He returned to his side just as the front door opened, and the two of us smiled all through the rest of the baseball game even though the Indians were losing.
31
Erica
I woke up the next morning to exciting news.
I ran downstairs, holding my laptop in one hand. Hunter and Brad were both eating cereal at the table.
“I got my first sale!” I said, waving the laptop. “My first legitimate sale!”
“That’s fantastic, sis!” Brad said.
“It’s official—you’re a real business now,” Hunter said with a huge grin. “What did they buy?”
I put the laptop down and scrolled across the order details. “A one-carat diamond. Radiant cut.”
“An engagement ring?” Brad asked.
I scrolled through the rest of the details. “They didn’t order any band with it. Just the loose gemstone. Ah, here we go. The order was placed by someone namedEmily Hanes. She’s sending a lock of her hair to the lab for the carbon signature. It’s not an engagement ring, then.”
“Woah, hey, you don’t know that,” Hunter said. “Maybe she’s a lesbian proposing to her partner. Or a straight woman who doesn’t want to wait for her boyfriend to propose.”
“Either way, I’m so excited!” I gasped. “The shipping address is in Dayton. She’s local! I wonder if it’s someone Miriam knows. She’s the other investor,” I told Brad.
“You could deliver the diamond to her directly,” Brad suggested.
My head whipped up. “I totally could! Maybe Emily would take a photo with me, for the website. Our first customer.”
Hunter chewed his cereal and gestured with the spoon. “You sure you want to do that? I thought the gemstones ship directly from the lab. And even if you found a way to intercept it, you might screw things up for her.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
Hunter grinned. “Emily might live with whoever she’s planning on proposing to. If you show up and make a big deal about it, you might ruin the surprise.”
I winced. “Crap. You’re totally right. Ruining our first customer’s proposal would not be a good way to start the business.”
“Sorry to be a buzzkill,” Hunter said. “But this is still awesome news. I didn’t expect you to get any sales until after your gemstones were available in stores. Or until we began a marketing campaign. We should go out to celebrate!”
I wasn’t closing at the brewery that night, so the three of us went out when I got off at seven. We bounced between two bars on the north side of town, then went to a tapas restaurant calledTapas The Morning.
“I don’t care if the food is good or not,” Hunter said, “this place sounds great just because their name is a pun.”
We ordered eight different tapas dishes and shared them while guzzling wine and reminiscing about the old days. Brad teased Hunter for finally settling down, especially considering he was such a ladies’ man back in high school.
Hunter steered the topic back toYours Forever Gemstones. “I talked to my marketing guy. He sent me a rough game plan for how we should market a company like this one.”
“Like this one?” I repeated, confused.
Hunter ticked off points on his fingers. “The business is small, at least for now. It’s entirely digital, without any brick-and-mortar stores. And the business model allows scalability. If demand suddenly surged tomorrow, we would be able to meet it. All of those affect the type of marketing we should pursue, and how much we need to spend. My guy also included a few charts to show what kind of return-on-investment we should expect on Facebook and Google Ads.”
“That’s a lot more detailed than I expected,” I said.
Hunter smiled. “My marketing guy is smart as hell. When do you want to go over this stuff? Tonight, when we get back?”
“I’ve had way too many wines to try to understand a new subject tonight,” I replied. “How about tomorrow? It’s my day off, so we’ll have lots of time.”
Hunter briefly looked disappointed. That’s when I realized he was trying to find an excuse for us to hang out tonight, after Brad had gone to bed.