✅ My Cousin's Keeper [NaNoWriMo 2021]

106. My Big Responsibility

This bonus chapter is dedicated to Eladon. Thank you for your support on Patreon!

I kept glancing nervously at my computer all of that morning. Watching what was going on in my house. I didn't expect to see anything yet; the little creep was coming over for dinner, not lunch. But I could see how nervous Tess was. I wanted to pick her up and hug her, tell her that she didn't need to do everything for herself. That was why she needed to be a little, after all, and the sooner she accepted that the easier it would be to take away all of the adult worries plaguing her.

I would probably have taken every opportunity to see what was happening at home through the day, but I had a lot more work than usual. Almost everyone on my little team – which had grown to thirty people now – was rushed off their feet, and it was getting rare that I could even take two minutes to look at my computer. It turned out that despite SYL being the leaseholder for almost every business in Upper Ashfields, this corporate town still had a lot of moving parts that got stuck as soon as we started taking direct control of anything. That didn't entirely surprise me; the people of the town might have liked the presence of such a large corporation to manage the town, but a lot of the shop owners still liked to think of themselves as independents; and they had their own ways of organising things. Even if everyone had been briefed weeks in advance, and all the contracts signed, it was too much to expect those businesses to change all their routines to fit around the event. For one store early morning delivery might mean some time before ten, for another it might be before they opened. And yet another might have their delivery routes blocked out in ten minute chunks so they would know exactly when they would be at a given place.

Everyone was trying their best. I could be sure of that, but there were a whole bunch of different organisations working together, and they didn't have much prior experience of working as a team. It was my job to make sure that all the gears meshed smoothly, and turn this whole town into a well oiled machine. Of course, the representatives from Claughton were here too, but they had some more specialised experience for this particular conference. A dozen men in navy suits, most of whom I still couldn't remember the names of, were tasked with making sure that nobody found out exactly how many celebrities might be here, or what the purpose of this meeting was. It shouldn't be too difficult; a good portion of the guests had brought their own trailers and recreational vehicles, and after a lot of searching I'd been able to mark out a section of the many parks in Ashfields that was surrounded entirely by buildings I could take control of. Their improvised camping space was surrounded by our offices, so that the identities of the people staying there could be kept on a need-to-know basis.

"Does anybody know where the peacock is?" an irate voice screeched from the radio on my belt. I didn't recognise who was calling, but they were clearly upset about something, and I knew that a good part of my job this week would be ensuring that none of the creatives had any reason to get mad. I knew who the peacock was, as well, having picked up a lot of the nicknames that the studio's technical staff used for their more glamorous coworkers. And I knew where he should have been; I'd done my best to memorise the important parts of the schedules for each day, so that I wouldn't need to delegate quite so much.

"He should be in auditions?" I hazarded. As a former A-list star, Tyler Walthamstone had been able to demand some unusual terms on his contract, like being able to watch the auditions for his character's close relations. I seriously hoped that he wasn't going to insist on a vapid blonde, like he had allegedly done on the teen vampire movie that catapulted him to stardom. I remembered when that movie had come out, during my college days, and I was sure that it would have been better if the leading lady had been picked for more than her looks. Tags 2 deserved better. But that clause was in the peacock's contract, and so he should have been sticking his nose into auditions for his girlfriend and other cast members.