Window Shopping

Not a chance.

I avoid looking at her, stooping down to gather up the empty soda can from my lunch and some balled up napkins. “I’m not sure yet. Maybe?”

“How do we make that a definitive yes?” She seems to be choosing her words carefully. “I know you haven’t gotten that first check yet—and I was in your shoes once. If you need to borrow something? Or we can talk to womenswear about discounting a dress for you—”

Jordyn is cut off when a security guard walks into the window box.

He’s followed by two more security guards.

Mrs. Bunting from human resources brings up the rear, clutching a folder to her chest with my name on it. “The one in the green shirt. That’s her—Stella Schmidt. She’s our only employee with a criminal record and I’d like her searched, please.”

The ground tilts beneath me.

In the matter of a second, I’m ice cold. My teeth are chattering, the sandwich in my stomach threatening to come up.

“Searched for what?” Jordyn demands to know.

“I just ran an inventory report. We are missing two very expensive pairs of earrings. Diamonds. Miss Schmidt has been here after hours every night for a week. She must have found a way into the locked cases and taken them. There’s no other explanation.”

“I didn’t take anything,” I wheeze, pressing a hand to my pitching stomach. “I swear. I didn’t. I-I don’t have access to the display cases—”

She snorts. “I’m sure someone like you has ways.”

Am I terrified right now? Oh yeah. I’m shaking so hard my muscles are beginning to ache. But there is also a part of me that’s oddly relieved. I’m not getting special treatment. I’m getting what so many of my fellow inmates spoke about. The unfair, unfounded suspicions, the assumptions placed on them by society. I’m finally getting a glimpse of that—albeit on a much smaller scale—and I’m almost grateful it’s finally happening. The other shoe is dropping. My luck has run out. Ironic that I didn’t do the crime this time, but so be it.

“I’m going to get Mr. Cook,” Jordyn says, jogging from the window box.

My throat is closed up too tight to call after her. What would I say anyway?

No? Don’t get Aiden?

There’s no one else to intervene on my behalf.

Unless…he believes I took those earrings.

As I’m led out of the window box and through the riveted main floor, the security guard holding my purse at his side, my left wrist locked in his other hand, I can barely feel my own embarrassment. I’m too busy envisioning Aiden’s disappointment, hot pressure blooming behind my eyes at the possibility of it.

* * *

Aiden

“Are you sure I can’t send a driver to pick you up on Thursday?” I ask Edna through the receiver of my office phone. I’m picturing all kinds of sweat-inducing scenarios that end in my tiny aunt getting abducted or lost in the wilds of JFK airport. “I’ll come get you myself.”

“I’ll hear of no such thing,” she says, cackling down the line. “You don’t have time to traipse out to the airport in the middle of your busiest shopping day of the year. I’m an independent woman—” She muffles the receiver. “Hank, if you roll your eyes at me one more time today, I’m going to carve them out with my painter’s knife.”

I know better than to utter a single syllable when Aunt Edna and Uncle Hank are having one of their classic stare downs. It’s a scene I can picture in my head clear as day and it’s probably taking place in their screened-in porch. Paints and canvases and half-drunk glasses of sweet tea are taking up every surface. Hank is probably patting at the sweat on the back of his neck, watching Edna on the phone like it’s a spectator sport, never actually getting on the horn himself.

“As I was saying, I’m more than capable of getting a taxi to the party. Just send me the address and don’t worry about a thing. Save your fretting for coaxing me off the dance floor.”

She curses when something scatters in the background. A mason jar full of beads or some such art supply. “I’ll clean that up later. Now are you going to tell me about the girl or are we going to drag this out another twenty minutes?”

I sit up a little straighter in my chair, shooting a glance toward Leland. Keeping my voice low, I say, “How did you…?”

“You’re doing a hell of a lot of sighing, Aiden Cook. Tell me what’s up.”

“You are,” Leland stage whispers from across the office. “Sighing a lot.”

“You can hear this?” I shoot back, pointing at the receiver.

He becomes engrossed by something on his computer screen.

I sigh again. Loudly. Lord, how many times have I done that? No wonder Edna is on to me. I sound like a deflating bouncy castle. Feel like one, too. It’s not getting any easier keeping my distance from Stella. Granted it’s only been three days since the last time we were face to face, but a year might as well have passed. I woke up in the cookware section at three am this morning with a whiskey hangover and had to do the walk of shame past a dozen judgmental mannequins to the outside world where I took an Uber home to shower. Now I’ve got a headache and a big chunk carved out of my chest. Sighing doesn’t relieve me of the hollowness, so I have no idea why I’m doing it or what it’s for.