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I polish off the rest of my eggs, set the plate in the sink, and I’m about to settle in for a new day of binge-watching sci-fi, when a knock at my door scares me almost out of my pants.
My first, utterly ridiculous thought is that it’s Typhon, here for the reaping, even though I know he can’t ever be here.
Then I worry it’s Tad.
But given that Rhygel was the one to tell him off, and I saw firsthand how scary he could be last night, I doubt Tad will be back anytime soon.
Mom isn’t due out of the hospital for another few days.
“Lily? Are you home?” Michelle asks through the door.
I unlock it and swing the door wide open. “Hey! What are you doing here?” I ask, ushering her inside.
“Hey,” she says, surprise on her face. “I thought since you weren’t answering my calls or texts, I’d swing by and see if you were OK.”
“Oh. I’m fine. Doing pretty great actually.”
Michelle steps inside. “Jeez, Lily,” she says as she looks around at my condo. “Overdoing it with the lily art a little, don’t you think?”
I laugh. “Yeah. I don’t mind when people give me lily stuff, but I guess I don’t have to display it all, huh?”
“I mean, if you like it you should, but this looks like a hoarder who needs counseling for their lily addiction.”
I chuckle again and we sit on the sofa, close enough our knees are nearly touching.
“I thought you were mad at me,” Michelle confesses.
“What? Why? I just haven’t been checking my phone often. I didn’t even know you’d called.”
“I thought you were mad because I got you fired.”
“Oh, Michelle. You didn’t get me fired, I did.”
“Yeah, but I told you to go home.”
“Michelle, it was a shitty policy. Not you. OK?”
A really shitty policy. In fact, it was so shitty, it hardly seemed legal.
“Holy shit, Michelle, you’re a genius,” I say and run to my room to get my phone. I shoot a quick text and head back to Michelle.
“How exactly am I a genius?”
I grin at her. “You’ll see.”
Rhonda sitsacross from me in a cold office with bad fluorescent lighting. Next to her sits a middle-aged man—the head of our HR department.
“Am I to understand that you went home after being sexually harassed by an employee at lunch, your coworker told your superior that you’d gone home, and you were fired for not following proper procedure when calling in?”
“Yes. That’s precisely what happened.”
“Rhonda, did you know about any of the circumstances surrounding Ms. DeCarlo’s dismissal?”
“I did not.”
The man, Harold, rifles through the paperwork in the file in front of him, scanning each page, only stopping when he’s reached the end of the file. “Yet there’s no evidence of such an occurrence. You’ve never once reported any alleged sexual harassment.”
“Well, yeah, that tracks. Why would I when most women who do report either aren’t believed or pushed out of their jobs?”
