopped, looked at Sheldon's expression, and made a decision. "Fine."
He turned back to Penny.
"I know running from the facility disappointed everyone," he said, with a quiet that worked considerably better than the textbook version would have. "But the beds were like sleeping on a park bench and the windows were about this big." He held up his hands to indicate a small rectangle. "After six months, I just needed to see a sky that wasn't framed."
Penny, who had been sitting cross-legged on the couch with her coffee, nodded slowly.
Leonard, watching from the kitchen, had the expression of someone watching a con succeed and not knowing whether to be relieved or horrified.
Martin caught Leonard's eye across the room.
Leonard mouthed: what do I do.
Martin mouthed back: nothing. Let it run.
From the couch, Penny patted Reed Parker's arm. "You don't have to explain yourself to me."
Reed Parker, who was apparently a decent human being underneath the performance, looked briefly and genuinely moved by this. Then he caught himself and modulated back to character.
Martin finished his coffee and went to shower.
Monday arrived the way Mondays arrived — with the specific energy of a week that had opinions about how it was going to go.
Martin pulled the 911 into the building garage at eight-nineteen and took the elevator to the lobby, which was where he encountered Harvey Specter getting out of a car that was very clearly not a vehicle Harvey had driven himself. Black Lincoln, extended, a driver who pulled away without being told to.
Harvey believed that lawyers should think at all times and that driving was an inefficient use of thinking time. Martin had always found this slightly ironic given that some of his better ideas had arrived on the highway, but Harvey's position was Harvey's position.
"Good morning," Martin said, because as the junior member of their working relationship he generally spoke first, which Harvey had noted once and never mentioned again.
"Monday," Harvey said, which from Harvey was a greeting.
They walked through the lobby together, showed their badges, and stopped at the elevator bank.
"Big week?" Martin said.
"Wyatt Communications patent acquisition." Harvey looked at the elevator indicator. "Someone's trying to consolidate their portfolio in the distributed wireless sector. Wyatt holds three patents that are worth considerably more as part of a bundle than individually."
"Who's the buyer?"
"Currently anonymous. Which means either a private equity structure or someone who doesn't want the target to know they're coming." The elevator arrived. "Either way, interesting."
They got in. The elevator, as sometimes happened at this hour, was occupied by a collection of people who had clearly been waiting and who reorganized themselves with the specific choreography of an elevator that had suddenly become more interesting than it had been.
Martin and Harvey exchanged the briefest possible glance.
"Forty-three," Martin said.
"Forty-four," Harvey said.
The doors closed.
Harvey, after a moment of silence that was technically professional: "I owe you something."
Martin looked at him.
"Mike," Harvey said. "Louis's leverage was the drug test. Mike didn't know the test was clean because I hadn't told him." He was looking at the elevator doors. "You told him to trust that I'd handled it. You were right."
"You would have handled it anyway."
"I did handle it," Harvey agreed. "Two days later than I would have if Mike had come to me directly instead of deciding to manage it himself." A pause. "Which he did because he didn't know he could come to me directly."
Martin absorbed this. "Communication gap."
"Which you filled." Harvey's expression didn't change, but something adjacent to acknowledgment crossed it. "So. Thank you."
Martin nodded once. "How's he doing?"
"He's going to be fine," Harvey said, in the specific tone that meant: he's going to be better than fine and I won't say more than that.
The elevator opened at thirty-eight. Several people got out. The remaining occupants rearranged.
"The Tesla," Martin said.
Harvey's expression moved approximately two millimeters. "What about it."
"The Roadster. They're doing limited allocation for the first production run." Martin pulled out his phone and opened a contact. "I know someone at the company. Not Elon — someone in the allocation office. If you want to be on the list, I can make a call."
Harvey looked at him. "You know someone at Tesla."
"I know someone at most places," Martin said. "It's a byproduct of knowing a lot of people before they became the people they became."
The elevator opened at forty-three.
Martin stepped out. Turned back briefly. "Let me know."
Harvey's expression, for approximately one second, was the expression of someone who'd been surprised again and was noting it for later.
The doors closed.
Martin was halfway down the forty-third floor corridor when he saw her.
Max Black, in her regular clothes — jeans, a jacket that had seen significant use, her hair doing what her hair did — was coming out of the kitchen area carrying an empty flat box with the efficient purposefulness of someone who'd completed a task and was moving to the next one.
