Cosmic by celeste, p.5
Cosmic by Celeste, page 5
He feels the world tilt. “You’re kidding.”
She holds up a hand. “Let me finish. Richard is the interim CEO. He’ll try to gut the place, sell the fragrance arm, maybe the whole division. The Board will support him unless you intervene. They hate risk, and they think you’re a liability, but you own fifty-one percent. That’s enough.”
Thad stares at her, unsure if this is some test or the way rich people plan for death.
“I don’t know anything about running a company,” he says.
“You know people. You know how to survive. That’s more than most CEOs have going for them.”
He shakes his head. “I’m a mess. I tour with a band that can’t keep a manager for more than six months. I can’t even keep a plant alive. Why would you put this on me?”
“Because you’re my son,” she says, matter-of-fact. “And because I’ve spent my whole life building something real, something that should outlive me. Do you think your band is chaotic? Try running a startup in the ’90s, with everyone betting you’d crash and burn. But I didn’t because I refused to let anyone else have the last word.” She sets her coffee down hard. “I refuse it still.”
He stands and paces the small rectangle of space between her bed and the window. “This is insane. You’ve spent my whole life telling me to stay out of the way, to find my own thing, to…”
“I lied,” she says, cutting him off. “Or maybe I was wrong. Either way, you’re it. I need you to do this, Thad.”
He runs a hand through his hair and feels the grease and the leftover product, the residue of someone else’s world. “I don’t even know where to start.”
“Start by showing up. There’s a meeting tomorrow. Natalie will brief you. Everything else, you’ll fake until it stops being fake.” She looks at him, the old steel back in her face. “Don’t let Richard destroy it. Don’t let the Board bully you. And don’t let them convince you that you’re not worth the risk.”
He laughs, bitter and hollow. “I’m not.”
“You are,” she says. “I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t believe it. You’ve always been more than you let on.”
He wants to argue, to tell her she’s wrong, but he can’t. Instead, he sinks into the visitor’s chair, hands buried in the pockets of his jacket.
She reaches out and takes his hand. The grip is weak but deliberate. “You’re my last shot,” she says. “Promise me you’ll try.”
He closes his eyes. He thinks of the shows, the noise, the way a crowd can turn on you if you hesitate even a second. He thinks of his mother, all bone and willpower, trying to fix the world from a hospital bed.
“I promise,” he says.
She lets go, leans back, and closes her eyes. “Good. Now, let me nap. I have to look presentable for my deathbed tomorrow.”
He laughs despite himself. “You’re impossible.”
She smiles, eyes still closed. “So are you. That’s why I love you.”
He watches her drift off, the slow rise and fall of her chest, and wonders if he’s made the worst promise of his life.
He hopes not.
But he knows better.
The cab ride uptown is a silent film. Thad stares out the window, watching the neighborhoods change from high-rise chaos to the tidy, gated calm of old money. The driver doesn’t say a word, threads through the avenues, drops him on a side street in the Eighties, and vanishes.
The townhouse is smaller than he remembers, but maybe that’s him, grown-up or at least stretched out. He lets himself in with the code, the click of the lock echoing down the hallway. The air is the same: cedar and polish and the faint ghost of something floral, his mother’s signature blend. The foyer is a time capsule featuring a modernist bench, stacked art books, and a cluster of silver umbrella stands. Everything is in its place.
He drifts through the rooms, fingertips grazing the curated surfaces—living room, with its brutalist sofas and impossible coffee table. The library was still lined with first editions and a collection of rare vinyl that was strictly off-limits, even in high school. The kitchen is cold and immaculate, save for a single mug in the sink.
Upstairs, the master suite is empty, the bed perfectly made, the walk-in closet a riot of silk and tweed. Jocelyn’s vanity is cluttered with bottles, the glass trays arranged like chess pieces, every perfume and serum aligned with military precision. He sees her there, reflected in the triptych mirror, putting on her armor before a big meeting or a worse argument.
