done this for me?
Anxiety I carried with me all morning softened in my chest until I felt like I could breathe. Damn them. For being so twisted and wrong and so damn good as well.
“Yes. Yes, just tired. Thank you.” I tried on a smile and found it wobbly, so I stopped and looked at my desk.
“Don’t thank me yet, you haven’t seen the pile of work you have to do.”
Staying busy and focused would be the best medicine.
“Thanks, Sandra. What do I need to do first?”
“He has maybe a hundred voicemails since yesterday. Most are about the river project on the south side they’re trying to get a proposal completed for. I scanned them earlier in case there was an emergency. Can you get the rest typed up and emailed to him, in order of priority like usual? Then I’ll have you help me with some budgets he needs to get ready to present.”
A day of messages, scheduling, and PowerPoint presentations.
Mundane.
Menial.
Mind-numbing. Exactly what I needed.
“Sounds perfect.”
8
Hudson
I saw her leave the condo building yesterday when I returned to my home, done hiding out at my father’s house like a coward. She practically skipped into a beat-up Corolla with rust on the edges of the doors and wheel wells. It hadn’t mattered to Lilly for one single second that the girl who had once had everything climbed into a bucket of scrap metal. Not if her smile was anything to go by.
Two small children in car seats had been strapped in the back, I caught a glimpse of them as the car turned the corner, away from me, while Angie, her school friend driving prattled on without a seeming care in the world.
I wanted to give Lilly that, that easy life with easy friendships not strained with lies or secrets. Yet she sought it elsewhere, and I should have been happy she was finding it on her own. Making her own life and her own friends, a life wholly unconnected to me in any way.
It kept me up at night, that smile she’d given, seeming so carefree.
Such drastic contrast to the way I’d last seen her, shattered and broken and probably picking up pieces of her broken heart and trust while trying to find anything salvageable.
It’d been a week since Thanksgiving. I’d given her enough time. I hadn’t stayed away because I wanted to, I stayed away because I knew she needed that. She needed the time and space to figure out what she wanted on her own but now that was ending.
Which was why I was once again, pacing the lobby of Valor, back by the elevators like a fool, unable to go to her directly and force the conversation we needed to have.
If only she knew. Understood why it was so important to me to keep that secret of my father he clung to with white knuckles.
Turning, I paced back toward the elevator bank, eyes on my watch and scanning the lobby when I could for a glimpse of her. I just wanted to see her, and then I’d go about my day. But then she appeared.
Head down and shoulders hunched as if she was trying to hide herself, but there was no darkness that could ever hide the light I saw simmering deep inside her, begging to burst free.
She headed toward the last elevator, closest to me. I stepped back out of sight as she pressed the button, fiddled with her scarf and then removed her gloves, shoving them deep into her coat pockets. She unbuttoned her coat as the elevators opened and stepped in.
My feet carried me in her direction without thought, pure instinct fueling me with the need to see to protect and to heal.
As soon as I stepped in, she gasped, but I kept my head down, hitting the number to my floor and the closed button so the doors shut. Two harried employees appeared in the doorway right before they closed, and I didn’t move a muscle to grab the door so they could enter.
We were shut in. Together and alone. Every beat of my heart told me to reach for her. To kiss her and hold her and apologize until my head was buried in her shoulder and she was forgiving me and wrapping her arms around me, holding me back.
Instead, I clenched my hands into fists and forced them to stay at my sides. In the mirrored door’s reflection, she clutched her coat tight to her chest and those hunched shoulders I