Chapter 2
I had to stop crying. He wasn’t worth it.
“That’s all I have for the Four-Squared project,” Octavia stated, and I snapped to attention.
“What about zoning?” I asked. “What’s happening there?”
“I was getting to that, Camille,” she informed me, although she had just closed the file. “I’m going before the Kent County commission on…” She checked her laptop. “Next Tuesday at four. Rashelle, you’ll come with.”
Rashelle had been staring at her own laptop but now she looked first at Octavia, and then at me. “Next Tuesday?” she echoed. “It’s not on the calendar.”
Octavia stopped typing and also looked up. “Is there a problem?”
“Yeah, I have a wedding dress fitting that afternoon,” our paralegal answered.
A wedding. Rashelle was getting married, but as for me? Oh, no. I had to stop this! I was at work.
“If I drive out to West Michigan with you, I’ll miss it,” she explained.
“You can change your appointment.” Octavia went back to typing. She did it by pecking one key at a time so it took forever.
Rashelle turned again to me and I unclenched my teeth from the inside of my cheek, which I’d been biting so that the pain would distract me from thoughts of my ex.
He really was my ex, and as my mom had told me a hundred times already since the ring return, he really wasn’t worth it.
I repeated her words in my mind as I tried to pull myself together.
He was not worth it and I was not going to cry at work, not here in this staff meeting and not in my glass-walled office where everyone could see. I was not going to cry!
“I feel like you should already know this, Rashelle, but your job comes before shopping,” Octavia mentioned as she searched for a letter on her keyboard, and I finally did step in.
“No, she’d not going shopping. This is a dress fitting,” I said, shaking my head. “Her wedding is too soon to reschedule. It’s fine,” I told Rashelle.
Octavia’s lip curled. I was already aware of what she thought about weddings, as were the rest of the people in this office.
When she’d first seen Rashelle’s ring, she had told everyone that our society’s obsession with couple-hood resulted in a colossal waste of time and money.
She lectured about how traditional marriage had been invented by the Founding Fathers as a way to suppress women’s rights in our new country, and she’d refused to believe that her argument was historically inaccurate.
She had advised us all that it was a better move, both emotionally and financially, to remain single.
My fingers clenched in my lap. I was single. My ring was gone and so was Dax.
“Well, I guess that Munir can come with me instead,” she said, and he raised his hand like he was in elementary school. “You’ll drive, and just FYI, there’s no compensation for gas,” she told him next, but when he also looked over at me, I shook my head again. We would figure it out later.
After our meeting ended, we all went back to our offices. Rashelle followed me into mine and shut the glass door behind herself. “Thank you,” she said. “I thought that Octavia would make me miss my fitting.”
“No problem.” I looked at her left hand, allowing my eyes to slide there just briefly.
“How are you doing?” she asked, and I saw her glance at my ring finger, too.
The tan line hadn’t had time to fade yet, and I took the coward’s route and put both my hands under my desk.
That was how I’d been handling this whole situation, with my head down and creeping along like a misty ghost in a scary movie.
I’d been hiding from Dax by ignoring his texts and voicemails.
I’d been avoiding certain roads that I knew he’d have to drive on to get to work, and I’d deleted the social media apps from my phone.
I’d done all that but I was still having trouble dealing… no, I had to stop crying.
I squeezed my bare fingers together and cleared my throat before I answered her question. “I’m fine,” I said. “Before next Tuesday, please sit down with Munir and get him up to speed so that he’s ready for the zoning commission.”
“And so that Octavia doesn’t have a cow about everything, right?” she asked, smiling.
I only shrugged. Rashelle liked to gossip but I wasn’t going to get involved.
When I’d first started here, rumors had blown up about me with lots of people (including her) whispering that I had been involved with our boss.
I had been embarrassed and self-conscious about coming to work every day because of that—but obviously, it hadn’t been true since Dax and I were together then.
We’d been engaged but I hadn’t had the ring yet… I bit the inside of my cheek again.
