Chapter 29: The Counter

Harold did not wait for Friday.

On Monday at ten in the morning, a text from my lab lead said the Tea Rose counter at the Fifth Avenue department store was being stripped.

"A preview," Nathaniel said, reading it over my shoulder in the lab.

"Of what?"

"Of how my father negotiates."

He had come back to the lab at midnight on Sunday, and I had been waiting up in my coat.

I had asked him where he had been.

"Upstairs with my father," he said. "I asked him to call off the shelf war. He said he would think about it."

It was true, as far as it went.

I had heard that, and I had let it go.

Now I took my bag, and Nathaniel took his keys, and we went downtown together.

The department store had hung a sign the week before.

Tea Rose, Formulated by Claire Winslow. In-store event, Monday.

There was a velvet rope, a stack of gift boxes, and a morning TV crew with a camera on a tripod.

Two men in black Rhodes Maison jackets were taking bottles off the glass shelves and putting them in a cardboard crate.

A saleswoman in a pink smock stood beside them with her hands folded and tears on her face.

A line of customers had gathered at the rope.

"What's happening?" a woman asked. "I came for my mother's birthday."

"I'm sorry, ma'am," the saleswoman whispered. "We've been told to remove the line."

The regional manager hurried over with an earpiece in one ear.

"Ms. Winslow, I apologize," he said. "It's a directive from corporate. It came through the Rhodes distribution office at nine."

"Whose directive?"

"The Chairman's."

"Not the chief executive's?"

He glanced at Nathaniel and winced.

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