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My mother sighs. “Ruth lectured me on self-sufficiency the one time I asked if I could borrow an egg. She wouldn’t have accepted help if her life depended on it.”
I think of Lucie refusing the advance on her salary when she clearly needed it and insisting later that she didn’t need help paying for a lawyer. She may be more like her aunt than she realizes.
“So how areyou?” my mother asks. “Any news about the merger?”
Lucie is on her hands and knees now, pretending to bury the toy Sophie gave her. Henry isn’t smiling, exactly, but he looks amused nonetheless. I kind of want to walk down there, though I’ve got no excuse for it. “Nothing new. We’re on track to have it all happen late summer or early fall.”
“You sound...different. In a good way. What’s going on?”
She wants to hear that something has changed—that I’mworking less, that I’ve heard from Kate—though she no longer asks and neither of those things is true. “Nothing’s changed,” I reply.
Henry runs by Lucie and she turns toward him, laughing as she pulls him into her lap, pressing her lips to the top of his head. And in response, there’s a rustling in my chest.
All that optimism I once had, all the things I wanted from life and gave up on...Lucie reminds me they were ever there in the first place.
And that’s what’s changed: she’s making me want those things again.
It’s probably for the best that I’m leaving California for good.
15
LUCIE
I’m too excited about the seventh floor to keep my thoughts to myself. I’ve only waited thirty minutes on Monday morning before I’m standing at his office door with my laptop in hand.
His gaze runs over me like a finger, lingering at points along the way—mouth, hips, legs. “I assume you’re here to hit me up for something wildly impractical?”
“Not impractical at all. Your company needs a break area, and that disgusting cafeteria doesn’t count.”
“I don’t suppose you’re talking about afreebreak area. Of course you’re not. Fine, what ridiculous shit do you want?”
I raise my laptop. “Can I show you?”
He sighs, pointing to the small table in the corner. “If you must.”
I take a seat and open the presentation, trying to ignore his heat, his smell, the rough slide of his palm over his pants. “This is what other companies are doing,” I begin. “Google has an ice rink. Their employees play—”
“We are not Google,” he replies firmly. “And I’m not putting in a rink.”
“I know. I figured I’d horrify you before I went to more low-key solutions.”
His lips tug upward, a quarter of a smile. “Did Mark give you primers on how to handle me?”
“No. I just know how to deal with men.” I didn’t intend for it to be a double entendre, but given the way his eyes dip to my mouth, he seems to have taken it as one. My knee brushes against a hard thigh as I cross my legs under the table and there’s a flash of something in his face—something hungry—that steals my breath. No matter how boring I’ve found sex to be in the past…I suspect he’d be different.
“The seventh floor,” I reply, swallowing. “It’s, uh, sitting empty.”
He tenses, the light in his eyes dimming. “We had to cut expenses.”
It can’t be the whole story. Whatever that space was costing him, it was minor relative to TSG’s budget. But my purpose here isn’t to quibble over the decisions he made in the past…it’s simply to fix them. “The difference in utility costs since you closed the seventh floor are negligible, and this is what it could be.” I turn the laptop to show him the rough drawing I created online—ping-pong on one side, a small coffee bar on the other, tables in the center.
He frowns. “That looks like a magnificent place for my employees to fuck around instead of working.”
His reaction doesn’t surprise me. I’d have died of shock at this point if he hadn’t shit all over the idea. “Caleb, people care about work-life balance, whether or not you approve. If you’re going to force them to come into the office, you’ve got to make it palatable.”
He groans, leaning his head back against the chair. “I’ll consider it. And in the meantime, I’m signing you up to speak about the walking program at this thing. We need to rehabilitate our image a little.” He slides a flyer toward me.
The Northern California Technology Consortium. The name, the glossy paper, the pops of royal blue—it all screamsimportantandintimidating. It makes me want to hide under a desk until it’s over.
