Chapter 2
“He doesn’t even work here,” Fletcher was whining as she and Ford took the elevator downstairs that evening. Ordinarily, she had a strict no-shit-talking-at-work policy, but today was the exception. What did she have to lose?
“When have the rules ever mattered to people like him?” Ford asked. “He’s hot, he’s rich, he gets everything handed to him. I’m surprised he even showed his face here. I haven’t seen him around the office since that night—”
“That we swore to never speak of?”
“—where absolutely nothing noteworthy occurred in a coat closet and no one nearly lost their job,” Ford finished tightly.
“Exactly.” Fletcher shook the memory out of her stiff shoulders as the elevator dinged, doors opening.
She’d rather fling herself off the Empire State Building than relive a single second from that night.
Especially within earshot of her colleagues.
“Anyway, aren’t you at least a little bit bummed I’m not going to mail one of these beautifully thick cardstock envelopes to your apartment? ”
Ford laughed. “You sending me one of those invitations would be the worst thing that ever happened to me.”
“Worse than that time you drank a triple espresso before the production meeting?”
A pause. “Second-worst thing,” he amended. “Point is, my PTO is already approved. My flights are booked. Slater from IT could accidentally delete InDesign off all our computers, and my Slack notifications would stay snoozed.”
Fletcher groaned as they wove around the reception desk. “Do you have to go?”
Ford pivoted hard on the heels of his boots.
Two firm palms planted on Fletcher’s shoulders, and she tried not to wince, thinking of the creases.
“I would sooner gouge out my eyes than spend a single extra second staring at those spreads. I cannot set my out-of-office autoresponder fast enough. Seychelles is calling, and I must answer.”
“Your vacation doesn’t start until halfway through the retreat. And Lydell is only a few miles away. If you’d gotten invited, you could still catch the tail end of your trip. Get a promotion and drink pina coladas off of someone’s stomach.”
Ford shook his head. “Nope. It’s called boundaries. Say it with me. Bound-a-ries.”
The thought of a week alone in the office should have thrilled Fletcher.
Except she knew Dyer was going to call asking questions at odd hours.
She had never touched her PTO because even if she wanted to take a day off, she couldn’t.
Dyer rang when he needed something—no matter what the calendar said.
“Taking some time off isn’t a crime punishable by death, you know?” Had she said that out loud, or had Ford developed rapid-onset telepathic powers? “You don’t have to kill yourself for this job. Shouldn’t, even.”
Fletcher mustered a small smile. “I’ve got to get home.”
Ford caught up to her in a few quick strides. “Hey, I’m going out tonight, and you should join me.”
“It’s a Tuesday.”
Ford’s eyebrows wagged. “And?”
And, the worst part about not being invited to Lydell was that Fletcher still had to do all the prep work. There was catering to coordinate, itineraries to plan, clothes to launder.
In her purse, her phone started to chime. On instinct, she lurched for it, pursing her lips like, See what I mean?
But it wasn’t Dyer’s designated ringtone. This was worse.
“I’ve got to take this,” she said with a sigh. Sighing wasn’t as accurate as deflating. “Have fun tonight.”
She regretted answering Kent’s call almost immediately. One second, she was saying hello, and the next, a tractor engine whined at deafening decibels, a belt out of sync or the oil tank empty. She couldn’t yank the speaker away from her ear fast enough.
“Sorry about that,” Kent said once the whirring died. “Trying to get this combine back up and running so we can finish harvesting the Weinbach field. What’s going on?”
“You called me, remember?” She didn’t mean to sound short-fused, but the words came out like a live wire that he was foolish enough to grab onto.
When Kent was mad, he grunted. He was such a grunter. And apparently, it had been a long day at her family’s farm where he spent his days helping out because here he was, grunting.
She could almost see him, hair grown too long, a grease stain on his white undershirt, lips turned downward.
Teeth always clenched behind his jaw. He’d been handsome once, in a rough-edged brooding way.
But, really, when you’ve been together since you were sixteen, did it really matter if you were attracted to them?
A relationship in motion would stay in motion. Newton’s fourth law.
Finally, once he was able to form full syllables again, he huffed, “I didn’t know it was a crime to call my fiancée.”
Fletcher pressed her lips into a pinstripe, a feeble attempt to leash her honest thoughts.
Again. Every call had been like this lately.
