Page 3 of Knocked Up By the Silver Foxes

Positive.

My brain offers me exactly one coherent thought in the silence that follows.

She's going to burn my Louboutins.

1

HARPER

The job listings are mocking me.

I know that because I’ve refreshed the same three tabs four times in the last ten minutes and the results haven’t changed. Hospitality coordinator, New York, minimum five years experience, salary negotiable: meaning they’ll offer whatever insults them least. Event manager, remote, must be willing to travel extensively, which is corporate speak for we’ll pay you like you’re part-time and expect you to live out of a suitcase. Senior events director, Manhattan only, references required.

I close the laptop.

Then I open it again because closing it felt too much like giving up and I’m not giving up. I’m regrouping. There’s a difference. Regrouping is strategic. Regrouping is what competent adults do when the universe decides to throw everything at them in the same calendar month.

It’s been two weeks since I left New York.

Two weeks since I packed the important things into my car, handed my apartment keys back to my landlord, and drove fourteen hours south to Tampa because Sophia Thorne told me I needed to and I was too exhausted to argue with her. Two weeks of job searching from the guest room of her penthouse apartment while she runs her boutique, Rosé, from the kitchen island in silk pajamas and makes it look effortless. Two weeks of waking up in a bed that isn’t mine, in a city that isn’t mine, rebuilding a life that apparently needed to be rebuilt from scratch because Jason and Rebecca Miller decided that their daughter’s career was a reasonable casualty in their latest attempt to squeeze money out of anyone who’d stand still long enough.

My parents. I should say my parents. Though calling them that has always felt like a courtesy I’ve been extending on credit for about twenty-three years now.

The official story, the one I’ve been practicing saying without my voice doing that tight, careful thing it does when I’m trying not to fall apart, is that they showed up. That’s it. That’s all it took. They found my office address somewhere, the way they always find things when they want something badly enough, and they showed up. First at my apartment. Then at work. Then they started making noise about missing finances, about access to company accounts, about things that weren’t true but were said loudly enough and in the right ears that HR had to get involved regardless.

My employer believed me. That’s the part I keep having to remind myself of because it doesn’t feel like it when I replay it. They believed me completely, sat me down, looked me in the eye, and then explained very gently and very professionally that they were going to classify it as a layoff so I could collect unemployment and get out of the situation cleanly without it becoming a larger liability for the company.

They were kind about it. Which somehow made it worse.

I built that career from absolutely nothing. Scholarships and side jobs and internships and four years at NYU on a combination of financial aid and working thirty hours a week. I was good at what I did. I was genuinely, measurably good at it and I had the performance reviews to prove it. And then my parents walked into my office building like a pair of deeply personalized natural disasters and dismantled it in about seventy-two hours.

So here I am. Tampa. Sophia’s guest room. Laptop open to job listings that require three more years of experience than I have and a references list from a company I can’t exactly put on blast without making myself look like the problem.

I refresh the tab again.

Nothing new.

Regrouping.

I hear Sophia before I see her.

Heels on hardwood, quick and deliberate, the specific rhythm of a woman who has decided something and would like everyone else to catch up immediately. The bedroom door swings open and Sophia Thorne fills the doorway in a white broderie sundress, strappy stiletto sandals that add four inches she doesn’t need, and a wide-brimmed floppy hat that somehow manages to look intentional rather than absurd. She’s carrying an iced coffee in one hand and has the expression of someone who has been deeply patient for as long as they intend to be.

She looks at me.

Then she looks at the room.

I have been in the middle of packing for approximately two hours, which means the room currently looks like my suitcase exploded and then the explosion had a secondary explosion. Dresses draped over the desk chair. Jeans in a pile by the window. A stack of sundresses on the bed next to a stack of tops that I’ve folded and refolded three times without making any decisions. My teal hardcover cases stand open against the wall, the large one gaping like a very judgmental mouth, because I’ve been adding things and removing things and adding them back for so long that I’ve essentially just been moving my clothes from one surface to another in a very elaborate loop.

Sophia looks back at me.

“Thorne Vineyard, here we…” She pauses. “Why the fuck aren’t you ready yet?”

I groan and close the laptop. “I shouldn’t be going. It’s a bad time.”

“A bad time.”

“I need to figure out how I’m going to cover my half of rent next month and I have approximately forty-seven tabs open with job listings and none of them are calling me back so the responsible thing to do is stay here and⁠—”