The Elf Widow

Muffins

David didn't notice Aubrey's second gift until he'd spent an hour updating his comprehensive to do list. At the highest level, the Kate's Time app categorized this work as the focus of his core drive to be truly self-actualized. At the level of which tasks he'd have to do, delegate, defer or dump today, he felt like he was slogging through a bog of toxic sludge. By the time he decided to retrieve one of the bottles of cold-brew coffee he'd stashed in the fridge the day before, his head was pounding.

In the middle of the kitchen, sat a platter of muffins. So that's why Aubrey had flour on her arms the night before. What's more, the platter sat on a small table that hadn't been there when he'd left. In fact, he didn't remember seeing it in any of the farmhouse's five rooms. He hated to think she'd dragged it up from the cellar all by herself. She could have hurt her back.

David sighed. Another thing to add to his list—update their workplace injury compensation.

He rubbed his forehead with one hand and picked up a muffin with the other. As he raised it to his lips, he caught whiff of clover and meadowsweet. Pealing back the paper, he spied blossoms mixed into the batter. Aubrey really knew her stuff. Only the highest of high-end tea rooms on Buchanan Street could even come close.

With one bite, David's tension lifted. But his sense of well-being lasted all of twenty minutes. That's when Zain and Zandy, his twin programmers, walked through the door already enmeshed in one of their usual arguments. They took one look at their side-by-side desks and stopped cold.

"One monitor?" Zandy tugged on her long blonde hair. "You expect my brother to code a world-class app using one monitor?"

Ach, no. When Alexandria McNab fussed with her hair major snags in the workday were sure to follow. "The laptop computers have screens," David said in the cheeriest voice he could muster. "Open them up and you have two screens."

Zain bent down to scrutinize the specifications on the backs of the offending equipment. "Where did you get these? They're ancient. My sister deserves better."

From Glasgow's second-best refurbished IT equipment outlet. David forced himself to smile. At least a common enemy—him—had stopped the twins' fight. "They're only a couple of years—"

"Zandy needs a touchscreen—something she can stand on its side to mimic a mobile's dimensions. How else can she align the look and feel of the computer app and the mobile app people who use both don't get confused?"

Maybe by comparing how the app looks on her computer and her actual phone? David clasped his hands in his lap. Mentally he weighed the unholy cost of the state-of-the-art set up of two computers and four monitors each twin had at their previous location versus the deal-destroying cost of both of them walking out the door.

"Of course, you'll have more screens. They're coming tomorrow." If I request a special rush from The Second Coming website and pick them up myself. David massaged the knot forming in the middle of his forehead. Giving in like this didn't mean just two additional screens for each of the twins. It meant two more for everyone—except him. And what if the intern expected more equipment than her personal laptop too? 

When Kate's Time's graphic artist, Ryan Gosman, swept open the door, David's fear was confirmed. "Don't worry, Goz," Zandy called out. "The rest of our workstation equipment is arriving tomorrow."

Ryan cocked his big shaggy head to one side, setting his tan bull hide fedora askew. "What are we supposed to do until then?"

David glanced at the over-sized hand-tooled leather portfolio tucked under Ryan's arm. His long-time creative colleague still relied on pencil-and-paper for the initial stages of his work. No amount of eye-rolling and logic could budge him, yet now he was insisting he couldn't work without multiple screens?