“It turns out that Lindsay is the person in charge of making that decision. She’s the HR director or consultant or whatever I could never get ahold of because she was out of the office.”
His jaw loosened. “Are you serious? How did you not know who she was?”
“Beats me.” I shrugged one shoulder, wishing I had a better answer for him. “It never came up, I guess. We were too busy—”
“I don’t want to know what you were too busy with.” He flashed me a knowing grin. “My wife’s pregnant. Trust me. I know all about how that works.”
“That wasn’t all we did.” I glowered at him.
My friend, however, kept right on grinning. “Sure. You went to a spa as well. Point taken. Carry on.”
“Anyway, the woman who took me to said spa and knows very well that I wasn’t at work is now the one who gets to decide my future.”
He whistled between his teeth and pointed the open top of his bottle at me. “You, my friend, are up shit’s creek with not a paddle in sight.”
“You think I don’t know that?” I sighed. “It’s not even so much about the job as it is about the idea that she’s been this close to me the entire time. Now that I’ve seen her again…”
“Wait. You saw her?” He chuckled before taking another swig of his beer. “How was it?”
I scraped my palm over my chin while I tried to find the right words to describe the disaster that meeting had been. “Let’s just say it could’ve gone better. I’m going to have to make some calls about the offers I’ve received in the past. Find out if any of those people are still interested.”
“It couldn’t have been that bad. You pulled a dick move by leaving without saying goodbye, but surely, she won’t fire you because of that.”
“Oh, no. I think she will.” The memory of the way she looked at me before I left her office would haunt me for the rest of my days. “She fucking hates me, man. Like, can’t stand to be in the same room as I am, hates me.”
“Told you she hadn’t meant it literally when she said she didn’t want to say goodbye.” He held up his hand to show me to give him a minute when I moved to flip him off. “The upside is that if she hates you, it means she does care about you.”
“Not enough to piss on me if I was on fire.” I rolled my head on my shoulders, trying to block out the pain and the universe of hurt behind her gaze when she’d stared at me. She hadn’t wanted me to see it, but I had. “I think I really fucked up.”
“You don’t say?” He drained what was left in his bottle, grabbing two more before we made our way up the stairs to the nursery. “You two had this idyllic week together in paradise. Then you spent the night together. Then you took off.”
“Because I thought I was doing what she wanted,” I burst out much louder than I had intended to.
Kavan turned on the step two above the one I was on, shooting me a look before he carried on walking. “Don’t yell at me, man. I didn’t tell you to do what you did. In fact, if you’d just have fucking phoned me when you came up with this idiotic plan, I’d have told you to can it and figure something else out.”
“So what? I deserve to lose my job because I made a mistake?” I knew that was what I had done now. Between Kavan, my mother, and seeing Lindsay again, there was no doubt that I hadn’t done the right thing. “I didn’t mean to hurt her. I was specifically trying not to.”
“You know what they say about the road to hell, right?”
“That it’s paved with good intentions?” I squeezed the back of my neck with one hand and finished my beer with the other. “Yeah, I know. I’m starting to see why they say it too. I didn’t want to hurt her, but I didn’t even know I was capable of hurting her that much.”
I’d thought I was the only one who’d have to live with the weight and the searing pain caused by my decision to leave. It was why I’d made the decision in the first place—to try saving her from having to carry any extra