Playmaker or Heartbreaker

Chapter 1

Chapter one

Mel

The drive home had been short, but it felt as if I’d crawled back from a war zone in heels. Fridays were supposed to be a win, a high five. This one was sucker punched by a spreadsheet, then followed by having the spreadsheet laugh at your expense.

“Is that you, Mel?”

Sam’s voice floated in from the kitchen as I shut the front door behind me.

I stepped into the living room. It smelled faintly of jasmine, with the warm vanilla of Sam’s favorite candles.

The soft thump of the fridge door was the only sound breaking the silence until Sam emerged with a soda in hand.

She took one look at me and stopped cold, her expression shifting from casual Friday to oh brother, what happened?

“You look like you got fired or hit by a truck.”

I slumped onto the couch with a dramatic sigh, feeling worse than a deflated balloon. “Not fired, but I might as well have been.”

“Well at least you didn’t get hit by a truck. That would’ve been a real mess to clean up,” she said, narrowing her eyes, really taking me in.

Her dark brows, the same shade as her glossy brown hair, drew together over her wide eyes.

Her features were all Dad’s side, while I’d gotten Mom’s lighter hair, but we both had our grandmother’s green-blue catlike eyes.

She stopped in front of me, hair scraped into a messy knot with a pencil sticking out in a flag-of-surrender style.

“Wait, are you okay? You’re not sick, are you?”

Sick? If only. A virus would be easier to fight than corporate downsizing. I shook my head.

“Pregnant?”

I almost smiled. “No. Definitely not pregnant.”

“Good. So, I won’t start lighting candles and maybe call in a lawyer, then a priest to cover the confession part.”

That earned a weak huff from me. “No. Just unemployed.”

“What?!” Her voice shot up, echoing through the house like a fire alarm. She searched my face for a hint of a joke. “You weren’t freaking kidding?!”

She reacted exactly as I did when I heard the news.

“The firm’s merging with a bigger one,” I said. “Mr. Grayson kept apologizing, all while giving me a very polite ‘we’re letting you go’ speech.”

“But I thought the firm was doing great! You guys had matching mugs and everything.”

I gave her a look. “That’s your corporate-success metric? Coordinated ceramics?”

“Obviously. That and end-of-year cheese boards,” she said, flopping onto the couch beside me. “You really didn’t see it coming?”

“I had a weird feeling. But you know me. I shoved it deep into the denial vault and threw away the key.”

Sam sighed. She knew what that meant. She might’ve been well on her way to becoming Doctor Samantha Boyd, but right now, she was just my younger sister.

Med school kept her too busy to help with the bills.

Some days, she looked like it was costing her everything, with eyes shadowed from studying and too much coffee.

She never said it, but I knew she was running on fumes, and that never stopped her from feeling guilty.

I’d seen it in the shimmer of her eyes when the roof upgrade didn’t happen.

She exhaled hard. “So what’s the deal? Why you?”

“Julius she didn’t have to. We both knew the math. I was the only one paying bills right now, and she was praying to match locally for residency next week. Until then, she was broke and buried in loans.

I didn’t answer right away. I let my eyes drift over the living room of our family home.

Our parents had handed us the title before retiring and moving to Florida.

“Young and energetic,” they’d said. “You can handle mowing the lawn and patching the walls.” All they wanted was to travel, to enjoy life after working hard to get us through college.

They gave us a choice: take the house now and keep their tax rate or wait and risk getting slammed. California had rules for this kind of thing; we did the math and said yes. It was paid off. All we had to cover were the repairs, utilities, and annual taxes.

Those taxes were a springtime sucker punch. Each year, they chewed through my assistant’s salary like a rabbit in a vegetable patch. But I told myself it was worth it, a good deal, and that was before becoming jobless.

Jobless—such a foreign word in my vocabulary. I’d never gone without work, not since those summer camp jobs back in high school. Sam shifted beside me, pulling me back to the present.

I glanced at her. She wasn’t even supposed to be here right now. “How come you’re home early?”

“Half-day clinic,” she said. Then, more gently, “So...how long?”

“They were generous,” I replied with a bitter smile, trying to inject levity into the situation. “Two-week stipend, a gold star of a whole fourteen days to reinvent my life.”

Her lips parted. “You’re already out.”

