Chapter 1 #2
By the time I got to my seat and settled in, the numbness began to wear off a little, and anger took its place.
I hadn’t done anything wrong. There was an entire chapter in the employee handbook that detailed what we should do if a company we worked with was acting in bad faith.
First, you call your boss—which I had—even though she hadn’t answered all week.
Then, respectfully sever contact with the bad faith company.
There were a few other minuscule suggestions in there, but that was the gist of it.
I’d done those things. I’d potentially saved the company from heaps of legal trouble in the future. Honestly, I was a fucking hero, and they should’ve rewarded me.
Settling into my window seat, I pulled the hood of my sweatshirt over my head and pulled out a book.
It was a little bit of a relief that there was nothing I could do about any of it while we were in the air.
Unless I paid for Wi-Fi—which I wasn’t planning on—Seat 22A was my own little bubble of solitude for the next few hours.
Well, it would’ve been if I hadn’t had a woman next to me that wanted to chat.
There was no way I could’ve known that pulling out a romance novel would open up a conversation about women’s fiction, porn—her words, not mine—in literature, and what constituted a good book.
I just wanted to read, but nothing I said or did made the lady catch a hint, and I wasn’t willing to completely piss her off when I was stuck elbow to elbow with her until we landed.
Instead, I just nodded along, staring at the pages that I couldn’t read with her jabbering in my ear the entire flight.
By the time we landed, I was dying to get off that stupid plane. Our little airport had never looked so good, and I let out a sigh of relief as I wandered toward the baggage claim. Hopefully my two suitcases had come through the trip unharmed, considering they held pretty much everything I owned.
After wrestling them off the conveyor belt and assuring myself that they were in full working condition, I dragged them toward the exit. My eyes fluttered closed as I stepped out into the cool damp air.
Home.
This was the place I was most comfortable. This was the place where I instantly relaxed. Turning on my phone, I ignored the notifications lighting up the screen and pressed a couple of buttons as I moved out of everyone’s way and posted up by the outside wall.
“Hey baby sister,” my brother answered. “You good?”
“Why wouldn’t I be good?” I asked suspiciously, perching on one of the suitcases.
“Because you’re callin’ me in the middle of a workday?”
“That’s fair,” I conceded, watching the travelers around me meet up with friends and family.
“Always glad to hear from you, Harp,” he said with a smile in his voice. “What’s up?”
“Well, I just got into town, but I don’t want to pay for a cab or a rideshare because I lost my fucking job,” I replied in one breath.
There was silence on the end of the phone for a long moment.
“All right. I’ll be there in fifteen.”
“I have bags. Two bags. Big ones.”
“I’ll borrow someone’s rig. See you soon.”
As soon as he’d hung up, I made sure my phone was on silent and stashed it in the bottom of my purse again. I didn’t want to deal with anything on there until I’d had a minute to get my feet under me.
If you couldn’t rush home and cut off all contact with the outside world, what was the point of home anyway?
It was closer to thirty minutes later when a large SUV pulled up to the curb and a familiar head of long dark hair popped out of the passenger window.
“Harp! Gray says you got canned!” my brother’s girlfriend yelled, grinning at me.
I flipped her off as I rose from my perch. “Glad to see you, too!”
“Are you kidding?” she screeched, leaning further out the window as Gray rounded the SUV and headed my way. “I’m fucking stoked you got fired! Now you can stay here where you belong.”
“Say it a little louder,” I complained as Gray pulled me into his arms, his biceps wrapped tightly around my head.
“How you doin’?” he asked, kissing the top of my head.
“Mostly pissed,” I replied as he let go. “Sad. Annoyed. Worried.”
“You fuck up at work?” He led the way over to the car, pulling both of my suitcases.
“No, I did the right thing.”
“No good deed…”
“Yeah, no shit,” I complained, throwing open the back door as he loaded the luggage.
“So, what happened?” Frankie asked, turning to see me from the passenger seat.
“You want the long version or the short version?”
“Short version—you can tell me the long version later when we’ve got booze.”
“Well,” I said, closing myself in the car.
I waited until Gray was in his seat to continue.
“Basically, I wouldn’t cook the books for the company who’d hired us, and I couldn’t get ahold of my boss to tell her.
I quit the job this morning, and my boss finally decided to call me back when I was at the airport and told me to go back and fucking grovel. ”
“No shit?” Gray asked, glancing at me in the rearview mirror as he pulled into traffic.
“Yep.” My stomach clenched at the memory of that conversation. “She also made some comment about how I shouldn’t be such a goody two-shoes considering who my family is.”
“What a cunt,” Frankie gasped, staring at me wide-eyed.
A bubble of laughter spilled out of my mouth.
“Sounds like you dodged a bullet,” Gray mused. “You don’t wanna work for some bitch—especially when she’s orderin’ you to put your ass on the line for some shady shit that she could deny havin’ anythin’ to do with later.”
“Yeah.” I agreed with him completely, but it didn’t help the anxiety that tightened my chest.
I’d never been fired before. I was a hard worker, and people liked me. I’d always been successful at everything I did. Being fired felt like failure, even if the logical part of my brain knew that it was a good thing I was no longer working there.
Thankfully, living out of two suitcases in apartments provided free of cost had kept my overhead so low that I’d banked most of my income since I started.
It wasn’t as if I didn’t have a cushion to fall back on.
I could take my time deciding next steps.
Maybe consider my time at home a little vacation.
“Well, you came home on the right day,” Frankie announced. “Brody’s birthday party is tonight.”
“Shit,” I mumbled, leaning my head against the seat. “I forgot to call him. Wait—Brody’s birthday isn’t until next week.”
“But the party’s tonight.” Frankie grinned.
Going to a party on the day I got fired for the first time was pretty much the last thing I wanted to do, but I shot Frankie a weak smile anyway.
It would be good to see all of my cousins.
We’d drifted apart a little since we’d become adults, but after growing up in a tight-knit family that saw each other nearly every day, those bonds held strong.
And if I was honest with myself, I knew that the rest of them hadn’t drifted anywhere.
It was me who’d moved away. Everyone else had stayed local, joining the club like our fathers, creating lives that were still intertwined.
I was the odd man out, and I knew it. That was why I couldn’t skip out on Brody’s birthday.
I was the one who left, so I was the one in charge of reconnecting again.
“Just—” I grimaced. “Don’t tell everyone I got fired, okay?”
“Of course not,” Frankie replied with a scoff.
“Nobody’s business but yours,” Gray agreed. “Mom and Dad know you’re home yet?”
As we turned onto a road more familiar to me than my own face, I leaned forward to look out the windshield just as my parents’ house came into view.
“No, they don’t.”
Gray smiled.
All was quiet as we parked out front and climbed out of Frankie’s SUV, but before we’d even unloaded my suitcases, my mom was racing out the front door barefoot. She gingerly step-skipped toward us over the uneven ground, her smile so wide I could practically see her molars.
“My baby,” she sang, throwing her arms around me. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“Surprise!” I replied, sinking into her hug. The scent of her hair made everything in the world disappear.
The thing about my mom was that she gave the best hugs, and she didn’t let go until the other person did.
And I couldn’t seem to let go.
We stood there in the drizzling rain while Frankie and Gray brought my bags into the house, and I didn’t pull away until I realized that without a coat my mom was getting soaked.
I could barely see her through my wet glasses as she held me at arm’s length and looked me over.
“Well, whatever it is, you’re in one piece.”
I let out a hiccupping laugh. “Yeah,” I croaked.
“Everything else can be fixed, sweetheart. Come inside.”