“No. I have a better idea. You use your medic skills. Aren’t you a doctor?”
I sighed heavily. “You know that I am. I finished med school as part of my training. Why?”
“Because that's what you're going to do. You have one month, one month that you will completely dedicate yourself to the children's hospital downtown. For free, and you have one month to get that girlfriend of yours to agree to marry you. If you don't, I’m cutting you off.”
My mouth dropped open. Could he even do that? All that money was willed to me in my parents’ estate. Sure I had been spending a little bit since getting out of the service, but it wasn't his to take away. “What are you talking about?”
“I'm going to put it in a trust. All of the money that was willed to you is shares within this pharmaceutical company. It was one of the reasons that your parents wanted you to become a doctor. At least that part of what they wished for you came true, even if you went about it in different means than they were planning.” He was referring to the fact that I didn't end up at some Ivy League school. Again, they died, I needed a new family. The military provided me that.
“So you want me to donate my medical knowledge? That doesn't just happen. I'm not just going to get some random free job for a month at the Children's Hospital.”
“Sure you are. I'm on the board, I can get you any job I want to. Maybe I should have you start as a nurse, clean bedpans for your indiscretions?”
My blood was boiling underneath my skin. How dare he do this to me? “And my girlfriend? You think I can just make this happen out of thin air?”
“According to you at our last dinner, it's quite serious. She may actually like it if you propose, show her and me that you’re ready to settle down and start acting like an adult.”
Fuck. Not only did I just get assigned the job that I would never want, but now I had to find a girlfriend, hell a fiancé. And as I sat in that gray office as the rain slid down the window outside I looked over the city and thought how the hell was I going to make it through the next thirty days?
Two
Addison
I curled my hair around my index finger just as I did every time I was nervous. It wasn't something I noticed in myself, but my sister, Elizabeth, always noticed and pointed it out.
“What's wrong?”
“What do you mean? Nothing is wrong.”
“Well, you're sweating for one. Two you've got the curlyhaired thing going on, and three you are pounding on that keyboard so loud that I'm sure neighbors upstairs can hear you. So again, what's wrong?”
Stupid big sisters, they always called you out on your shit. “Fine, you know the new security system for the law firm? I want to make sure that our client's files are as secure as possible. I mean without that why would they come to us? You know that discretion is our biggest attribute of the company. But I keep getting denied access to some of my codes. It doesn’t make any sense because I built the system, I have access to everything! I just don't understand why I'm getting locked out.”
Elizabeth stood from the kitchen table and walked around behind me staring at the screen. Sure indiscretion was big of a law firm, but when you and your sister are both coders, you help each other out.
“What about this line here?” She pointed at the screen. The line of code that she was referring to I hadn't written. “I've no idea. I didn’t put that in there.”
She made a face and took the three tiny steps that she needed to take to be into the kitchen of our small apartment.
“You made a face. Why did you make a face?”
She shrugged as she poked her head into the refrigerator to grab a bottle of wine. “I mean it's probably nothing.”
“What is nothing, Elizabeth?”
“Well the last time I had one of my codes changed, it meant that I was getting the boot. Somebody was double checking my work and they didn't like what they saw. I'm really sorry Addison. But I think you're getting fired.”
My mouth dropped open. I couldn't get fired. We were barely affording this apartment with the two of our incomes combined. Manhattan was expensive as hell. If I got fired, I don't know what we would do. I don't know how we would make it.
“Are you sure? Elizabeth focus. Are you sure that's what happened?”
She brought a glass of red over to me and sat down across us at the table and began seriously typing. She turned the laptop screen around so that I could see it and pointed to the screen. There was a picture of a guy younger than us, with black framed glasses and a big dopey smile. “See this kid? And he is a kid. He's fresh out of college, ten years younger than me. He does a great job. He can code faster than I could. Faster and cheaper is what a company is always looking for. That software is being recoded,
it's because they consider you antiquated. So instead of trying to update their security system tonight, you should start looking for jobs.”
I rolled my eyes at her. As much as I loved Elizabeth and our sisterly bond, sometimes she had a flair for the dramatic. So I shut my computer, but instead of looking for jobs I grabbed my laptop and my wine and headed to my bedroom. Watching a good rom com and drowning my sorrows in a glass of red would be the only thing I accomplished for the evening.
Three