There’s Greg, leaning against a cubicle, talking to my co-workers. My high school baggage, come back to haunt me.
Why is he up here? He’s not supposed to be up here! He should be on the sixth floor, in Accounting!
Greg’s angled away from me, deep in conversation with Sarah Ng. She’s a few years younger than me but she seems to have her life way more together, with her poised answers in meetings and her perfect outfits that make her look like an actress in a K-drama about a start-up. Meanwhile, every item of work clothing I own was chosen in a panic and fits weird in at least one spot.
Greg smiles at something she says, playful and a little weary, like he’s been through a lot but he has a sense of humor aboutit.
Morgan Schaeffer walks over to join them, which probably means she sniffs gossip. She’s the other senior copywriter on the team besides Al, and she lives for other people’s drama. She’s an overworked mom in her late forties, but she has the energy of an imp emoji come to life.
Greg leans in and says something to both of them in a low voice. Whatever it is gets a melodious laugh from Sarah, and my stomach dips.
Al wanders over to the group, shaking his head. “Can you believe these targets?” He points to an email from Erica on his phone. “This is as much as three people used to do.”
“Oh well,anyonecan do it with a full staff.” Morgan chuckles. “Where’s the challenge in that?”
“Morning, Ruby!” Al says.
Greg turns my way then, and he might be even better-looking than I remember. Smooth brown skin that’s a bit darker than mine—he moisturizes, clearly. Cheekbones that are more prominent now that he’s lost the baby fat in his face. Full lips that give me inconvenient flashbacks to things that areancient history and not worth thinking about, okay!
We haven’t been in the same room together since Mom’s memorial service, and he kept a respectful distance then. Our relationship had been in the “infrequent texts and tense run-ins when I’m home for holidays” stage for five years, at least. And even though he tried to reach out after Mom died, I ignored his messages, let his calls go to voicemail.
Greg takes a couple steps closer. “Hey, it’s—it’s good to see you, Ruby,” he says, voice low and earnest like we’re still at a funeral. The top two buttons of his blue oxford are undone, and a hint of the thin gold chain he inherited from his dad peeks out underneath.
Something in my brain short-circuits, and I stare at him stone-faced and walk past without saying anything, slumping down in my chair so my cubicle walls hide me.
“That was weird,” Sarah says. Sound unfortunately travels in an open-plan office.
“Ooh, tense!” Morgan says. “Seems like there’s a story there.”
He better not say a fucking word,I think, waking up my laptop screen and gritting my teeth.
“No,” he says, voice flat. “No story.” And somehow that stings more than if he’d told the truth.
As far back as I remember, Greg’s mom was my mom’s best friend. I call her “Tita Wendy” even though we’re not at all related, the way everyone we knew who was Filipino and roughly Mom’s age could be a Tita or Tito.
They met back when Tita Wendy was still working as anurse, and Mom came in with a broken wrist and the cheapest TKCORP health insurance plan. They had the same taste in gossip, and they felt similarly embattled, single moms against the world (Greg’s dad passed away when he was six; my dad left when I was three). Tita Wendy made fun of Mom for being a snob, and I guess she appreciated that—finally,someone recognized how hard she was working at snobbery!
And so Greg and I grew up together, also best friends. Or we were for a while, at least.
“Was that the girl who—?” Sarah asks.
The girl whose mom died at work. Of course everyone knows.
There was an email. A GoFundMe for funeral expenses. A company-wide meeting about work-life balance.
Everyone whispered,She worked so hard.
Mom died at her desk, pulling a late night on a big project.Shows you go the extra mile,she said.Builds goodwill. It will pay off.She always said yes to everything, volunteered for every task no one else wanted to do, every after-hours or weekend commitment.
The cleaning woman found her the next morning, slumped over her keyboard. Heart attack, apparently.
Mom died at work, and I was three thousand miles away from her.
I peek over my cubicle, and Greg’s eyes meet mine. My memory shuffles through the dozens of times we’ve locked eyes across a room over the years—in class, at the mall, at the table when he and his mom came over for dinner—and it was like he knew exactly what I was thinking.
Our psychic link,we’d joke. That’s how close we were. (It made the joke better that his mom works as a psychic. Tita Wendy hurt her feet and left nursing when we were in fourth grade—herpivot to the spirit world,as she likes to call it.)
But I learned a long time ago that was bullshit, something I fooled myself into believing. I never knew what he was thinking at all.
