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If she finds out what you did, she’ll be pissed.
“If you don’t mind, Troy, I’m tired. It’s been a long day.” She sighed heavily.
Let her go and let it be.
“It was me,” I blurted out.
“What?” she asked with a frown.
“The presentation, the reason you got it wrong… it was my fault.”
“I don’t understand,” Mackenzie said, shaking her head.
Yeah, I was screwing up even more. What the hell was wrong with me? I should have just kept my mouth shut, but the idea of her blaming herself, doubting herself, on top of everything else she was going through, made me feel like shit.
I hadn’t exactly been chivalrous, or moral, for that matter. It hadn’t really mattered that much to me before—it was a dog-eat-dog world—but this wasn’t just anyone. This wasn’t a work rival, a company I hated. This was Mackenzie.
I let out a breath. “Johnson emailed me the updated brief, asking me to send it to you, and I didn’t.”
Mackenzie’s frown deepened. “What are you saying?”
I didn’t answer her, letting her put two and two together.
Her eyes widened. “You sabotaged me?”
“I didn’t know you, then. Not the way I know you, now.”
“Does that matter?” she asked, hurt and anger warring for first place on her face, her expression changing and changing again. “You didn’t at any point think to tell me when youdidget to know me?”
“I tried.”
“When!?” she cried out.
I couldn’t answer that. I’d had so much time to tell her, but I hadn’t, and now it was too late.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
Mackenzie’s face sobered, her emotions slipping away as her expressionless mask fell into place.
“For what? You got the contract, just as you wanted it.”
“For hurting you,” I said.
Mackenzie laughed bitterly.
“Don’t lie to me, Troy. You’re not sorry, not one bit.”
“Don’t tell me what I feel.”
“Oh, now,” Mackenzie said, “to do that, I would have to assume you give a shit about me and as we just established… you don’t.”
She turned around and walked out of the boardroom, leaving me behind in the wake of my own destruction.
Yeah, I’d done it now. I’d fucked it all up.
She was wrong. I cared. I cared so much. Seeing her walk away stung like a bitch.
But that was why I didn’t do this—I didn’t get close to anyone because losing them was a special kind of hell I had no intention of revisiting time and time again. Losing her now was better, so that it was the end of it, and then I could move forward.
