The Job Offer - By Eleanor Webb Page 0,69

compound solution for the problem of counteracting crude oil in marine water. They hoped to create a natural solution to quicken the sea water’s natural ability to absorb oil so that when future spills happened, the sea would recover faster. The key was in also not making something that would ultimately hurt the very thing they were trying to save. She found the work, so far, to be challenging, and she liked her coworkers.

The only down side of her job was that she spent far too much time looking for Ben on campus even though she knew that he would not be back until next week. Dr. Rudolph told her that his trip was being extended another week but did not go into details as to why. Not that she missed him, she told herself again. If she told herself that long enough, maybe one day she would believe it.

Oh, who was she kidding? Except for her professional life she was miserable. Even that would change once he returned. Carla noticed and commented a few times over the past few weeks about Anne’s brooding and weight loss, wanting to know what was wrong. But Anne just was not ready to talk to her about Ben, yet. Not with Carla and not with her mother who asked her again if she wanted to talk about Ben when she heard the sadness in Anne’s voice the last time they talked on the phone. All Anne could do was hope that her heart would heal in time. She just needed to survive the next year.

But having a baby changed everything. If Ben thought that she used him to get the position in the company, what would he think when he found out that she was pregnant with his child? She could not continue to work for the company over the next year knowing that Ben would think that she was only trying to trap him into marriage like Chelsea and his other past girlfriend. Or worse, that she was trapping him just so that she could collect child payments from him for the next eighteen years. But Ben needed to know about the baby. He had a right to know. Even if he did not want her or the baby, he had a right to know. Eventually she would have to tell him. She just could not do it yet. Once she found another job, she would tell him.

Maybe she would tell him, she thought.

Yes, she would tell him.

Her indecisiveness was driving her crazy, and she left her house for work while she lectured herself. She just hoped her indecisiveness would not start to cross over into her professional life, too.

She drove into the parking lot of Building Two a half an hour later, grabbed her umbrella from the passenger seat, and ran for the employee entrance through the pouring rain. Shaking the water from her umbrella when she walked through the door, she rounded the corner at the end of the hall and went into the Research and Development wing. Her office was the second one in, and she quickly stored her things, turned on her computer, and pulled out her files. She needed to get her notes together for the morning meeting she was to attend with Dr. Rudolph, Mr. Winfield, and the science technicians who worked on the project with her.

They were going to discuss proposed compounds with which they might experiment and lay out a game plan for combining them. Compounds needed to be mixed in a certain order to gain the results they were looking for. Ben usually joined these initial meetings, Dr. Rudolph told her last Friday, when he also told her that Ben would not be there. Anne was just happy that this morning, of all mornings, he would miss the meeting because he was still in Asia. She did not think that she could handle seeing him today.

Anne walked into the first floor R & D conference room of her building at five minutes to ten and saw the technicians already sitting at the large oblong table. Before she left her desk, she uploaded her PowerPoint presentation to the Research drive, and now went to the front of the room to pull the presentation up on the digital board so that it would be ready for the beginning of the meeting. She could hear Mr. Winfield and Dr. Rudolph talking as they came into the conference room, but she did not turn around to acknowledge