Not in a meeting. Not as a briefing. Just here.

The back room. Melissa and Jayme, the east-facing room with the low chairs and Jayme's plant. Mindy still gone.

Melissa tells Jayme about a brand they worked with two years ago at a different agency. They'd handled it wrong - not incompetently, but safely, talking real founders with real instincts back to what the agency knew would work. It worked. Melissa has been thinking about it for two years because working and being right aren't the same thing.

"Scar tissue," Melissa says, and Jayme knows she understands. "I'm not criticizing the choice. I'm saying I don't want to be on the other side of something real that's asking for more than we're ready to give."

Jayme: "Is this about the pitch." Melissa: "Not directly. Adjacently."

Jayme says: "I hear you." Not yes. Not the gentle tabling. Something new.

The pitch can wait. Melissa already said the thing that needed to be said before it.

Featured: Melissa Sanderson, strategist. Jayme Nichols, division lead.

The Marfa Munchies is a daily fiction podcast about a food, beverage, and lifestyle division of a creative agency between Marfa and Dallas. New episodes every morning.

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| ai-assisted fiction