Think Outside the Boss - Olivia Hayle Page 0,19

my afternoon,” I say, “and move any meetings from three p.m. to telephone meetings instead. I’ll be working from home.”

She’s already tapping away at the keyboard. “Of course, sir. Everything all right with Joshua?”

Cecilia knows everything about everything, and has since I took over Exciteur. She’s invaluable. “Yes,” I reply, already heading to the elevators. “See you tomorrow.”

I find myself tapping my foot against the steel floor the entire way down, and I know I won’t be able let go of my worry until I arrive at St. John’s. Ryan stops the car in the drop-off zone and I shoot out of the car, striding up the stairs to the old brick building.

Joshua, Joshua, where are you…

He’s waiting with Mrs. Kim inside the school’s main doors, sitting on a bench and kicking his legs out in front of him. He shoots me a sheepish look under a head of dark curls.

“Thank you for coming,” Mrs. Kim tells me. “I’m sorry about calling you during your working hours, but I’m afraid Joshua was really in pain.”

He hunches over at her words, an arm curling around his stomach.

“You made the right call,” I say. “Thanks for letting me know.”

Her exhale is one of relief. Had she been worried I’d be angry? Perhaps I hadn’t hidden my annoyance at the bake sale calls as well as I thought I had.

Joshua and I head out of school, and I reach out to run a hand through his hair.

“Hey, Dad.”

“Hey, kid. A stomachache, huh?”

“Yes.”

Hmm. “Is it too bad for ice cream in the park on the way home?”

He looks up at me, eyes serious behind his glasses. “I think ice cream might make it better.”

I press my lips together to keep from smiling. “Then ice cream it is, kiddo.”

Joshua leaves his backpack in the car and Ryan takes off, back to the apartment. We walk home instead, side by side and hands in our pockets. The tall oak trees of Central Park beckon at the end of the street. An oasis in this world of stone.

“Did you have Math and English this morning?”

He nods. The lapels of his uniform shirt are askew and I reach over and correct them for him, ignoring his huff of irritation. “And? How did it go?”

“Math was fine. English was fine, too. We had to recite a poem and then tell the class what we thought it meant.”

My eyebrows rise. “One you wrote yourself?”

“No, from a book.” His voice darkens. “We got one each and then we had to stand by our desks and read them out loud.”

“How did it go?”

“All right, I guess. I got an easy one.”

So that’s not what he got a stomachache from, then. We enter the park and both watch as a dog runs in front of us, its leash trailing behind it on the darkened grass. A teenage boy comes running after it.

“See?” I say. “That’s why we don’t have a dog.”

“I would hold on to the leash,” Joshua protests. “And we don’t have to get a big dog.”

“We’re not a small-dog family.”

“We’re a no-dog family,” he mutters. “I’m getting strawberry.”

“Good choice. I think I’ll get mango.”

He groans. “You always get mango.”

“It’s my favorite, kid.” I run my hand through his thick head of curls again. He’ll never get me to stop doing that, not even when he’s as tall as me. His mother had those exact curls.

“If it’s not broken, don’t fix it,” he quotes with a sigh. It’s one of my favorite sayings.

“Exactly. Besides, you like mango, too.”

“Yeah, but not all the time.”

“I’m old and set in my ways.”

“You’re not that old,” he frowns. “Mike’s dad is in his fifties!”

I snort. At thirty-four, I suppose it’s nice that my kid doesn’t consider me that old. But at nine, I guess all adults are old. “Well, people have children at different ages.”

“Or they get children at different ages, like you got me.”

“Exactly like that, yes.”

He doesn’t sound upset about it. For Joshua, his parents’ deaths aren’t something he remembers. He only knows of my sister and her husband’s airplane crash in the Rocky Mountains from what he’s been told, even if he’d been alive in those terrible days when rescue teams searched after the chartered airplane. He’d been two years old.

I’d signed Joshua’s adoption papers six days after his parents had been officially declared dead.

We stop by the ice cream stand on the east side of Central Park. It’s only a stone’s throw from our apartment, and it’s a place we frequent. Some