me, as it does from time to time. Little things she used to say. Don’t work to live, she’d say. Right before leaving on one of her adventures around the globe, taking her to Southeast Asia or Bermuda or the coral reefs that shelter Australia’s Gold Coast. I didn’t start listening to her advice until after she’d gone. What would she tell me in this situation?
Freddie’s beautiful, elfin face drifts into my view. Olive-toned skin and brown eyes, dark hair, a beauty with fire in her eyes. And now she’s been offered her dream job. Oh, I’d recognized the tentative hope in her eyes as she told me. The warring of emotions. She’s conflicted, and it’s because of me.
I can see so much of myself in Freddie. The hunger in her eyes. I’d had the same desire, undiluted and powerful, when I was her age. Before I’d received Joshua. I will never regret taking care of him, never regret signing those papers. He’s Jenny’s greatest lesson and greatest gift, as if she’d handed me the note slow down, brother in human form. He’s a wonder.
And yet I remember the initial feeling of being held back. Of making concessions, of sacrificing pieces of your old dream as you try to make sense of the new one. I can’t ask Freddie to do that, and we can’t build a relationship that’s heavy with that decision, weighed down by her sacrifice. I don’t know if it would survive it.
She might resent me one day, not to mention how I might resent myself, because it would kill me to be the reason she doesn’t get what she dreams of.
I reach for the phone on my desk. Dial the number to the chief HR rep.
To do what, though? Instruct them to give her the job?
Or tell them to choose someone else?
Slowly, I put the phone down. For a long moment I just stare at it in horrified silence.
I can’t interfere with this. Whatever happens, it’s Freddie’s decision, and it has to be on her merits alone. My fingerprints can’t be anywhere near this. Not if we’re to have a hope of surviving past it, as friends.
Friends. Could I stand just being her friend? Receiving polite little postcards from Italy?
Never has the knowledge that she’s in the same building as me burned the way it does today. Sitting just a few floors below me, but she might as well be on the other side of the globe already for all the good it does. I can’t take her to lunch. I can’t show her the city.
I’m powerless.
And I hate feeling powerless. So I open my emails and type a quick one to Gwen in HR, still keeping my internal promise not to interfere. Let me know when you have a viable candidate for Milan, I write. I want the position filled as soon as possible.
The emotions inside me still as soon as I’ve sent it. At least I’ll be notified when she’s made a decision. Should give me an opportunity to put on my game face for when she comes to tell me. To break up with me gently. Tell me she’s following her dreams, the way I want for her. Even if it’ll hurt.
I don’t know if it makes it easier or harder that we won’t have much time to spend together before she goes. The company’s holiday party is tomorrow night. Then I fly to Tahiti with Joshua, and she heads to Philadelphia to celebrate Christmas with her family.
A quick, rapid-fire succession of knocks on my office door, the pattern familiar. “Come in.”
Clive’s navy-blue suit is a bit too large for his form. He’s wearing the same bland smile as always, but it widens when he notices my scowl.
“You look like you want to punch someone,” he comments. “Should I leave? Because I’m not a volunteer.”
“No, I’m good.”
“You sure?”
“Yes. What do you need?”
He doesn’t waste any time. That’s one of the things I’ve always appreciated with Clive as a COO, that he isn’t here for idle chitchat or trying to get to know me. We run a business, so let’s get down to running it.
“Actually,” he says, sinking down in the chair in front of my desk, “what I want is an update on the mole situation.”
My mood sours further. The fucking leak had struck again, at least if the article Anthony sent me this morning was correct. A rival company in the biotech sphere just unveiled their new five-year plan, and it’s nearly