Chapter 23 The Fun Kind of Breaking and Entering
The Fun Kind of Breaking and Entering
Tuesday, Now
At work, everything has gone to shit.
Sure, my Monday disappearance didn’t exactly set the place up for success, but while I was getting my heart stomped on in my driveway, Bob was hiding from the receptionist, who’d been fielding his angry client calls.
Literally hiding . At some point, Pamela mounted a search team and caught him watching highlights of the US Open in the lactation closet.
So on Tuesday morning, I don’t know what I’m expecting to greet me—acknowledgment, recognition, mild gratitude for my years of unrelenting service to his clients—but Bob has never been more of a heinous prick.
I can’t tell if he’s embarrassed to have uncovered the depths of his incompetence or if he’s just that entitled.
No one asks about the wedding fiasco besides Stacy and, weirdly, Paul, who makes an appearance in the office despite having a two-day-old infant at home.
On Wednesday, Anders from IT delivers my new laptop in exchange for a garbage bag of rice and computer parts.
“It’s set up like you had it before. Back to normal,” Anders tells me.
The moment he’s out of my office, I boot up my computer and stalk Ethan’s van social media account again.
He’s been consistently posting the promotional photos I took over the weekend, but the newest image isn’t that.
Sure, the van is featured, but it’s one I took of him while he was driving us to the wedding that never was.
The night I kissed him in his van and he promised me I’d do it again.
I know it’s his camera, but I can’t help but feel that that particular photo is mine, and he’s carelessly exposing our moments to the light.
When Rich left me, I was listless. I was certainly grieving something , but sadness was harder to grab on to. Rich moved out and took with him the end of a possibility. I was grieving the unrealized potential of a life with him—what we could become if we were both a little different.
But without Ethan, I’m hollow. I’m emptied and splayed on the floor like a box of old photographs unearthed from the attic.
I’m marred by memories of something so stunningly real and exactly right while an essential piece of my body has been pried out of my chest. I’ve lost something tangible .
What Ethan and I had was something to lose.
There’s a sad sort of beauty in the way grief goes liquid and takes different shapes to fill the body it’s in.
The emptier someone leaves you, the more your insides swim with their loss.
Some endings are about mourning what’s gone and some are about accepting what you never even had.
The perfect husband. The perfect life. But perfect isn’t the same as right.
Perfect things can be all wrong. Losing something that was so imperfect in all the loveliest ways hurts infinitely worse.
I figure that so long as I’m drowning in the absence of Ethan Powell, I might as well internet stalk him with purpose and soundtrack the act with every song crediting him as a lyricist. I made the playlist myself and it already has two saves.
The Seraphina songs are particularly gut-wrenching.
Heartbreaking poetry of lives never lived, paths not taken, and love lost out of cowardice.
I’ve heard the album seven times already; each listen presses into a bruise on my ribs.
I hope he never knows I played him on a loop for days after he left.
I hope he sees he made my Spotify Wrapped.
Unable to spend another second wallowing, I punch out every browser tab one by one and do the one thing I’ve never let myself do: I openly cry at my desk.
Loud, body-shaking, cathartic sobs. It’s astounding how good it feels to audibly weep in a glass office where everyone can see and hear me but must carry on as though they’re not physically disturbed by my behavior.
I don’t think I’ve ever felt so powerful.
Is this how Bob feels when he berates a temp for stocking the wrong brand of nut milk in the break room fridge?
The world around me is bending to my will. It’s intoxicating.
But the party ends with a Teams message from Pamela that dries my eyes in an instant.
Are you CRYING? What is wrong with you? Have you LOST your mind?
The rest of Wednesday is a blur of tears soundtracked by sad indie folk rock. Thursday starts with an elevator ambush.
“AgriTech is threatening to fire us again.” Stacy’s heels clap down the hall in front of me.
When she realizes I’m not keeping up, she seems to consider stopping but instead only slows to half speed.
She’s suited in head-to-toe orange like a sentient Creamsicle, while I’m in my depression slacks (which are just sweatpants I’ve ironed a pleat into).
“Good. They should. Tell them to do it,” I goad, sipping on my Big Gulp.
She grabs the plastic cup and one of my other drinks out of my hands. “What’s in your cup? Your breath smells like a movie theater floor.”
I hiccup. “It’s all the sodas mixed together.”
