Chapter 1 #2
Bart tipped his wine glass towards me. “I told you to report him when he did that.”
“I couldn’t, Bart! Imagine running off to HR on my first day to tell them that one of the Customer Experience and Support Team Leaders… uh… propositioned me.”
It was a nice way of putting it. Richie Curran looked like a Loki cosplayer dipped in grease with his skinny, weaselly face, long black hair, and pronounced widow’s peak.
He’d slimed up to me at the sinks in the communal kitchen on my first day at the call center, only six months ago.
He explained that it was Base Budget Insurance company culture to sleep with your co-workers, invited me into a stall to blow him, then blew it off as a joke when I very frostily declined.
“If I ran off to Human Resources to complain on my very first day,” I explained. “They’d flag me as a problem. I’d be seen as a weak idiot who couldn’t handle herself.”
And I could definitely handle myself. I’d gotten used to it over the years.
I was cursed—or blessed, depending on how you looked at it—with a very curvy figure, big boobs, a small waist, and long shapely thighs.
No matter how many masculine power suits and giant nerd glasses and sensible loafers I wore, I somehow ended up looking like a poor man’s Jessica Rabbit.
Even now that I was in my mid-forties and a tiny bit overweight, with sparkles of silver sprinkled through my thick, wavy dark hair, I still attracted the assholes—sleazy men who stared at my breasts and busybodies who demanded to know my ethnicity, wanting to know where I got my “exotic” coloring from.
Because apparently, having light-green eyes and tanned skin was “exotic.”
I used to be able to put people in their place with an arch of my eyebrow. I’d lost that ability in the last couple of years.
Along with everything else.
“I understand,” Bart said. “Still, you should have reported him.”
I inhaled and sighed it all out, trying not to let my deep breath bump the table. “Yes, in retrospect, I should have.”
I was still pissed about being outmaneuvered on my first day. I’d been out of the game for too long; I’d lost my edge. I didn’t see Richie moving his chess pieces, arranging his pawns around him to protect himself in case I did complain to Human Resources about his sleazy proposition.
“I didn’t realize until it was too late,” I said.
“That afternoon, three other men asked me to go for a drink with them after work. When the last one approached me, I realized Richie had made sure I couldn’t report any of them.
Human Resources wouldn’t believe that four men separately propositioned me on my first day in the office. ” I grimaced. “Richie outsmarted me.”
“Hmm. You know…” Bart said, pursing his lips. “I always thought you were exaggerating about how complicated office politics are.”
“Bart.” I smiled at him fondly. “You’re the head of the Base Budget Insurance compliance department.
Nobody would dare mess with compliance. You know I love you, but your job is so boring I feel like my eyes are glazing over the second the elevator dings on the fourth floor.
You wouldn’t know office gossip if it walked up and punched you in the face. ”
He chuckled and examined his wine again, swirling the merlot around the big round goblet. Too late, I realized he was only holding the glass to be polite. My dinner plate had shifted forwards an inch, and there was no room on the table for him to put it down.
Smoothly, I tugged my plate forward into my chest and pushed the vase half an inch to the side, so he had a place to put his glass, which he did with a flourish.
“Could he be bluffing?” Bart said. “Are you sure he knows? Gordon and Delilah did a very good job wiping all traces of you from San Francisco society. Nobody even whispers your name anymore.”
A stab of soul-crushing despair pierced my heart, penetrating through all my defenses.
I inhaled sharply, still shocked at the pain it caused me.
It took enormous effort to stop my hands from shaking, but I managed it, wordlessly repeating a mantra in my head, over and over.
I am a strong, confident woman. The past is the past. I forgive myself. I deserve a fresh start.
“Richie Curran made it very clear.” I swallowed, bracing myself. “He even dropped Vincent’s name into the conversation.”
Saying my ex-husband’s name out loud hurt so much it felt like a dagger to the chest. I loved him so much. I mourned him like he was dead. The loss was so painful that I almost wished he was dead.
Instead, he was in my beautiful old house up in Pacific Heights, getting ready to marry his intern, a gorgeous, willowy stick-thin Irish beauty named Seraphina.
Seraphina was only twenty-four. She was nearly half my age.
I blinked. A flash of light had exploded outside the window, a sudden bright flare somewhere out in the communal rooftop garden.
Someone was taking photos with a very bright camera flash, or something like that.
I welcomed the distraction; it dragged me out of the painful past. And at least the models out there hadn’t fallen off the edge of the building yet.
Bart peered outside the window for a second, but the light was gone. It was dark out there again. The twinkling lights of the cityscape shone merrily in the distance, leading down to oil-black water of the bay.
“Well. If he mentioned Vincent, then Richie definitely knows,” he said gloomily.
I exhaled slowly, trying to keep a lid on the black fog that threatened to rise up and devour me again.
“It’s to be expected. Even with my surname changed, there’s a lot of old photos of me at events floating around the internet.
San Francisco is a big city, but I’m not naive enough to think that I’d become anonymous just because I changed my name.
” I swallowed. You’re a strong, mentally stable woman.
“Even with Vincent’s parents trying to wipe all traces of me from the face of the earth. ”
A crash came from right outside. Both of us turned to look, but I could only see our reflections in the glass.
