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“I think so too,” she said, smiling.
The End
Find more books by Winter Sloane
BELONGING
Rose Wulf
Copyright © 2022
Chapter One
“Amaia, come into my office before you get settled.”
Amaia Reynolds stared after her boss’s already retreating back, confusion sparking in her chest. Her boss had a tendency to stay cooped in his office, supposedly making phone calls or doing important computer work throughout the day. She saw him in passing maybe three times a week. The fact that he knew her name at all honestly surprised her.
She glanced toward the morning receptionist, who offered a wordless shrug.
With nothing else to go on, Amaia drew a preparatory breath and redirected herself. Her boss’s office was down a different hall than her own cubicle. As a result, she rarely had occasion to traverse this part of the single-story building, and as soon as the less familiar walls encompassed her, she felt out of place. But that wasn’t a feeling that would change if she waited to set her coffee thermos and purse down on her desk first, so she might as well save herself from having to backtrack.
Amaia tapped on the door, which her employer had left ajar, and cautiously called out, “You asked to see me, sir?”
“Yes, Amaia, come in.” The sound of wheels rolling over a rubber carpet mat accompanied the response.
Amaia stepped into the office and pulled the doorclosed behind her before slowly approaching the nearest of the matching guest chairs. She really wasn’t sure what was going on. Had someone complained about her? And even if they had, wouldn’t she be talking to HR instead of the boss himself? She’d never been inside his office before, and though it was sizable enough for his status, it was more of a mess than she’d expected. Particularly his desk.
He picked up a narrow strip of paper as he angled around the desk, coming to stand in front of her. His bifocals slid down his nose, and he used his free hand to nudge them back into place. “I apologize for the suddenness of this,” he said, “but I’m afraid the company’s making some changes to accommodate the changing economy.” He held out the paper, revealing it to be a check. “Your position’s been eliminated effective immediately. If you need a letter of recommendation, you can contact HR.”
Amaia nearly dropped her thermos as her jaw fell open. “I— What? You’re firing me?”
For a moment, his lips made a thin line. “As I said, your position’s been eliminated. There’s no place for you.”
She couldn’t breathe. Her head swam and her stomach flipped, tossing her cheap breakfast dangerously close to the surface. She stumbled and caught herself on the arm of the nearest chair. “Y-you couldn’t reassign me somewhere?” She was babbling. She knew it. Fired was fired, and there was no point arguing. Her gaze slid to the check he still held out for her. “You couldn’t have given me a littlenotice?”
“It was a decision made by all the shareholders.” The shareholders. He always fell back on the invisible, unaccountable shareholders every time he did something his staff disapproved of, instead of owning it himself.Hewas a shareholder, but that always seemed like a forgettable detail in those moments.
Amaia straightened, sure she at least wasn’t going tothrow up and further humiliate herself, and snatched the check from his grasp. “What’s this?”
“Your last week’s pay.”
A quick glance confirmed his statement. It was exactly one final week’s worth of pay. She felt more than a little like she was being bought off somehow. Still, Amaia swallowed the feeling down and managed to shove the paper into her purse. She squared her shoulders and narrowed her eyes at herformeremployer. “This is real low, and you know it. I expect that letter of reference tosparkle.” Amaia didn’t wait for his response before twisting away and striding out of his office.
By the time she was back in the lobby, her adrenaline-fueled surge of confidence was gone. Crushed under the weight of the realization that her paycheck-to-paycheck life had just gotten infinitely harder. She didn’t have the energy for fake smiles for her now-former colleagues who were still filing into the office, none of whom would miss her, anyway. Though she did wonder how many of them might be following her out the door within the hour.
Was it four years?Perhaps slightly less. She’d worked for that ungrateful bastard for just under four years. She’d finally worked her way up to a position that paid well enough for her to quit her second job only the summer before. Not even a full year earlier.
Amaia sighed as she put the parking lot and the building behind her. She’d worried quitting that job at the mall was a bad idea, but she’d also hated it with a passion. She’d been moving up in a stable, if boring, career. Or so she’d thought. In the time it took most women to bring life into the world, she’d gone and lost that job entirely. All that was left was to get her last paycheck into the bank, figure out the exact dollar amount she had remaining, and calculate where and how much she would have to scrape from there.
Her bank of choice was a generous fifteen-minute walk away. Fifteen minutes for Amaia’s anxiety to spike as her mind spiraled over everything she didn’t know how she’d cut out of her budget. Fifteen minutes for Amaia to worry about whether she’d find a new job before whatever she had saved up ran dry and she lost her home. It was a small apartment, not in the greatest condition, in an even worse neighborhood. But it was the place she’d called home for something like a decade—the first and only place she’d ever lived on her own. She didn’t know how to live anywhere else.
Amaia paused at the corner before her bank, breathing a little too hard and her vision blurry, as an old and equally blurry memory wafted across her mind’s eye. Just for a second. Would it feel like that? She dragged in a deeper breath.Now I’m being ridiculous.
As a young child, after her father had died, her mother had taken her and moved away from the town they’d lived in as a family. At the time, of course, leaving the only home she’d known and the home she’d shared with the father she’d recently lost had been traumatic. All she really remembered about it anymore was having been upset and crying a lot. She heard a whisper of her younger self saying something utterly childlike about bringing Daddy with them, despite that he was already in the ground. Her mother had been much more level-headed, the way she remembered it, and not surrendered to the wailings of a grade-schooler.
Amaia pushed the memory away and used the opportunity to clear her vision from her more recent, but still unreasonable, tears. She didn’t even remember the name of that town anymore. Some small place in Idaho, she suspected, but she doubted she’d find it even if she went looking. It wasn’t like she could ask her mom.
Her mother would also tell her to stop being a baby abouta job she’d never cared for and focus on moving forward. So she did that and quickly found herself handing over her check to the bank teller who clearly didn’t recognize her.No big deal. I only come in two or three times a month.But Amaia kept the thought to herself, got the information she needed, thanked him, and ducked back out of the building. Looking at the number she’d written down would upset her all over again, so she didn’t want to do it inside the building with overlapping security cameras.