When I didn’t accept her invitation to badmouth Octavia, Rashelle told me that she would go talk to Munir right now, and she left my office.
It was almost time for the staff to leave for the day anyway, but I planned to stay a lot longer myself.
I had plenty to do and lately, I had hated going to my apartment.
It felt so strange without Dax. After all, I had moved to Detroit for him, so it was strange for me to be in this entire city.
I bit my cheek and repeated that he wasn’t worth it, and I worked for a couple more hours before I also left to hit the building’s gym.
Things had gotten ridiculously complicated after the night at Chateau Moderne, because Dax and I had been together for long time and there were so many connections between our lives.
All of those needed to be severed or untangled.
I was a lawyer so I was used to tedious details, but it was a different experience when it was so personal.
There were the vehicles, for example. He had been driving what I’d called the good car, the one that didn’t have any mechanical problems and was actually mine.
He took that one because he was out in the city late at night and had needed something reliable.
It had left the bad car, which was in his name, for my use.
That issue had been the first thing I’d dealt with, after the bouncer guy and I had made our deal on the sidewalk outside of the nightclub.
“Come on,” I’d told him. “Let’s get this over with.
” First, he’d said that he needed to see the color of my money.
I didn’t actually have that much on me but he’d been ok with seeing the color of my bank account when I showed him the balance on my phone.
He’d informed me that he didn’t do any payment apps, he worked cash only, and then he’d told his boss at the Chateau Moderne that he was taking off early…
which was apparently ok. Anyway, we had gone to get my car, the one that Dax had driven to the club that night.
He’d left it halfway on the sidewalk and next to a fire hydrant.
“Where did you park? You can follow me home,” I’d told the bouncer.
“No, I’ll go with you,” he had said, and had gotten into the passenger side.
“Who the hell rides in here, tiny children?” He’d put the seat as far back as it would go, mangling the clothes that Dax kept hanging on the bar across the rear seats and crushing whatever else he’d stored on the floor. There was a lot of stuff down there.
If I hadn’t already been so upset, I would have told the bouncer to get right back out and go to his own vehicle. But I wasn’t thinking straight. “Fine, you can come with me,” I’d muttered, and we had gotten on our way.
I had to do that now, too. The gym had emptied while I’d been working out until I was the last person here, and all the employees were watching me.
I’d had jobs like theirs where I had to wait to close up, and I didn’t like doing this to them…
but I also really didn’t want to go home.
“Thank you,” I told the woman at the desk when I finally left, and she ran behind me to lock the door.
And then I really did have to return to the place I’d shared with Dax.
He’d been so upset when we’d moved in there, but I’d said that it was the best that we could afford and I had held firm in the face of his strenuous objections.
It had been a terrible fight, actually, but I was the only one contributing to the rent since he was growing his business.
I hadn’t been willing to give in, not on that.
But he’d been right that it wasn’t a very nice place.
The neighborhood wasn’t the safest, which my coworkers had informed me when they’d heard the address and which I could also see with my own eyes every time I was there.
There was always something happening on the street, like police cars and ambulances driving up and down it, some kind of fight, or somebody yelling and causing problems. In fact, I saw a scary guy right now, a huge figure lurking in the shadows of my building.
I parked but then, as I watched him, I wasn’t sure what to do.
Was it better to make a run for the entrance or to stay here, where someone else might come and bother me?
I didn’t seem to have the city smarts that my coworkers did and at times like this, I missed them.
The man seemed to notice me in my car because his head lifted and stayed turned in my direction.
I got ready to start the engine with the new key I’d had made, the only one that now worked for this vehicle.
The bouncer guy had told me that I’d better do it, because he thought that Dax would try to repossess it. He had called that “felony larceny.”
“It’s not a bad ride,” the bouncer had told me on the night of my breakup, as we’d ridden through the city. He’d run his mitt of a hand over my dashboard. “But you keep a lot of crap in it.”
“It’s Dax’s stuff,” I’d explained. He had liked to be ready to make wardrobe changes for the night and the thought of him looking so cute in one of his outfits…