Measured words and muted frustrations. Days and weeks of her silencing his calls so that she didn’t have to pretend she actually wanted to answer them.
Days and weeks of him still calling, no matter what she said.
Or what she didn’t.
Like, for instance, Yes, I want to marry you!
Pushing through the office’s revolving doors, Fletcher imagined letting the tide of Manhattan sweep her away. Kent, however, was an anchor to the seafloor. She shoved out a breath, a long spool of white in the October evening. “We talked about that, Kent.”
“I know you said you’re not ready, but no one’s ever really ready, are they?” Kent’s voice strained against the words, feeling every inch of the thirteen hundred miles between them. Honestly, Fletcher couldn’t tell if his bad mood was because of her or the broken combine header. Did she even care?
“I need to focus on my career right now. You know that.” Now more than ever. Stupid invitations. Stupid Waylon.
Kent barked a laugh, grating. “Is that what you call making some billionaire’s coffee every morning for pennies? A career?”
A blue post office box greeted her outside the office. Dyer would have never conceded to e-vites for a trip as prestigious as Lydell. So Fletcher stuffed and stamped and sealed all fifteen without a hint of dissent.
She could have taken the stack of envelopes to the company mailroom, but after the day she’d had, she couldn’t wait to get home, swap into some pajamas, and crack open Lightroom to edit her recent camera roll in peace.
Waylon’s invite was the only envelope left in Fletcher’s hands. It should’ve been her name delicately penned on the envelope, her ticket to a weeklong getaway at Lydell Island where she could laugh and schmooze and come back to New York City with a suntan and a salary increase.
The envelope with that little red bead of wax like a bullet hole to her heart sank into the mail slot with cruel finality.
She shifted the phone to her other ear. “You mean a job at my dream company? Yeah, that’s what I call it.”
“You’re working yourself to death for some lunatic who doesn’t care about you,” he said. “All I’m asking is for you to call home sometimes. Can you stop being so goddamn selfish for five minutes?”
Here it came. The same fight for the thousandth time, tonight of all nights. She wanted to yell, scream, cause a scene, but she didn’t. Of course she didn’t. Fletcher Spence didn’t cause scenes. She planned things, fixed things, pretended things were fine.
Fletcher breathed through her nose. Apparently inhaling was the only human function she could manage while staying calm. “Kent, I—”
Something cracked in Kent’s voice. A desperate plea. “It wouldn’t be the end of the world if you took a break. I haven’t seen you since July, you know?”
July when he proposed. July when she smiled and nodded in front of their extended families, ambushed at an Independence Day barbecue she agreed to attend only because the office was closed Friday and Monday and she could be there and back without taking personal time.
July when she swore she wouldn’t go back to Nebraska again until she had her first byline.
Fletcher turned down her block, each step kicking up crisp autumn leaves. The rest of the evening’s commuters whizzed past, shuffling her back and forth, but it all felt like slow motion. Everything she wanted to say lodged halfway up her throat.
Her feet led her past prewar storefronts and walk-ups with rusting fire escapes.
It was all so different from her family’s parcel in the blink-and-you’d-miss-it town on the outskirts of Lincoln where she grew up, barefoot and wild on the farm.
Back then, when she sprawled across the grass and daydreamed, she imagined soaring over the oceans with a scarf billowing in the wind like Amelia Earhart.
Then, when she was old enough to realize that she’d much prefer to fly in a plane that had a slightly lower chance of crash-landing to avoid getting eaten alive by coconut crabs, she rebuilt her vision board around traveling the globe with Jet-Setter.
As far as she could tell, Kent’s globe ended at the Lincoln city limits. They were twenty-six years old. God forbid she wasn’t ready to settle down, get married, pop out three kids, and adopt a golden retriever.
“What’s going on with you?” Kent asked when she didn’t respond. She could practically see him thoughtlessly swipe an oil-stained hand down his face, exasperated.
Bumping open the door of her entirely too-orange building, Fletcher groaned. If they weren’t already fighting, they would be soon. “You know that company trip I’ve wanted to go on for the last three years? Dyer approved the guest list today, and I’m not on it.”
Kent bristled like she knew he would. “I told you. He doesn’t appreciate you. None of them do.”
“That’s not the point.” Hot, angry tears welled in Fletcher’s eyes, but she blinked them away as she hiked up and up and up toward her fifth-floor apartment.