She eyes me up and down cautiously. “Are you okay, sweetie?”
The question is too perfunctory to demand honest consideration, and still, it stops me in my tracks.
“Is this it?” I ask her.
She looks at me askance. “Is what ‘it’?”
“Is this the thing we’ve been working toward? Is this what my dream was?”
Stacy’s eyeing me as though she doesn’t recognize me. Like I’ve possibly undergone a lobotomy. Which is fair, because my sense of self feels…off. It’s as though someone’s walked inside my head and moved all the furniture six inches.
“Partnership’s the dream,” she says simply.
“Being Bob is my dream? Bob is who I’m aspiring to? To be so afraid and stressed by my own job that I get slapped with an HR complaint for locking myself in the pumping closet? That’s what I’ve sacrificed every weekend for?”
“Alrighty…how about we get you out of this very public hallway before you visibly unravel?” She peers over my shoulder and then coaxes me into a conference room.
“You don’t have to be like Bob to do his job,” she tells me once the door is shut.
“Ideally, you’d be nothing like him. He’s not a good lawyer. ”
My butt slides down the glass wall, plopping all the way to the floor. I’m being unprofessional, but since the “crying incident”—which is already being discussed throughout the office in hushed, cautioning tones—I’m far past the point of caring about propriety.
“What is being a partner here supposed to do for me?”
She looks past my head with noticeable discomfort. “You want to work with more tech startups, right? Women founders? Marginalized founders? You’ll need leverage to get the higher-ups to sign off on it. If you’re a partner—”
“Then I’ll be the partner signing clients who don’t bring in enough money. Nothing will never be enough. All I’ll get is a stake in a toxic firm filled with a bunch of overworked, underappreciated associates. Why do I want that?” I ask her, genuinely curious.
“I don’t know, Charley. Why do any of us want it? Money. Security. Predictability. The devil you know and all that.”
The devil you know. I hate this place, but I know it better than anywhere else, and if I give up enough of my happiness, I could have it forever. A relatively lucrative prison of my own making.
This is the bargain I’ve struck. I could’ve spent eternity in search of the impossible with Ethan, but, hey, if I stick it out here long enough, I might earn an executive parking spot. Maybe they could bury me in it.
—
Stacy recommends I work from home and I heed her advice, bringing my laptop into my bed with my Crisp & Green salad like I do every night. I’m a bed person now.
Hours go by. I’m cozy in my patent-drafting flow state. Nothing can disrupt me until something clatter-clatter-crashes at the other end of the house. Then I hear something that makes my blood run cold: a man’s voice.
Every cell in my body tenses, as if I’m trapped in one of those dreams where I’m soundlessly screaming.
A shriek is perched at the roof of my mouth.
I lift my phone to call 911, but the device in my hand is a dead black brick.
Darting my eyes around the room in search of a baseball bat or a particularly angular lamp, I find nothing in my sparsely furnished bedroom that could save me from an attacker.
Nothing but a bed, a minifridge, and a bar cart topped with that damn penis straw.
Ethan’s face flashes in my mind, and god help me, I want to grab the straw, if for no other reason than he’ll know I died thinking of him when my body is found clutching it.
Resisting the dramatics, I reach for the deceptively heavy mortar and pestle from my Mad Men bar cart and head for the stairs.
Every creaky step makes me wince. I could run out the front door and flee the scene, but I can’t be certain the guy won’t spot me making a break for it, and my system is coursing with too much adrenaline to think clearly anyway.
Instead, I follow the voice, the rustling, the squeak of the rubber sneaker soles against the tile floor in my sunroom.
There’s nothing left to take and still I’m determined not to lose another thing without a fight.
My back is pressed against the wall beside the French double doors facing the empty great room. I breathe in deep. In. Out. In. Out. I swear to god, if I die alone in this house before I’ve even settled on a living room couch…
A woman’s voice tells her coconspirator, “You’re going to have to suck in your butt, babe.”
Instantly, my stomach unwinds at the sight of my sister and her fiancé mid–B&E. “Holy—”
“Charlie Brown!” Petey’s butt says. He’s nothing but a pair of familiar legs dangling through my open window as Laurel fails to yank him by his tree-trunk thighs through the too-small opening. “Hey! Hi. How’ve you been?”
“What are you doing?” I lower my weapon and my entire body slouches in relief. “I almost killed you.”