She Ate My Lunch for Free Every Day—Until Six Tins of Luxury Caviar Arrived novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Six Tins
Six tins of caviar arrive, Cassidy eats one in front of the floor, and Althea sends her a bill for 481 lunches and a tin. The card in the box is signed C., and Killian is looking at her.
On the morning the caviar came, my ledger said Cassidy Dunne had eaten four hundred and eighty-one of my lunches.
The ledger was a green spiral notebook in my top drawer.
It had one line per lunch, priced at a flat six dollars, ingredients only, no labor and no markup.
The first line was two years old.
I had never sent a bill.
I had just kept writing.
On the fourteenth floor, my lunch bag went into the shared fridge as usual.
It was navy, with a laminated card on the front that said MY LUNCH. HANDS OFF.
I had drawn a crown on the card so nobody could say it wasn't official.
Above the fridge hung the office manager's sign: FRIDGE CLEARED FRIDAY.
Under it, in marker, somebody had added SAME PEOPLE ALWAYS GET A PASS.
Nobody knew who had written it, and nobody had taken it down.
Downstairs, the lobby guard had already eaten his half of my turkey sandwich, as he did every morning.
His name was Otis, and he had told me the elevator was making a noise again.
At 9:40 a courier came out of the elevator with a cooler and said, "Brannigan?"
"That's me."
"Sign here. Keep it refrigerated."
Inside, packed in ice, were six round tins with gold crowns on the lids.
The packing slip said luxury caviar, two hundred and forty dollars each.
An envelope was taped to the lid of the top tin.
My team lead was already calling stand-up, so I put the envelope in my blazer pocket and carried the cooler to the fridge.
I lined the six tins up on the top shelf and stuck a yellow note in front of them.
SIX TINS. MINE.
Cassidy came by with her mug on her way to the printer and stopped.
"Althea. Are those real?"
"They're real."
"Who died?"
"Nobody. They're mine."
"Obviously they're yours." She smiled and squeezed my arm. "Yesterday's lemon chicken was a five, by the way. Best thing in this building."
She left a star rating on every container she returned.
It was the nicest thing anyone on this floor did for me.
I went to stand-up.
Killian Pembroke led it from the end of the table, holding his chipped TEAM LEAD mug and not looking at anyone.
He had sat three desks from mine for two years.
The first line in my ledger was dated the Monday after Dennis from accounts packed his desk.
That was the day Cassidy first ate my lunch, and Killian had looked at his screen then too.
When my lunch vanished, he looked at his screen, and he had looked at his screen four hundred and eighty-one times.
Twenty minutes later I walked back past the fridge, and the top shelf had five tins on it.
I stopped.
I peeled off my yellow note, wrote $240 EACH under MINE, and stuck it back.
It looked the same, only more expensive.
So I moved the five remaining tins into my lunch bag, zipped it, and carried it to my desk.
That was when I heard the spoon.
Cassidy was perched on the corner of the intern's desk with a cracker in one hand and an open tin in the other.
Six people were watching her.
She closed her eyes and said, "It tastes like the ocean got promoted."
The intern said, "Is that, like, a lot of money?"
"Two hundred and forty dollars," I said.
"Put it on my tab!" said Cassidy, and everybody laughed.
They laughed because there had never been a tab.
Cassidy knew that, and so did I.
I opened my top drawer and took out the green notebook.
"What's that?" the intern asked.
"A tab."
I turned to the last page and wrote: Caviar, 1 tin, $240.00.
Under it I wrote the total.
Four hundred and eighty-one lunches at six dollars was $2,886.00.
With the tin, it was $3,126.00.
I opened the payment app on my phone and sent Cassidy a request for that amount.
In the note field I typed: 481 lunches, 1 tin. Itemized copy attached.
Then I photographed all forty-one pages of the ledger and sent those too.
Cassidy's phone buzzed on the desk.
She read it, and the smile stayed exactly where it was.
"Aw, Althea," she said. "You kept receipts."
She peeled a yellow note off the intern's pad, wrote on it, and pressed it to my monitor.
It said: Invoice, 1 star. Needs a tip.
The floor went quiet for about a second, and then someone said, "That's just Cass."
I sat down and took the envelope out of my blazer pocket.
Inside was a card with six words on it, in blue pen.
I owe you more than six tins. C.
There were two Cs on the fourteenth floor.
One of them was licking a spoon.
I looked up.
Killian Pembroke had stopped looking at his screen.
He was looking at me.
I took my pen and wrote his initial at the top of a clean page.
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