“The whole point of having an in-house marketing team is that we don’t have to hire freelancers.” She hated him with a fiery passion at that moment. It wasn’t just his smug tone. It was the timing of it: a Sunday at noon, because dressing her down couldn’t possibly wait until Monday morning. No, he needed to act fast to drag her away from whatever she was doing and back to her desk by Monday…not because he needed her, because Sarah knew that absolutely nothing critical or time sensitive would be occurring this week, but for the principle of the thing. Just to show that he could force her to obey.
“I know that,” she said with forced politeness.
“If we hire freelancers, we don’t need you.”
“I know.”
Owen sighed bitterly. “I’ll speak to people, but I don’t think this is getting approved.”
“Thank you. I understand.”
She wondered if she was about to be fired, and as she hung up the phone, she waited for panic to set in.
But it didn’t.
Why wasn’t she panicking?
She was going tolose her job.
She should be freaking out. And she felt…fine.
She stared out the window, letting the strange dissonance of her reaction sink in. She mustreallyhate her job. She had never articulated it that way to herself, but if she had liked it even a little bit, she wouldn’t be feeling this complete, Zen-like calm about possibly losing it.
Ren glanced over at her. “Trouble at work?”
“It’s fine.”
“I didn’t mean to cause problems for you.”
Sarah almost laughed. Ren always seemed to cause problems for her, one way or another. But she didn’t feel angry at Ren right then, either.
The next fewhours passed in a strange mix of feelings. Sometimes, Sarah felt the uncomplicated boredom of long car trips: none of the trees were very tall nor the houses very large. Her home province rolled past them in its epic loneliness, always beautiful, often poor, the roads practically empty except for occasional trucks passing them a little too aggressively.
Other times, Sarah felt a delirious sense of unreality at sitting next to Ren again, like he couldn’t possibly be here, and they couldn’t possibly be chatting about movies and the best places he had travelled and the weirdest clients she had dealt with during herExistential Innocenceseries. It felt strange that they could still make each other laugh. They could still talk for forty-five minutes about books they had loved and movies they had seen.
When they sat across from each other at a tiny restaurant for lunch, ordering milk shakes and eating fries, she felt like she was in a strange dream.
Occasionally, she remembered that she was still mad at him. He had hurt her and probably would again. He was too easy to fall for—that was the problem. It wasn’t just his looks or intelligence. It was the way he seemed to know her so well, the way he remembered stories she had told him when she was twenty years old.
“That was when you were taking care of Anya’s cat,” he would say in the middle of her reminiscing about getting locked out of her Montreal apartment. Or: “This was the owner of the Kristman Gallery?” when she talked about an annoying comment at one of her shows. Or: “Ah yes, your Agnes Varda period,” when she talked about an unfortunate haircut she got during her third year at McGill. It was irritating every time he did it.
She had sworn off romance for a reason. The whole point of putting your heart out of reach was that it couldn’t get broken. It belonged to you again, not to the whims of people who came into and out of your life without warning. Maybe her mother had been right to stay single. Feelings were like a roller coaster ride: they were exciting and terrifying, but they always ended up with you at the bottom of the ride—never at the top, never at the high point. The high points were temporary. The low points were where you landed.
Finally, almost six hours into their trip, a thought came that settled her nerves. Whatever happened with Ren—whether he befriended her, or flirted with her, or remained entirely professional and hurt her that way—he was going back to Nevada at the end of this trip. There was no possibility of anything happening, so she wasn’t at risk of getting her hopes up. There was nothing to get her hopes upfor. She could be present for this trip, with its music and milkshakes and scenery and jokes. She could enjoy it and move on.
They arrivedat their hotel at sunset and climbed out of Ren’s rental car slowly, shaking out stiff legs. Sarah felt like someone had folded her in an envelope and shipped her overseas.
“This place looks fancy,” she said in surprise as she took in the three-story shingled hotel nestled into the top of a hill. Somehow, she hadn’t expected they’d be staying anywhere especially nice. Most of the province kept things simple, but this was Newfoundland’s version of a mountain chalet, curved around a driveway with wings outstretched towards stunning views of a distant bay.
Ren nodded. “Remember what I said about Silicon Valley tech guys? They can rough it, but they prefer not to. We’ll do one night of sleeping under the stars at the end of the week, but otherwise there’s room service.”
When they walked up to the desk, a young woman in a hotel uniform greeted them with a grave expression. “Mr. Durand,” she said. “I left a message on your phone. You requested an extra room?”
“Yes,” he said, glancing down at his phone in puzzlement. “Sorry. My cell service is terrible here…”
“Unfortunately, we couldn’t find one for you. I called around to the other hotels, but this is the busy season and the whole area is pretty booked up. The nearest I could find was a place forty-five minutes down the road. Something should open up by Wednesday.”
Ren frowned and glanced at Sarah. “Oh.”
