Page 63 of Emil

“Why are you making surprises for me on your birthday?” I asked incredulously. It wasn’t his job to smooth things over for me. It was my job to smooth things for everyone else.

“Because it’s been too long since I saw you, and I wanted to tell you that I missed you.”

“You just told me that.”

“And now I’m gonna show you,” Jakob said brightly.

In the tiny FaceTime window, his curls bounced as he jumped around on the sofa. I could hear Reed chuckling in the background at his silliness.

Then a throat clearing behind me made me want to sink straight into the ground.

“Oh, hello,” Jakob said with his usual friendliness. “Are you a friend of Anders?”

Dammit.

“Hi, yes, I am,” Emil said easily. “I’m Emil. And you are?”

“Jakob, and that’s Reed,” Jakob said, jerking his head toward Reed behind him.

“Nice to meet you,” Emil replied. “Happy early birthday, by the way.”

Oh. He’d heard everything. Fantastic.

“Thanks,” Jakob said, then paused, his face lighting up like he’d just had the best idea of his life. “You could come with Anders. Any friend of his and all that.”

I opened my mouth. To say something. Anything. A polite out. A not-yet. A later, maybe. But Emil didn’t look at me. Didn’t check. Didn’t hesitate. And my stomach dropped.

“I’d love to,” Emil said without hesitation. “Thanks so much.”

He smiled at Jakob in that indulgent way everyone seemed to smile at him, and I knew, with sudden clarity, that I was absolutely done for.

“Okay, bye!” Jakob signed off, and Emil started opening food like there hadn’t been some kind of seismic shift under my feet.

“You don’t have to go to the birthday party if you don’t want to. Jakob would understand.”

Emil studied me quietly before he said, “I like birthday parties.”

“If you go, they’re going to think we’re together.”

Emil looked at me again. “I’m fine with that.” He nudged my to-go container toward me and added, “Eat before it gets cold.”

My fate had apparently been decided. He was going to the party with me. But my burger smelled too good to spiral about it when I could eat instead.

We talked about the park, the weather, the food. Everything except the party. When we finished eating, Emil carefully cleaned his fingers with a napkin. I could tell he wanted to say something. It was unusual to see him look uneasy. He was usually so calm. So self-assured.

“I got the results of the investigation,” he said.

“I see.”

“You were cleared,” Emil said carefully. Then, after a beat, “You were deliberately targeted.”

“John?”

“Yeah. It’ll be a couple of weeks while we clean him out of the company before you can go back.”

“I see.”

What Lacey had told me rattled around in my head. Being cleared didn’t erase the fact that my coworkers had believed what John said about me. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to go back and face them.