He stops before the perfume cabinet, a display case built into the wall. Hundreds of bottles, some antique, some designed by his mother herself. Each one has a memory: a birthday, a launch party, a holiday in Paris or Tokyo. He lifts one, a faceted glass thing with a silver atomizer, and the scent blasts him back to grade school, to the way she used to lean in and kiss his cheek before sending him out into the world. There were days he hated it, the way her smell clung to him, marking him as hers. Now, he can’t get enough.
He puts the bottle back, careful not to disturb the symmetry.
His old bedroom is exactly as he left it, vintage posters, a battered Fender on the stand, the same sheets he remembers from high school. It feels staged and preserved for future anthropologists to study. He sits on the edge of the bed, then lies back and stares at the ceiling. It’s cracked, with paint peeling in one corner.
His phone vibrates in his pocket. A text from the band:
U alive? Berlin wants an encore.
He types a reply, deletes it, and then tosses the phone across the room. It lands in a pile of laundry, which is somehow comforting.
He closes his eyes and listens to the house. It creaks and sighs, expanding and contracting with the weather like a living thing. He’s never felt so alone, but at the same time, it’s the most real he’s felt in months.
Sleep comes, but it’s thin, shot through with dreams of runways and hospitals and the scent of cold flowers.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
He wakes in the dark to the vibration of his phone, the screen strobing through the cracks of his eyelids. For a second, he thinks he’s missed soundcheck, or an airport transfer, or that the band’s manager is screaming at him for skipping another interview. Then he remembers New York, the townhouse, his mother’s hospital bed.
He fumbles for the phone and answers reflexively. “Yeah?”
It’s not Natalie this time. It’s a nurse, a voice professional, and soft-spoken. “Mr. Hastings? Your mother’s condition has changed. You should come in as soon as you can.”
The cold in his gut is instant, total. He pulls on yesterday’s clothes, ignores the stench of his own body, and is out the door in under two minutes. The city is a maze of empty avenues, cabs few and far between, but he flags one and shoves cash at the driver. “Mount Sinai. Fast as you can.”
The drive is a blur of sodium lights and silent streets. He tries to text the band, Natalie, or anyone, but his fingers won’t work. He lets the phone drop into his lap and stares out the window, willing the buildings to move faster.
At the hospital, the night shift has turned the place into a crypt. The lobby is deserted except for a security guard dozing in a plastic chair. Upstairs, the corridors are dim, lights low, as if the whole place is holding its breath.
At the nurse’s station, two women confer in whispers. One of them, a tall woman with braids and calm eyes, spots Thad and beckons him over. “She’s in the same room,” the nurse says. “Family has already arrived.”
He hesitates outside the door. Through the glass, he sees a cluster of people: his uncle Richard, hair slicked and suit perfect even at 2 a.m.; two cousins he barely knows, both glued to their phones; and a pair of older women who might be family or legal, it’s hard to tell. They all look up when he enters.
Richard is the first to speak. “You made good time.”
Thad nods, unwilling to give the man anything more.
“Doctor will be by soon,” Richard adds, already scanning the room for someone more useful. The cousins look at Thad, then away, then back at their screens.
No one sits. No one speaks.
The next ten minutes are agony, a stand-off of forced calm and old family politics. At one point, Richard leans in, voice low. “She was proud of you, you know. Even if she couldn’t say it.”
Thad ignores him.
The doctor arrives young, clean-shaven, and exhausted. He gathers them in the hallway and delivers the news without a preamble. “Her organs are shutting down. We’re keeping her comfortable, but she is unlikely to regain consciousness. If you want to say goodbye, now is the time.”
There are tears, quiet, efficient tears from the women. Richard nods, jaw working.
Thad stands in the corridor, watching his own hands tremble. He feels the world contracting to a single, blinding point.
They file in, one by one, to say their goodbyes.
The night drags. Every hour is its own universe: people come and go, say what they need to say, and then leave for the next shift of waiting. Richard sits for a while, murmurs prayers or curses or both, then stands and disappears down the hall. The cousins take turns but mostly hover near the vending machines, faces lit by phone screens. The older women hold hands and speak in low, urgent voices. No one tries to talk to Thad.
