Nicole looked back at the shark mug. Silence is the real scare.
“Yeah?”
Gia’s desk, ten feet away, was a riot of color: a pink iMac, a framed photo of her rescue greyhound, and a half-finished macrame plant holder dangling from a lamp arm. She owned Dibella Designs , a small studio that hand-painted custom sneakers for athletes and influencers. She believed in intuition. Intuition was a muscle you had to stretch. And she definitely left dirty coffee mugs in the sink.
“It was the right call.” Nicole paused, wrestling with the words. “The hummus comment was out of line. It wasn’t about the hummus.”
For the next hour, she tried to ignore the tea and focus on her model. But her brain kept snagging on an anomaly. The algorithm predicted that the slasher film’s third-act twist—the killer being the heroine’s long-lost twin—would test poorly with women aged 18-34. But Gia, Nicole realized, was a woman aged 34. And Gia loved horror movies. She’d mentioned it once, offhand, while Nicole was on a call. “The best ones know when to be quiet,” she’d said. “Silence is the real scare.”