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Pris folded her arms over her matching gray jumpsuit with her mother’s company logo on the breast pocket. She’d swept her dark hair into a ponytail.
“Mom sent me to tell you to hurry up. She wants everyone to finish early today.”
“She does? Why?”
My heart trotted into a panic. Hawk wasn’t coming up here, was he? I’d done my best to avoid him for the past two months. I couldn’t lose control of that now.
Pris rolled her eyes. “I’ve already delivered the message. I guess you’ll find out with the rest of us—assuming you don’t break anything in the meantime.”
She skewered a glance at the mop bucket as though it had caused her a personal offense before adding, “And keep it down, would you? You’re as bad as Charlotte. I heard you all the way down in Shipping.”
Charlotte, Pris’s other (biological) sister, tended to crow her own rendition of whatever song had just played on the radio whenever she felt like it.
Maybe that was when I’d started wearing earbuds…
Somehow, Pris managed to swagger even in her baggy jumpsuit and sneakers as though she wore elegant heels and a businessy pencil skirt and top instead as she sashayed fromthe room.
“Glad we had that little chat,” I said to my reflection who looked as unamused as I was.
From the time her mom married my dad, Pris and I had never gotten along, but the whole mess with Derek had really put me on her hit list. No matter what my stepsister thought, I hadn’t done anything to encourage Derek’s attention while they’d been dating.
And then after he and I started dating, I’d broken it off with himforPris.
What more did she want?
I finished mopping the luxurious bathroom, set the mop in the bucket, which was adjoined to the garbage can on its cart, and braced the handle to roll the entire contraption from tile to carpet toward the door.
I took care in double-checking areas, ensuring no rags or spare garbage bags had been left behind, before heading toward the set of light switches near the door.
A patch of dust on the shelf caught my eye. I moved the picture frame aside, swiped the dust with the cloth hanging from my pocket, and allowed myself a few fleeting moments to gaze at Hawk’s company photo within the frame.
My stomach gave a little flip.
His dark suit offset his blue eyes and dreamy features. One hand was propped along the banister behind him. I was already warm in my jumpsuit, but the sight of him in his photo set a match to my blood.
Other memories flooded in, memories of stolen glances, sweet words and promises, of his interest in me and the sweet texts asking if he could see me again.
“It’d been for the best,” I told the picture, wishing my heart would believe as much.
As stupid as it seemed, part of me wished I’d been able to say yes, that I’d agreed to see him again. What would have happened if I had? Would he really have wanted to see me?
Would he care that I worked for him—or, rather that the company I worked for had been hired by him?
“It can never be,” I told him, as though his picture had something to say about it.
The sun rising over Westville was visible through the wide glass windows as I made my way to the elevator. It cast splashes of orange to counterbalance the December snow below.
I wheeled the bucket to the custodial closet on the twelfth floor, emptied its contents—spilling water into my shoe and saturating my sock in the process—and hung the damp mop to dry over the floor-sink before locking the closet behind me.
I descended to the lowest level in the building where the main custodial breakroom was located. A few other employees roosted on the long, wooden bench in front of a line of lockers where we all secured our belongings.
Pris and Charlotte were already settled in beside a few of the others.
Their mom, Stina, was the only one of the crew not decked out in the oh-so-fashionable gray jumpsuits. Instead, she wore a white blouse with black, flowy pants, heels, and her usual sneer of dissatisfaction at thesight of me.
“There you are.” She didn’t add the word, but “finally” was evident in her tone.
Stina began to pace in front of the crew. Arms folded, heels clacking, she paraded her position as custodial company owner with pride.