He spends most of the night in the chair by Jocelyn’s bed, one hand wrapped around hers, the other on his knee, white-knuckled. He tells her stories about the band, about Berlin, and about the time he broke his wrist in seventh grade when she made him sign his own cast so he wouldn’t forget the pain. He apologizes for every argument, every slammed door, every year he spent pretending she wasn’t the only person who ever cared what happened to him.
He tells her, “I’ll try. I’ll do my best. I’m sorry I didn’t do it sooner.”
Her hand never tightens, never twitches. The only thing keeping the room from going silent is the steady beep of the monitor and the occasional hiss of the oxygen line.
Outside, the city starts to wake up. Thad watches the light shift from black to blue to a thin, gold streak as the sun climbs the skyline. He’s bone-tired, eyes burning, but he refuses to sleep.
At 5:42, the monitor’s rhythm stumbles. He notices but doesn’t react. Maybe it’s a sensor. Perhaps a nurse will fix it. But the line on the screen flattens, then spikes and drops again.
The room fills with a nurse, a doctor, and another nurse, all moving with the practiced speed of people who do this every day. They check her pulse, her eyes, and her chest, but Thad knows even before they say it.
“She’s gone,” the doctor says, gentle but absolute.
Richard is behind him, hand on his shoulder. “She was the toughest person I ever knew,” he says.
Thad nods, but he can’t speak. He watches as the staff removes the IVs, unhooks the monitors, and closes Jocelyn’s eyes. There’s a moment where it’s him and her, the world reduced to a single, quiet breath.
He tries to stand, but his legs don’t work. He grips the rail of the hospital bed, knuckles white, and sobs. Not the silent, manly tears his mother would have approved of, but raw, ugly, shattering grief.
She’s gone. For real, forever.
And he’s alone.
CHAPTER TWELVE
At this hour, the lab is a vessel of pure intention, bleached white and sleepless, humming with the low mechanical insistence of the refrigerators and the soft, uterine rush of the climate system. Forty floors above the financial thrum, Celeste leans into the stillness and lets it pressurize her, the world reduced to a grid of glass benches, stainless hoods, and a personal perimeter marked by the blue-white fluorescence of her bench lamp.
She wears the day’s uniform: sleeveless navy sheath, the collar sharp enough to cut citrus, hair in a coil so tight it radiates tension. Every inch of her is tuned for function, but never at the expense of style; the watch, the shoes, the frameless lens perched at the tip of her nose for reading microprint. She is alone except for the company of tools and the ghosts of last night’s failed batches, lined up like war casualties at the back edge of the workspace.
The Cosmic line is in its final phase, and so is she. Three iterations remain, each a fine adjustment on the molecular knife’s edge between anticipation and ruin. She measures base alcohol, weighs out dry-down fixative, and then, with the controlled delicacy of a surgeon, siphons two microliters of the custom top note: a blend so unstable she has to keep it sealed under argon, else the volatile esters will cannibalize themselves by morning.
She assembles her scent strip bouquet, a dozen identical white slivers, fans them out, and begins the test: dip, count, shake, wait, inhale. The protocol is pure choreography; her hands are steady, even when her mind jumps ahead three steps, already remixing, predicting, and preparing for the next setback. She has not eaten in sixteen hours and barely slept in double that, but there is nothing in her bearing to suggest fatigue, only the hungry light in her eyes, each assessment precise and instant.
First strip: the opening is a vertical leap, effervescent, a flash of ozone and unripe citrus, but it collapses too soon, the aldehydes blinking out before the second inhale. She documents the note in her lab book, then moves on to the next, and the next. Each time, she narrows the error. By the seventh, her heart accelerates: the sequence is correct, the transitions clean, and the base that has haunted her for six months —iris and metallic musk —emerges on schedule, then lingers on her skin, cold and endless as deep space.
