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He kissed me, and we hugged again, this time more tightly than before. Furio gave me another kiss on the forehead, and said, “Until we meet again, Amber Moltisanti.”
As I walked out to the waiting car, I hoped that meeting would be soon.
49
Jude
As I stared at my computer screen and reviewed my team’s latest batch of code, I thought to myself:I miss Amber.
I missed her for professional reasons. While she was in Italy, some of her work was bubbling up to me. Nancy was supposed to be handling most of the workload, but she had a lot of questions for me. When Amber was here, things worked far more seamlessly.
But deeper than that, I missed her emotionally. Every time I passed her empty office, I felt an aching chasm in my stomach. I did not consider myself to be a codependent person, but the lack of her reassuring presence was making it difficult to do daily tasks. I didn’t want to go home to my empty apartment. My coding wasn’t as crisp and efficient as it normally was. When I crawled into bed at night, I found myself counting down the days until she returned.
The office was changing while she was gone, too. It was only a few days, but Melinda had already hired seven new people. The office was alive with activity, like a bee hive that had been kicked. I didn’t recognize half the faces I saw, although everyone smiled and nodded to me.
It was good for the company, I knew. We were growing by leaps and bounds, desperately trying to keep up with the ever-increasing traffic on our cryptocurrency platform. The chart showing our daily earnings was a steep incline, and growing steeper every single day. Our exchange was even featured on the front page of MSNBC’s finance column.
Yet as good as it was for our bottom line, it made me miss the simple days. Back when Amber and I were the only ones working here late at night by the glow of our computer monitors. Creating the expansion roadmap from scratch.
Owen seemed fidgety these days, too. He thrived in the chaos of a rapidly-expanding company, but I knew there was aspects he disliked. He was the kind of guy who insisted on having his finger on the pulse of every project and meeting, which was impossible now that we were this large. It made him feel like he was losing control.
To counter that, he had scheduled several meetings a day to try to keep abreast of all the happenings in the office, even though it meant going over the same stuff every day.
It was after one of those meetings in Owen’s office, when Melinda and Nancy had already left, that he turned to me and almost gave me a heart attack.
“You miss Amber, don’t you?”
If I had been taking a sip of my coffee, I probably would have spat it out.Does he know? Am I that obvious?I slowly put my mug back down and gave him a calculated frown.
“Why would you think that?”
“Nancy is good, but she’s not Amber,” he replied. “I’ve seen Nancy come to you a lot for clarification. Stuff that Amber would intuitively know.”
I tried not to let my relief show. “Oh, yeah. I miss her office presence. You never realize just how much work someone does until they’re suddenly gone.”
I must have failed at hiding my relief, because Owen studied me for a moment. “What did you think I meant? Miss her, like… as a friend? Or more than that?”
“Of course not,” I said with a dismissive laugh. “Amber is nice and all, but it’s just professional.”
“Right,” he said, staring off. “Not to mention she’s your direct report. That would be unethical.”
“What about you?” I said. I knew I was projecting, but I desperately wanted to deflect the topic away from me. “Doyoumiss her?”
“Why would I? We can hardly stand each other. You know that.”
“That’s how it started,” I pointed out, “but you two haven’t been fighting as much lately. If anything, you seem just as friendly as she and I are.”
“She’s an asset to the company. No point in fighting with someone who kicks ass at her job.”
He shrugged casually. Too casually for Owen. Then again, it was late in the day, and we were exhausted. Both of us had been working a lot of late nights this week.
“You should get some sleep,” I said. “You’ve got bags under your eyes.”
“No rest for the wicked,” he replied. “I’m probably going to be here late.”
I glanced at my watch. Amber was landing soon, and was going to swing by the office before going home. I was hoping to be here when she did, and without Owen to watch us and analyze why I was so happy to see her.
“I’m worried about the stuff in Italy,” Owen finally said.