“Yup. Just me, the couch, and a to-do list that starts with ‘don’t cry in public,’ followed by ‘figure out how to make ramen look gourmet.’”

She didn’t say anything, and leaned against me. If only sisterly shoulder pressing could physically hold up my ego and the whole damn day.

After three years at the law firm, work had gone stale. I had wanted more movement, more excitement, but the steady paycheck kept me lazily scouting instead of leaping. Today’s bombshell shook me; now I regretted not having aggressively looked for another job.

We sat quietly. Normally, I’d call Erica, my disaster hotline, but she and her husband had recently moved to Thailand for his job. Three years overseas, right when I could’ve used her the most.

I let my head fall back. “Are you still going out tonight?”

Sam didn’t say anything at first. She had plans, something low-key with her med school crew. She needed it. Lately, her life has been all research and deadlines.

“Yeah,” she finally mumbled. “Match-week stress relief with some tequila in order.”

“You should go,” I said quickly. “Live your youth. Someone has to keep the spirit of our financial disaster alive.”

The idea of being alone tonight—me and the weight of my what-now spiral, sounded more thrilling than pretending I had energy for small talk. The date I’d agreed to, wouldn’t like this mood. My social battery was officially one percent.

She gave me a small, wistful smile. “I hear you,” she said, squeezing my shoulder before standing to get ready.

I stayed right where I was, sinking deeper into the couch, but it couldn’t swallow the entire day.

My eyes drifted to Sam’s med books stacked under the table.

The room carried our fingerprints now—my thrift-store lamp perched on the side table, a throw blanket sliding halfway to the floor.

The old oil painting of Lake Tahoe still hung over the mantel, but now it leaned against a framed photo of me and Erica mid-laugh at a festival in SoCal before she left.

What used to be Mom’s drop-in-ready living room had softened into ours, lived in, a little uneven, but real. Normally, it comforted me. Tonight, though, even this space felt like it was holding its breath, waiting for me to figure out what came next.

I didn’t even reach for my purse to cancel my date. He could take the hint from the ghosting, or from a selfie I would send him with my hair screaming torched ambition and panic sweat.

“I hate leaving you like this,” Sam said, stepping back into the living room.

I looked up.

She slung her crossbody over one shoulder. “You’re not even going to have a proper Friday night meltdown. A couch crash with existential dread and no snacks, that’s it.”

I smirked. She was the sassier version of me, and better at knowing when to take a break.

“I was actually about to cancel on someone I was supposed to meet tonight.”

She faced me directly. “Wait. Cancel on who?”

“Andrew Clifford.”

Her eyebrows shot up. “That sexy intern from your firm?”

“He’s a lawyer now,” I said. “Well…almost, pending interview reviews. He asked me to grab a drink tonight, but—”

“And you’re telling me this now?” she cut in. “The guy shows up, does his time, flirts with the office assistant. Handy.”

“Jeez, Sam. It’s not a corporate takeover.”

She grinned. “I’m just saying, he’s got that Hallmark movie-villain vibe—charming at first, but probably trouble.”

I gave her a look. “He wasn’t sleazy. He’s smart, sweet, and for the record, he didn’t get hired at the firm. So much for ‘handy.’”

“And you,” she pointed a finger at me, “have not had an actual date in too long. You’re going. I don’t care if I haven’t seen his résumé. Please put on something that screams ‘I’m interesting.’”

I chuckled and stood to walk her to the door.

“Remember,” I said, grabbing the door handle, “if the Boyd family ends up on a cringe social trend tonight, that’s on you.”

Sam rolled her eyes. “Relax, Mom 2.0. Anything else before I go embrace my twenties’ bad decisions?”

“Yep. No mystery drinks. If someone tries to kiss you without asking, elbow first, report later. We’ve been over this.”

She burst out laughing and pulled me into a quick side hug before stepping outside. We’d played this game forever. Me parenting, her pretending to be annoyed, and it usually made me feel like I was holding the world together.

Her laugh faded down the walkway. I clicked the door shut, and silence flooded in, making the noise in my head louder.

They let me go. I worked my ass off, and now it was…

gone. I exhaled. Should I cancel on Andrew because I was spiraling?

No magic job offer will land in my inbox tonight.

At least a drink with someone nice might take the stink off the day.