then.”
I wasn’t lying when I said that I needed the time on the walk home to think; I did. But I also had another reason for wanting to walk—the route on the way back to the apartment passed by my old office building at Cubed.
Ever since I had started questioning whether or not I had been right to break up with Tim, I couldn’t stop thinking about it and worrying that I’d been too hasty. Now, I was getting obsessed with trying to either confirm or retract my decision. I didn’t actually have anything planned per se; I wasn’t going to go walking into his office or anything. I just thought that I would walk by the building to see if I got any kind of feeling about things. Maybe his office light would still be on, and he would be the only one in the building. Maybe then I would feel like I should go in and talk to him. Or maybe he would be by his car getting ready to leave, and he would see me walk by and call out for me to stop to talk to him. Maybe he was just waiting for the opportunity to patch things up between us. There was, of course, also the possibility that he hated me now. I tried not to dwell on that one.
The nearer that I got to the Cubed complex, the more I convinced myself that I should just go in and talk to Tim about everything. By the time I had almost reached the front entrance, I was certain that I would head straight on up to his office if his car were still parked in the lot. But then, just as I noticed that Tim’s car was indeed still there in the lot, I saw him leaving the building with some woman. I stopped walking and stood next to the corner of the next-door building so that he wouldn’t spot me there. Not only was it a woman, but it was the woman, the woman who had been in the limo with him and the subject of the picture that had caused all the trouble to begin with.
I turned down the other street and hurried away before he could see me there.
4
Chapter Three (Tim)
“You look like shit,” Max said as I walked into the office in the morning.
At least I could always count on Max, to be honest.
“Rough night?” he asked.
“Not unless you count having to deal with Chelsea,” I answered. “I just don’t understand why that woman is so hell-bent on trying to snake her way into my life.”
“What did she do this time?”
“Nothing remarkable, she just showed up here at the office last night to try to get me to take her out for drinks. I ended up having to walk her out and hail her a cab just so I could get her to leave. I wasn’t even finished with my work, so I came back inside after I got rid of her.”
“Man, that girl really wants a piece of you,” Max said as he shook his head.
“Yeah, but why? I mean, I don’t get it. There are plenty of other wealthy, attractive men in Seattle. Why does she keep coming after me?” I asked.
Max laughed. “Don’t be so full of yourself. You’re not that attractive.”
I slapped him on the shoulder, and then we got started on work. I loved hanging out with Max, and I always considered it an honor when he worked on a project with me. He was an incredibly talented designer, and he would come up with some of the most innovative ideas I had ever seen. I always fancied myself as being pretty inventive, but Max’s ideas put my creativity to shame. If I could choose one head to crawl inside and look around in for a while, it would be his.
He had designed and installed the curved skylight in the bedroom of my modular home in the mountains and inlaid them with a magnifying element that made it look as though you were literally lying among the stars at nighttime. At the time, there was no such technology to make the glass do that, so Max camped out in the woods in his van for several days, and when he returned, he had invented it. The guy was a complete genius in the body of a drifter.
He also was a good friend, the type of friend who never sold you out, but also called you out