Kimberly #2
What I got was silence. He looked at me for three seconds, four, five, and his face gave me nothing. Not a crack. Not a flinch. Not a single sign that anything I said had landed anywhere at all.
"We’ll see," he said. He walked around his desk and sat, and just like that I was dismissed. "HR is on the fourth floor. Get your badge. Your first day starts now."
"Right now?"
"You heard me."
I walked to the door, which he unlocked from somewhere behind that desk with a buzz and a click. My legs were unsteady and my face was burning. I made it six steps before my shoe caught the carpet and I stumbled, and I felt his gaze on my back.
I did not turn around. I walked to the elevator and pressed the button and stood there staring at my reflection in the polished doors and thought, with complete clarity, that Greta Whitlock’s sweet, sensitive boy was the most infuriating man I had ever met in my life.
That evening I stopped at the Thai place on Third and picked up pad thai and spring rolls and that coconut soup Katelyn never stopped talking about, and I carried it all home in two plastic bags that I held up like trophies the second I walked through the door.
"We’re celebrating," I announced. "I have a job. An actual, real, salaried job with benefits, and I brought food that did not come from our freezer."
Katelyn looked up from the kitchen table where she’d been grading reading logs in red pen, and her whole face opened up. "Are you serious?"
"Dead serious. Secretary to the CEO."
She screamed. Not a cute little gasp—a full scream, the one that made the neighbor bang on the wall, and then she was on her feet and grabbing the bags out of my hands and spreading containers across the counter. "Penny! Get out here! Kim brought real food and she has news!"
Penny’s door opened. She came out slow, suspicious, still in her pajamas with her hood up, and she looked at the spread on the counter and then at me.
"What happened?"
"I got a job." I couldn’t keep the grin off my face. "A good one. Steady paycheck, which means," I pulled out a chair and sat, "we can try again. The new treatment. We can look into it for real this time."
Penny stood very still. The hope in the room was almost physical, and she was fighting it, pushing back against it the way she’d been pushing back against everything for months.
"Save it, Kim." Her voice was quiet. "I’m not a hole you just pour money into."
"That is not what you are."
"That’s exactly what I am. Every dollar you’ve ever made goes straight into keeping me alive, and for what? So I can sit in that chair at the clinic for another six weeks and watch the number not move?"
I got up and went to her. She didn’t step away, which I took as permission. I put my arms around her and pulled her in, and she was stiff for a second, holding, holding, and then she wasn’t.
"Listen to me," I said, into her hair, which smelled like the lavender she rubbed on her wrists every night.
"You are not a bill I pay. You are my baby sister.
You are the girl who used to wake me up at midnight to watch you dance.
You are the loudest, bravest, most stubborn person in this family, and your being here, right here, breathing, fighting, stealing the entire carton of orange juice like a little criminal, that is not nothing.
That is everything. That is the whole reason I get up in the morning. "
She was crying. I was crying. My voice was doing the shaky thing it does when I’ve run out of places to put what I’m feeling, and I just held on tighter.
"I’m sorry," she said, small, muffled against my shoulder. "I’m sorry I’m so mean about it. I’m scared, Kim. I’m really scared."
"I know, sweetheart. I’m scared too. But you don’t have to be sorry for being scared. You just have to let me be scared with you. Okay? That’s it. That’s all I’m asking."
She nodded against my shoulder. We stood there for a long time, the two of us in our tiny kitchen with the take-out getting cold on the counter.
"Oh, good," Katelyn said, her voice thick and her eyes red. "Are we doing a crying festival? Because nobody invited me and I’m deeply offended." She crossed the kitchen in three steps and wrapped her arms around both of us.
Penny laughed through her tears. Katelyn kissed the top of her head and said, "If anybody makes me cry before I eat my coconut soup, I will never forgive either of you."
We ate. We talked. Penny stole spring rolls off Katelyn’s plate, and Katelyn pretended to be outraged, and for about an hour the apartment sounded like it used to, back when the worst thing we had to worry about was rent.
Penny fell asleep on the couch halfway through a movie, her head in Katelyn’s lap, and Katelyn looked at me over her sleeping sister's hair, and neither of us needed to say a word.
I covered Penny with the throw blanket and turned off the lamp and thought, for the first time in a very long time, that we might be okay. That there might be a road through this with all three of us still standing at the end of it.
I believed that for about fourteen hours.
The next morning I walked into the Whitlock Tower a little before seven, badge clipped to my blazer, and I knew before I reached the elevator that something was wrong.
Two women by the coffee station stopped talking mid-sentence when I passed.
A man in a gray suit looked at me, then looked away too fast. The lobby had a charge running through it, a low hum of whispered conversations that cut off the second I got close enough to hear them.
The third floor was the worst. People moved in tight clusters, heads together, voices down, and a woman I’d never met turned and stared at me with an expression I couldn’t place.
Sophie found me before I’d made it ten steps. She pulled me into the break room and shut the door.
"Okay, don’t freak out."
"That is the worst possible way to start a sentence."
"A competitor announced overnight that they’re launching the exact same product Whitlock has been developing in secret for six months.
Like, the exact same one. Down to the features.
" She was talking fast, her fingers tight around her coffee cup.
"Someone leaked it. Internal, has to be.
And people are, well." She winced. "You showed up out of nowhere yesterday.
Nobody knows who you are. The CEO fired his own secretary on the spot to give you her job.
And now today, the biggest leak in company history. "
I stared at her. "They think I did it?"
Sophie’s face told me everything her mouth was still trying to soften.
"I’ve been here one day. I don’t even know my computer password."
"I know that. You know that." She glanced toward the door, where I could hear footsteps and low voices passing on the other side. "But the people out there are looking for someone to blame, and you’re the easiest story they’ve got."
I stood in that break room with my new badge still shiny on my lapel and my fourteen hours of believing things were going to be okay, and I felt every single one of them drain out of me like water through a crack in the glass.
The break room door opened behind me. I didn’t hear it at first, not over the sound of my own career collapsing before it started.
"Well." Behind me, a man’s voice. "If she’s the leak, she’s doing a terrible job of hiding. Standing right out in the open with her badge still crooked."