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“What do you mean you lost her?” Maggie hisses, dragging Jim by his ear into the corner of the break room. “I asked you to watch her for two minutes while I got her something to eat.” She rolls her eyes, shoving the crackers and peanut butter into Jim’s hands. “How did you even—I don’t want to know. We’re dead.”
Jim scrubs a hand over his face. “I’m dead. Will is going to punt me off the balcony.”
“Why did you let a two year old out of your sight?” she asks, before pursing her lips together and pushing past him, stalking out into the bullpen with a distinct sense of looming unemployment hanging over her.
That, and, hi, yes, you’ve lost your niece, do try not to panic this building only has forty-four floors and thousands of employees. So she’s trying quite hard not to panic, imagining two-year-old little Charlie toddling down a stairwell, or into the arms of someone who will whisk her away for ransom, or worse.
The rest of her mind is telling her that’s insane, because the last time someone lost track of Charlie they found her sleeping in the cupboard where Jim keeps his “secret” stash, thumb stuck between her lips, mouth rimmed with Pop-tart crumbs, and dead the world.
But Jim flings his arms out in front of him, trailing her on the search. “I had to go run copy on the—I told her to stay put!”
“She’s two! You can’t just tell her to stay put you nitwit!” she whispers fiercely, whipping around on him before craning her head, trying to spot a flash of blonde hair at anyone’s knee height. “We have five minutes until broadcast, and I am not walking into that control room until I know where Charlie is.”
“Neither am I,” Jim asserts quietly, beginning to look rather pale and like his collar is too tight. “Because Mac, unlike Will, is gonna make me live through this.”
They check Mac’s office, and then Will’s, and under the anchor desk because of that one time Charlotte had separation anxiety so bad she colored next to Will’s feet the entire broadcast, and under every desk and in the closets and all the cupboards, twice. The bathrooms, and then by the time they consider going to the other floors they’ve got half of senior staff (but no interns, they can’t keep their mouths shut) climbing stairwells while they stand in the elevator lobby, panting frantically, when the doors from a descending elevator open
“You lost this.”
Maggie frantically wipes a lock of hair out of her lip gloss. “Mrs. Lansing.”
Leona Lansing shifts little Charlie, babbling incoherently (although Maggie definitely thinks she hearsGramma more than once, and wonders what Will and Mac have to say about that) while playing with a strand of pearls wrapped around the older woman’s neck, more solidly onto her hip. “Not that I mind finding her in my office, in fact I think she looks rather nice behind my desk, another blonde to assume the throne.”
“Oh my gosh, thank you,” Maggie blurts out, letting Leona foist the squirming toddler into her arms. “Thank you, I am so sorry, thank you.”
Jim regains himself first, petting down Charlotte’s hair and smooths a cool mask over his face. “We, um—”
“He lost her,” Maggie says, kissing the top of Charlotte’s head.
Leona snorts, jabbing at the “hold” button on the elevator. “Charlie Skinner lost my son in Macy’s on Black Friday. Until you can top that, I think you’re fine. Now don’t you both have jobs to do, or have the McAvoys officially demoted you to babysitters? Although, considering them, that may be a promotion…”