the room and an additional twenty people for all the blessings in her life, and lucky for us she remembers to thank Rusty just after God.
“Last, but not least …” She lifts her glass and looks with melting adoration at Carey, and the room goes quiet again.
Carey straightens and stills, so achingly vigilant, and I realize this must be the moment of Melissa’s surprise.
“Of course I would be a scatterbrained mess without my amazing assistant, Carey,” she says. “This girl has been with me since the beginning, back when all I had was my marriage, my kids, and a little furniture store in Jackson. She keeps my calendar sane! Carey, here’s to another ten years.”
The room fills with a few awwwws and congratulatory Hear, hears. Glasses clink, but somehow a hush falls in the space around me. To anyone else, this appears to be an amazing honor Melissa Tripp just bestowed on her nobody assistant, but I know the truth. And regardless of what she just told me, so does Carey. I look over at her. Her hair has come out of its bun; her face is flushed from running around nonstop for the past two hours. She even has a smudge of powdered sugar on her cheek. Her left hand is tucked beneath her right arm—a sign that she’s tired and struggling with cramping. I watch her hold on to her gracious smile as long as she can, but the moment Melissa turns away, it falters.
I turn to her, nudging her shoulder with mine when she remains as still as a statue. “That was sweet, yeah?”
She stares straight ahead. “I think that was Melly’s surprise.”
My smile falls. “Carey—”
“I’ve given her my whole life, and she just thanked me for keeping her calendar organized.”
What a punch in the gut. I don’t know what to say, so without thinking, I reach down and slide her hand into mine. Although her fingers remain rigid, I hear her breathing ease.
“You know how you can hear someone say a lie so many times that it starts to feel true?” She waits for me to nod and then continues. “I think that’s what happened with me and Melly. She calls me her light bulb switch, like I’m just a button she pushes to get ideas. Does she really think that’s how this works?”
I open my mouth to answer but don’t want to speak without something helpful to say, and right now, nothing helpful is materializing.
“To her I’ll always be the teenage girl in cutoffs who wandered into her showroom, probably because that’s how I still see myself,” she says. “Are we in some sort of sick symbiotic relationship?”
I pause, considering how honest I want to be. “It seems more parasitic to me,” I admit. Okay, so pretty honest, then.
Carey looks up at me, and I realize she’s about to freak out. Her inhales are coming in fast and shallow; her face has gone a clammy gray.
A quick glance around the room tells me the lunch is winding down. I assume we’re expected to stay to settle everything up and make sure every executive gets a cab back to the airport, but Carey isn’t going to be very good at her job right now. She’s done enough.
Very gently, I tug on her hand in mine.
I expect her to stop once we’re out on the sidewalk, maybe take a deep, fortifying breath. But she holds up the hand that’s not currently wrapped around my fingers and hails a cab.
We climb in and fall silent once she’s given the name of our hotel. Instead of sliding across the seat, she stays close, holding on to my hand.
Carey lets me pay for the cab without argument and follows me out onto the sidewalk, but once there, she turns determined again, taking long strides into the hotel and directly to the elevators.
She turns to me. “Which floor are you on?”
My insides go tight; are we just going to go back to our rooms? It’s only three o’clock in the afternoon. I want to help her figure this out, not go sit alone for the rest of the day. “Ninth. Where are you?”
“Seventh.”
Inside the elevator, she presses the button for the ninth floor, but doesn’t then hit the button for the seventh. Confusion starts to set in, and I open my mouth to respond, but she steps forward with a determination that makes my mind go blank. Instinct brings my hands to her waist.
Her hands twist in my shirt, pulling me