I Hear You

The thing Melissa said was about a brand they'd both worked with two years ago, at a different agency, in a different city, before any of this existed.

She said it in the back of the Marfa office, in the narrow room they used for calls and overflows - the room that faced east and got the mid-morning light and had two low chairs and a plant that Jayme had put there two seasons ago and been taking care of ever since, the way she took care of things, reliably and without making it a conversation.

"We handled it wrong," Melissa said.

Jayme looked at her. Not with surprise - with the careful attention of a person who has been waiting for a particular sentence without knowing exactly what it was going to sound like.

The brand had been a small natural foods company, family-owned, trying to grow into national distribution. They'd come to the agency with a straightforward brief and the brief had been correct - the product was real, the founders were genuine, the market was there - and the agency had done technically competent work and the client had grown and the relationship had ended well enough. And yet. And yet Melissa had always known, in the place where you know things that don't make it into the debrief, that they had read the founders wrong. Had treated them like a small account when they were actually a case study in miniature - the kind of people whose instincts were almost always right and whose trust, once you had it, would have compounded in ways the agency had not been positioned to see.

"We played it safe," Melissa said. "Every time they wanted to go further, we talked them back to what we knew would work. And it worked. And I've been thinking about it for two years because I don't think working was the same as being right."

Jayme was quiet. The plant in the corner moved slightly in the air from the window. Outside, Chloe was on a call, her voice audible but not the words.

"I know why we did it," Jayme said. "We were six months out of a bad quarter."

"I know."

"It wasn't cowardice. It was - "

"Scar tissue," Melissa said. And then: "I know. I'm not criticizing the choice." She paused. "I'm saying I've thought about it because I don't want to be in that position again. On the other side of the table from something real that's asking for more than we're ready to give."

Jayme considered this for a long moment, the way she considered things she was taking seriously. "Is this about the pitch," she said.

"Not directly," Melissa said. "Maybe adjacently."

"Adjacently," Jayme repeated, with the dry edge she brought to everything that was being said in an oblique direction.

"I'm not pitching you right now," Melissa said. "I'm just - " She stopped. She tried again. "I wanted to tell you that I've been thinking about the tendency to protect the thing by not pushing it. And I think the tendency isn't wrong, but I think it has a cost, and I wanted to say that out loud to you, not in a meeting, not as a briefing, just - here."

Jayme was quiet for another moment. Then she said: "I hear you."

That was all. Not yes, not no, not the gentle tabling. Just: I hear you. Which was not the same as anything Jayme had said before, and Melissa knew the difference, and let it sit.

They went back to work. The day moved. Mindy was still in Dallas and nobody mentioned it again and the absence kept doing what absences do - making space for things that only fit when the room is arranged differently.

Melissa did not open the pitch document. She didn't need to. She'd said the thing that needed to be said before the pitch, and the pitch could wait.

This entry is part of The Marfa Munchies, a daily fiction podcast from The Marfa Strategy.

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