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She was still in the kitchen brewing the tea when my phone rang. I realized I hadn’t called Ava back, and it was her checking in on me.
“So?” she asked when I answered.
“I am,” I said without introduction.
She drew in a breath. Emily came back into the room with my tea and gave a questioning look to the phone in my hand.
“Who is that?” she asked.
“It’s Ava,” I said, switching over to speakerphone. Reality was really starting to settle in, and rather than the almost numb feeling I had, I was starting to freak out. “What am I supposed to do? Everybody at work is going to have an absolute field day with this. And what about the society pages? What about the tabloids? The company is just starting to get big, and Tom has already been followed by photographers.”
“That really cannot be what you’re thinking about right now,” Ava said. “You don’t need to be worrying about it. We can figure out how to handle that later if it comes up. But right now, you have other things to think about. Specifically, Tom. You really need to tell him.”
“I don’t know how I’m going to,” I said, tears finally starting to fall down my cheeks. “How am I possibly supposed to tell him about this?”
Emily reached out and took my hand. “You’re going to be fine. You’ll figure out what to say.”
“I just bought you a ticket,” Ava said. “Your flight leaves at five tomorrow evening. It was the earliest one I could find.”
“You got me a plane ticket?” I asked, my voice rising.
“Yes,” she said. “You need to do this. Please, Amanda. Pack a bag and take that flight. Trust me.”
I agreed, but I was still feeling unsure. I could handle anything when it came to the complications and messes at work, but this… this was something I didn’t know if I could handle.31TomI was in a weird mood when I sat down for the video conference meeting that morning. People often talked about waking up on the wrong side of the bed, but this was more like waking up on the wrong side of the room. My whole day felt off. No matter how much coffee I poured down my throat, it didn’t seem to lift the fog, either. Before the meeting started, I decided that getting a little food in me might fix the problem, and if not, I’d take a long bath or something and see if that reset me.
Yet the room service breakfast had done nothing except make me long for better food in general, and as I sat down for the meeting, I was starting to get cranky. Whatever was causing me to feel this way made me unnaturally upset at the speed of my laptop, and I shouted at it in vain when it took too long to open the window. Perhaps nine in the morning was too early to have whiskey, but I was very close to resorting to liquor to take the edge off if I didn’t get it under control.
Then, things were made exponentially worse when the meeting began. Amanda wasn’t there. Not only was she not there, her window didn’t even exist. She wasn’t on the call at all. I suffered through about half of it, hoping she would pop on late or something, and when she didn’t, I resigned myself to the fact that she just wasn’t going to be there. Miserable and bored, I made it through the rest of the meeting, and when it was finally over, I breathed a sigh of relief. Landon stayed on until after everyone else left, and then it was just me and him.
“Well, I think that went well,” Landon said.
“Yeah, fine. Where’s Amanda?”
“What?” Landon asked, surprised.
“I just noticed she wasn’t there,” I said, trying to cover my tracks.
“Oh, yeah, I don’t know, actually. I thought you might shed some light on that,” Landon said.
“I don’t know, either,” I grumbled. Landon insisted on talking about the call for a little longer, but I got off as soon as I could. I had other things on my mind.
I was worried about her. She wasn’t the type of person who just wouldn’t show up to a meeting without telling someone what was going on. She would have told someone. She would have told me.
Pulling open my phone, I went through my messages, just in case she had texted me and I hadn’t noticed. It was foolish. I had been checking my texts for some kind of response from her for days. Predictably, there was none there. That left the company messaging program and my emails. The messaging program had nothing new from her, and she hadn’t posted in any of the group chats for days either.
That left the email. I opened it up on my laptop, skimming the most recent ones before searching for her name. Once I got her name in the search bar, a list of emails from her came through, mostly itineraries and rundowns of meetings and conference calls. But the most recent one stuck out. The subject simply said “Transfer.”