She saw him and stopped.
"First delivery done," she said.
"How'd it go?"
"The pantry lady — Carla — looked at me like I was bringing contraband. Then she opened the first box and now she wants my number." Max adjusted the empty box under her arm. "Also two people from the floor above came down specifically. I don't know how word travels that fast."
"This building has excellent gossip infrastructure," Martin said. "It's one of its better qualities."
Max looked at him. She looked, he noted, like someone who'd been awake since two-thirty in the morning.
"When do you babysit?" he said.
"Noon. I'm going home to sleep for three hours first." She paused. "I gave notice this morning, by the way. The babysitting job. Last week is next week."
"That's the right call."
"It freed up my afternoon, which is what you told me it would." She said it matter-of-factly, the way Max said things she'd decided not to make complicated. "The oven situation is the next thing."
Martin had been thinking about this since Friday.
"I know what I want to give you for Thanksgiving," he said.
Max looked at him with the immediate wariness of someone who'd learned that Martin's gift suggestions tended to be structurally unusual.
"The oven," he said. "New equipment. Commercial grade, appropriate for the volume you're running. Installed before the holiday week, which means you have it for the holiday baking surge."
"Martin—"
"This isn't charity," he said, before she could build momentum. "I've made this same offer to every client relationship I care about long-term. One percent of the business, non-diluting, transferred to the Hope Foundation — same structure as the Mutual Aid agreements, same structure as Han's arrangement. I provide resources that accelerate the timeline. The Foundation gets a small stake in what you build. You get equipment you'd spend two months saving for." He paused. "The oven costs me one afternoon and a check. It costs you one percent of something you haven't built yet. That's not a bad trade for either of us."
Max was quiet.
"Also," Martin said, "if you have a larger oven, you can sleep forty-five minutes longer every morning because you're running fewer batches. Which means you show up here looking less like someone who's been awake since before the city started."
Max looked at the ceiling briefly.
"You do that thing," she said.
"What thing."
"Where you make the logical case so completely that disagreeing feels like arguing against math."
"I learned it in law school," Martin said. "They call it oral argument. Lawyers call everything something formal so it sounds like we invented it."
"Do you know what Facebook is?" Max said, suddenly.
Martin blinked at the pivot. "Reasonably well."
"Han was showing me. He got tagged in like thirty photos and kept—" she waved a hand— "anyway. Are you on it?"
"I'm on it."
"The founder is your client."
"He is."
Max stared at him. "Can you get Beyoncé to accept my friend request?"
Martin thought about this seriously. "That's genuinely outside what I can do. Beyoncé's digital presence is managed by a team of people whose entire job is deciding who Beyoncé interacts with online. I have no leverage there."
"What about Britney?"
"Also no."
"Taylor Swift just started—"
"Max."
"Right." She looked at the empty box. "The oven."
"The oven," Martin confirmed.
She was quiet for a moment.
"You choose the oven, though," Martin said. "You know what you need. I'm just signing the check."
Max looked at him. "You're a very strange person to be friends with, you know that?"
"I've been told."
"Okay." She said it simply, without ceremony, the way Max made decisions once she'd made them. "But I want to go look at them first. I'm not having someone deliver me a kitchen appliance I didn't personally vet."
"Absolutely."
"And I want Caroline there. She has opinions about ovens."
"She can be there."
"And Earl."
Martin paused. "Earl wants to come look at commercial ovens?"
"Earl wants to be included in things," Max said. "He doesn't have a lot of people who include him in things."
Martin looked at her for a moment — at the practical matter-of-factness of this, the way she'd said it without sentiment but with complete seriousness.
"Then Earl comes," he said.
Max picked up her empty box. "Saturday. I'll text you."
She headed for the elevator.
Martin watched her go, then turned back toward his office.
Behind him, somewhere in the building, the first batch of Monday morning cupcakes was doing what it always did — moving through the pantry, down the corridors, out into the working day of a law firm full of people who had not previously considered that a cupcake operation run out of a Brooklyn apartment by a twenty-four-year-old who'd never graduated high school could produce something better than the catered options they'd been settling for.
They were settling no longer.
Martin sat at his desk, opened the Wyatt Communications file that Harvey had mentioned in the elevator, and started reading.
The week had begun.
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