Half a million per year could drag me out of crushing debt, and maybe out of poverty entirely. I could help my mother—maybe save her life. Pay off the house, cover her medical bills, take care of her the way nobody ever took care of her in her whole life. Even if she didn’t deserve it, she was still my mother. I could do something good with that sort of money.
But Bret was still there, waiting.
“Maybe,” I said, and the elevator kept sliding down. “I could maybe put aside my problems with Bret.”
She looked at me, then at the numbers. Ten, nine, eight…
“You don’t have forever to decide,” she said. “When this elevator reaches the bottom, I want your answer. I want your commitment, one way or the other. No waffling, no quitting on me, none of that. If you do this, you’ll be in it entirely, do you understand me, Jude?”
“Yes,” I whispered, and thought of Bret on the swings, and walking with him through Cobalt Ridge, riding bikes and laughing. Five, four three…
“Well?” she asked as the elevator dinged. I closed my eyes and saw Bret, the last time we spoke, back when we were still kids: the anger in his eyes when I screamed that he was going back on our promise, that I never wanted to see him again, and the hurt I felt when he turned his back and walked away. I’d never gotten over that, not in all the years since.
“I’ll do it,” I said as the doors slid open.
“Good,” she said, and stepped out. “Take the day to get yourself together. There’s a tour tomorrow.” I followed her into the lobby, then down the steps out front. A car waited for her by the curb. I wondered who the hell called it, and who was running this trip—but figured it was my replacement, the new version of me, some new lucky girl that would spend a few weeks per year scheduling and planning, but otherwise sitting in her living room in her sweats.
While I went through hell for money.
“I’ll be there,” I said.
And she climbed into the car, and was gone. I watched it pull out into traffic, then half turned back toward the building behind me.
Bret Flowers, the boy that broke my heart, was a grown-ass man now. A very handsome, and apparently very successful man.
And I was going to have to get over what happened if I was going to make this work.
Lady Fluke said I had the day to figure my shit out, and so that was what I’d do. Then tomorrow, I’d go to the tour, and start my new life in a job for which I was completely unprepared and unqualified.
2
Bret
Back when I was a kid, the old Nabisco factory in Northeast Philadelphia used to make the whole surrounding area smelled like baking cookies. For a few miles in all directions, it smelled like sugar and rising dough. I used to roll my windows down and breathe it in—at least until my dad would tell me to put those fucking things back up and stop making so much goddamn noise.
Now it was abandoned, shut down five years earlier. Neal jiggled the handle of a door that led into the distribution section of the structure, and frowned until the thing popped open. He staggered back and grinned sheepishly at me.
I’d known him since college. We both went to UC Berkeley, out in California, about as far from home as I could possibly get. He was a senior when I was a freshman, and we kept in touch after he graduated. We opened Flowers Construction together while I was still in school, and grew it from a tiny little regional company that employed two kids with no experience and boatloads of ambition into a multinational corporation with thousands of projects and millions in revenue. Sometimes I looked back on my life before and wondered how I made it through the days without something to lose myself in, something to distract me from the world outside of my head.
“Should we go inside?” Neal asked, and checked his watch. He looked older than me, mostly because he didn’t take care of himself. He’d always been lazy and prone to drinking too much, and that caught up with him over the years. He took care of the numbers and accounting, and I took care of courting new clients and managing the overall strategy. We made a pretty good team for the most part, and though there’d been arguments over the years, we’d managed to come through stronger each time.
I joked that it was like a marriage, but frankly, it was like a marriage. Minus the sex and children.
“She’s going to come,” I said, looking back at the parking lot.
“I’m not sure about that,” Neal said. “I mean, she ran off.”