She stands, shoulders back, and tests the air again. The scent blooms and recedes in invisible waves, never overpowering, never lost. She thinks this is it. Not a product, not even a solution, an actual, physical fact. It exists, and it is hers.
She wants to savor the moment, to write it in the book of perfect days, but the click of heels down the hall cracks the surface tension. She turns, frown already loaded, as the door slides open without a knock.
Maya, the junior assistant, collapses visibly. Her lab coat is askew, one sleeve caught on a pipette tip; her face is mottled pink above her mask.
“Ms. Bellamy.” Breathless, one hand white-knuckling a clipboard, the other trembling with the effort of not dropping it. “There’s a call. For you. From upstairs.”
Celeste suppresses the urge to correct her posture. “It’s two hours before the executive meeting. Is this a drill or an emergency?”
Maya’s jaw works, lips parting and closing twice before sound emerges. “They said to tell you it’s official. Jocelyn Hastings is dead. Effective as of an hour ago. Richard Fellows is interim CEO.”
The words detonate in the lab. The weight of them is physical; Celeste feels her pulse spasm, a momentary blankness as all prior certainties drop into freefall. She is aware of her own body in the space, the rigid line of her back, the dampness of her palms, and the way her tongue presses itself against her teeth as if to prevent the spill of reaction.
She waits exactly two seconds. In that time, a million futures sketch and erase themselves in the air. Most of them end with this place gone, her job outsourced, or worse, spun into the ground for a quick headline. She knows Richard’s style, his contempt for perfume as “an expensive, irrelevant affectation,” his plans for “lean productization,” and the not-so-private emails where he referred to the R&D staff as “prima donnas in lab coats.”
She asks, “Who else knows?”
Maya shifts from foot to foot, eyes darting to the array of half-used bottles on the bench. “The board. Security. Legal. They sent out a draft press release, embargoed until the hour, but people on our floor are already talking about it. They,” she stops, checks herself, “they think we’re on the block.”
Celeste nods, then flicks her attention to the scent strips fanned in her hand. She anchors herself there. “Thank you. Did they specify a time for transition?”
“Tomorrow. There’s a briefing at eight. They want you present.”
“Of course,” Celeste says, her voice so smooth she hardly recognizes it.
Maya lingers, unwilling to leave. “I wanted to say. If anything happens, if this place shuts or changes, working with you was the best part of my job.” The admission is pure, unscripted, and it scrapes the inside of Celeste’s ribs in a way nothing else could.
She lets the compliment hang, then waves the assistant out. When the door closes, Celeste sits hard on the steel stool, and the entire bench vibrates with the impact. Her vision narrows to a tunnel, not from shock but from a kind of hyperconsciousness: every input heightened, every memory called to the surface.
She is sixteen again, standing in her parents’ kitchen in Marseilles, inhaling the last batch of her mother’s garden distillate, knowing with complete certainty that it would be the best thing she’d ever smell. She is twenty-four, alone at a midnight train station, reading the letter from Hastings that promised her the world if only she could invent it. She is every version of herself she’s ever needed to be: ambitious, strategic, hungry, and afraid.
She stands and moves to the small, glass-fronted vault in the back of the lab. The Cosmic formulas are stored here, in both digital files and handwritten logs, preserving the fragrance's lineage in both formats. She enters the passcode, checks the lock twice, then places today’s samples and the lab book inside. She wipes the touchpad clean with alcohol, rechecks it, and only then allows herself to exhale.
Her mind is already working on the next steps. Fellows will be CEO by sundown; the layoffs will start in days, if not hours. The only play is to get Cosmic out the door and, with it, her own reputation sealed in amber before the hounds arrive. She’ll have to bring the team together, calm the panic, and keep everyone moving as if the floor isn’t about to vanish.
In the anteroom, she finds three of her staff clustered around the coffee station, faces stretched thin with anticipation. The senior compounder is whispering, the others nodding along, all of them flicking anxious glances at the clock.
Celeste enters without fanfare, hands clasped behind her back. “You’ve all heard?”