I leaned closer, put my head on the glass, and peered out.
From here, I could only see the fern wall on the left wall of the rooftop.
Loud voices shouted furiously for a second, the young woman snapping, and one of the men arguing back in a sexy, low tone.
I stifled my groan. Apart from having half the floor space as all the other single apartments in the building, this was the worst part of living on the rooftop.
Other residents could hold parties right outside my window, and there was no escaping the noise.
It was the only apartment I could afford, though, and the leasing agent had only given it to me because he was a friend of Bart’s.
Bart turned back to me, graciously ignoring the noise outside, and nodded thoughtfully. “Okay, so Richie knows. What are we going to do about it?”
Warmth bloomed in my chest. I smiled at him. “We?”
“Of course I’m going to help you.”
“Bart…” My grin grew wider. “You are the best. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
Another smash came from outside—the tell-tale tinkle of broken glass on concrete. Those damned gorgeous models were going to get broken glass all over the rooftop.
My lips thinned. “Excuse me for a second.” I stood, carefully squeezing myself out from where I was jammed between the kitchen counter and the table, walked the four steps to my front door, opened it, and walked out into the hallway.
The door immediately to my left led out to the rooftop garden. I opened it with a bang and strode outside.
The cool night air breezed around me. It wasn’t too cold tonight; we were still in the dying days of late summer and it wasn’t as windy as usual, but goosebumps rose on my flesh anyway, just like they had before.
The four stunning creatures were gathered around what appeared to be another special effects prop—a huge black circle ringed with blue fire, hovering in the air.
For a second, I was fascinated, then, slightly concerned.
I got my phone out of my pocket, brought up my camera app, then checked the scene in front of me through the screen.
Yes, they were really there. I wasn’t hallucinating. The ring of blue fire must be a hologram.
Oh no. Too late, I realized they were all staring at me, and I was holding my phone up. It looked like I was filming them.
Karen mode activated. Goddamnit.
I whipped my phone away. I could hardly yell at them for the broken glass now. I sighed deeply. “Just… just make sure you clean up after yourselves, okay?”
Before they could respond, I turned around and marched back to my apartment.
Bart stood in the middle of the room. He’d obviously very politely used my absence to remove himself from where he’d been wedged in between the wall and the dining room table. Now, standing up, all six-foot-two inches of enormous teddy bear almost filled my whole apartment.
“I’m so sorry, Bart,” I said. “There’s a group of models doing a photoshoot on the roof.”
“Aha,” he winked at me. “Let’s go watch. Maybe we could make friends with them.”
Like me, Bart loved beauty in all things—in art, in decor, in people, it didn’t matter. If it was gorgeous, Bart would admire it.
“I’m afraid I might have Karen-ed myself out of making friends,” I sighed.
“Understandable. Well, I should head off anyway,” he said, draining his wine. “Bobby just texted me; he’s on his way to come and shout at me again.”
“What did you do this time?” Bart’s on-again-off-again boyfriend was one of the best food critics on the West Coast.
“I was supposed to join him at Cloud this evening.”
A warm feeling bloomed in my chest. Cloud was the hottest restaurant in the city. If you wanted to dine there, you had to make a reservation six months in advance and provide two years’ worth of tax returns to prove you could afford it.
I smiled. “And you turned him down for my ham-fisted attempt at sheep’s milk ricotta with sage and browned butter ravioli?
” I hadn’t eaten any of it myself; I was saving it for my lunch tomorrow.
It was lucky that budgeting was in my blood because at the moment, I couldn’t afford to eat more than twice a day.
He grinned at me. “Your company was much better.” He inclined his head graciously. “Thank you for a lovely evening, Susan. And don’t worry about Richie Curran. You’ll figure out something. Nobody could ever get you down, so don’t let that slimy creep be the first.”
“Thanks, Bart.” I hugged him and plastered myself up against the wall so he could exit my apartment.
It didn’t really matter that my apartment was no bigger than a shoebox; as soon as Bart left, it felt big and empty.
One of the hardest things about my new life was adjusting to being lonely.
For fifteen years, Vincent had always been right there next to me; we were twin stars, peas in a pod, soulmates—Vincent, the gorgeous, blazingly talented painter who set the art world on fire, and me, the vice president at Orwan Bank, occasional board member, the corporate hotshot on her way to senior vice president status.
Vincent and I had everything. There was only one thing we didn’t have. And I couldn’t give it to him, so everything else crumbled into dust.
Now, I was barely the team leader at the call center of a shitty insurance company, and Vincent was in our bed, in our house, with his young, pregnant intern.
Stop it, Susan. I gave myself a stern talking to as I gathered up the dinner plates and washed them in my tiny sink, trying—and failing—to resist the temptation to chug the rest of the wine right out of the bottle. You’re a strong, capable woman. You can rebuild your life.
Despair punched me in the chest for a second. Rebuilding would be a whole lot easier if I could have escaped San Francisco to start my life afresh where nobody knew me. I couldn’t, though; it was a condition of my release that I stay in a familiar location.
The rooftop access door banged open; I exhaled, relieved. The models were leaving. Now, I could wallow in misery, in blessed silence.
There was a knock at my door.