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CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
“The deal sounds too good to be true,” Valerie whispered when Tim bent down. “Tell me it isn’t.”
Heidi tapped Tim on the shoulder and pointed to the deli’s meat case. “What does he even eat anymore? Does he still like pastrami?”
“Salami,” Valerie said.
Heidi pointed at her. “That’swhat it was. We need to conference and tell me everything you know about him.” She put in an order for a sandwich for Kevin. “I was always so pissed when my teachers told my parents stuff about me that they wouldn’t have found out, but I’m not beneath using those tactics myself now.”
“Funny how experience changes folks,” Tim said. He moved into Heidi’s vacated space in line and put in an order for both him and Valerie. He hadn’t asked, but she didn’t really care. At the moment, she was happy to let someone else make simple decisions for her so she could use her brain energy on bigger ones.
Her new boss Shel Thomas was aviperand was totally unapologetic about it. “I don’t care if men think I’m a bitch,” she’d said. “If I’ve got something they want and it’s one of a kind, I’m gonna make them pay.”
Thethingwas Valerie, and Shel was going to make Lipton pay.
Her on-the-fly, take-it-or-leave-it proposal to Richard Lipton had been to contract Valerie out to them for the duration of the Shora project for an exorbitant sum of moneywellover commensurate for her worth, which would put some unexpected money in Shel’s pocket, too.
Shel would have final say over Valerie’s plans and her firm would be the one on record, but Valerie would get to remain on site at Shora in the same capacity she had before…just with a bit more autonomy.
It was a perfect solution. It seemedtooperfect. That’s why Valerie had told Shel she’d call her back. There had to be some pitfall Valerie couldn’t see.
She must have zoned out staring at the deli meats because Tim gave her a nudge and got her moving.
“Came on,” he said. “We don’t have to wait here for the sandwiches. They’ll bring them out to us.”
“Oh.” She followed him to a table near the window.
Heidi sat in the corner and muttered while she dug in her purse, saying something about her reading glasses walking away.
Valerie slipped between the seats to the one across from Heidi, and Tim sat beside Valerie.
She picked up the saltshaker and fiddled with it, stared at the holes on the top. Counted them. There were twelve.
Tim gave her knee a squeeze under the table. “Wanna talk about it?”
“I don’t know what there is to say. I feel like I’m in this gauzy dreamland and any minute I’m going to wake up and I’ll realize it was all phony and that I can’t really have everything I want.”
Heidi pushed her garishly patterned yellow-framed glasses onto her nose and dragged her thumb up her phone screen. “You’re making it sound like it was some easy thing. Itwasn’t, from what I hear.”
“You got that offer because you pushed for it,” Tim said.
“The job, maybe, but…” Valerie cut her gaze to Heidi and then back to Tim. It didn’t matter if Heidi overheard. She’d likely get it all second- or third-hand, anyway, given the robustness of the grapevine out at Clay’s. “I was going to giveyouup.”
“You weren’t giving me up so much as doing what you told me you were going to. You said from the start that you couldn’t commit. If anyone has had things fall too easily into place, it’s me. I’m benefitting from your good fortune.”
“Okay, maybe. But say I accept Shel’s terms at stay on at Shora. That’s three years, maybe four, of development. What next? I don’t start things I know I’m not going to finish, and—”
He silenced her with a kiss.
Going limp against the arm he’d slung around her, she understood. “Try another excuse,” he seemed to be saying.
She didn’t have any excuses.
She slumped in her seat and tried to reorder her thoughts. Why couldn’t she justlethim have her? It was an easy thing. She didn’t even have to beg.
“Who knows what’s going to happen three or four years from now?” Heidi asked. “If you’d been in San Francisco, you might have been considering making a move back this way by then.”
“That’s true,” Valerie murmured. “My grandmother’s getting up there in years.”
