3. Chloe
3
CHLOE
I t was almost ten in the morning, and despite the two cups of coffee I’d downed so far, I still didn’t feel the jolt of energy that everyone around me seemed to reflect.
I stared at the cardboard box at my feet.
It was a box of things from my desk at the old office.
I’d lugged it from my old workplace to the Tassater building, in the desperate hope that this would be my new workplace.
For the past two days, ever since the takeover of Mindwell Inc.
had been finalized, I’d been a nervous ball of fear.
Gary Chalk, the now-ex-CEO of Mindwell, had met the board of Tassater Inc.
many times. As Gary’s assistant, I’d facilitated that.
Now, with Gary gone and no further instructions to me, I was waiting to find out what the fate of my administrative assistant job was going to be.
I didn’t miss Gary. I was relieved to not be working for him anymore.
If only not working for Gary meant that I was working for someone better.
“I heard he’s, like, a god of good looks. Like a Greek god.” A raven-haired woman next to me giggled.
“You mean our new CEO?” the woman next to her whispered back.
“Yes. I heard he owns properties in Lake Como in Italy and Monaco and a superyacht that can hold fifty people. He’s the richest man on this side of town, but he never dates. The paparazzi has never caught him with a woman, and they’ve tried their darned best.”
Ah, Sean Tassater, the new CEO of Mindwell.
I hadn’t met the man, and it looked like I’d missed out.
How did he look?
The whispers continued to my right.
“Are you saying he’s one of those guys who is perennially single?”
“Ever since his divorce, yes. Sigh. He is droolworthy.”
The only man whose good looks had left a lasting impression on me was my coffeehouse savior.
I remembered him all right.
I had no trouble thinking of him as I went to bed at night, imagining him holding me like he’d done back then.
In fact, I needed to stop thinking about the tall man who had been capable of making me feel butterflies in my stomach on my wedding day.
Because this was all I’d permit myself to do when it came to men henceforth—daydream.
I knew Sean was just a man who had helped me get a cab.
Not someone who could understand a woman’s inability to process the barrage of emotions that hit her when she was dumped on her wedding day.
That man didn’t exist.
Bruce had broken up with me in a brusque, emotionless manner that was not unlike the way my dad had left me and Henry back when I was eighteen.
I had sobbed my heart out for nights back then, and I’d cried my eyes out every night last month before I decided I was done dating.
Just like I had stopped believing in fairy tales back when I was eighteen.
This much was obvious to me now—I couldn’t be a responsible carer for my sibling and have love.
I checked my watch and realized it was about the time when Henry, my twenty-three-year-old brother, should be taking his medicine.
I needed to give him a call to remind him, but I didn’t want to risk missing the beginning of today’s meeting.
Ever since the car accident, Henry had been confined to his wheelchair.
He had good upper-body strength and minimal lower-body strength.
He pulled himself in and out of his wheelchair when he needed to get to bed or had to use the bathroom.
Most days were good.
Some days, however, the pain got the better of him, and those days, he was emotionally and physically shut down, staying in bed for prolonged periods.
I felt terrible on those days, bits of my guilt quietly creeping up on me.
It’s my fault he’s wheelchair-bound, remember?
We had been walking back home that night, and I was wrapped up in my own thoughts, dreaming about a future at The Juilliard School.
Henry saw the car before I even heard it.
The roar of the engine was drowned out by the thoughts buzzing in my head, excitement blurring my focus.
The car swerved to avoid a squirrel crossing the road, and the driver lost control.
I was directly in its path.
Then, in one swift move, Henry shoved me aside, intervening at the last possible moment.
I hit the ground, my back scraping against the rough bushes, the scent of crushed leaves filling my nose.
The deafening screech of tires ripped through the air, but I was untouched.
When I looked up with the metallic taste of panic rising in my throat, Henry was on the pavement, gasping in pain.
The coppery smell of blood hung in the air.
He hadn’t been lucky.
He had taken the hit.
He had taken the danger meant for me.
If I’d noticed the car first, he wouldn’t have suffered.
If I’d pulled him out of the way with me, he would have been spared.
If, if, and more ifs.
What remained was that I’d been foolish, and Henry had paid for it.
The only way I could assuage my guilt on those days was to give up something else I wanted to do for myself and spend time with Henry instead.
Make him laugh, reduce his pain.
Lately, I’d noticed a correlation between his good days and staying on top of his meds, and I was hopeful he could have fewer bad times, going forward.
Just as I was thinking this, my phone began to buzz with a call.
I took a quick glance around me before checking the caller.
It was Henry.
Sean Tassater, the man who had taken over Mindwell Inc.
, was running late for this meeting, so I took my chance and answered the phone call.
“Hi, Chloe.” Henry’s voice, calm and confident, rang through clearly.
“Are you busy?”
“Not at all,” I answered, forcing my voice to sound cheerful and happy.
I was always happy to speak to Henry.
Even if in the midst of all my sisterly love, there was a thread of perpetual guilt, mixed with financial frustration.
Guilt because Henry had saved my life, at a horrible cost to himself.
Financial frustration because so much of what he needed—like therapy, better medicines—was constrained by my lack of funds.
“You know, I’m always grateful that you’re never busy whenever I call you,” Henry said after a moment’s silence, like he was musing out loud.
“Even when you’re at work.”
“Isn’t that a good thing?” I asked, though I didn’t like the direction this conversation was about to take.
“Say, Henry, did you?—”
“Don’t ask me if I’ve taken my medicines,” he groaned.
I exhaled just as I noticed a flurry of activity outside the room.
Sean Tassater had probably arrived—and with him, the fate of my job.
“Anyway,” Henry continued, “I just called to ask how you’re doing. I know mergers are pretty scary for the employees, and there’s a lot of uncertainty associated with it. Are you okay?”
I made a noise of disbelief.
“Of course I’m fine. You don’t need to worry about my job. I just spoke with the HR at Tassater Inc. They’re finding a new job for me here, I promise. You have nothing to fear.”
It was a blatant lie, but along with the fear of losing my job, I seemed to have lost my mind.
I was now making promises I shouldn’t.
For all I knew, this meeting could end with me getting laid off.
A pit of fear expanded in my stomach, and I swallowed and tried to focus on something else.
Henry wanted to sign up for the student education association.
The fees weren’t covered by his partial scholarship, and I knew I could afford it …
if I had a paycheck to rely on.
When it came to college classes, Henry thrived in clubs where he got to teach.
It challenged him and fulfilled his desire to be more to the people around him, to help more.
“You should sign up for the student club like you wanted to,” I said.
In the silence on the line, I could almost hear the wheels in his brain whirling with excitement.
“Are you sure?” he asked, but the lilt in his voice was back.
He was excited now. Already planning the presentation slides for the upcoming class.
“It costs two grand,” he reminded me.
Henry’s undergrad classes in the nearby community college were the one thing he looked forward to.
They gave him a life outside of home.
The classes gave him hope that he could have a career, just like everyone else around him.
I wanted that for him.
“Easy-peasy,” I said with a laugh just as I noticed the air in the room stiffening.
Someone important was about to walk in.
I turned my attention back to the phone.
“Now, I need to hang up,” I said quietly.
“I’ll pick you up in the evening, after your classes, Henry. And remember?—”
“All right, all right. I’ll take my medicines,” he said in a much happier voice before hanging up.
I stared at the picture of Henry on my phone before pocketing it.
Shit. I needed to make sure I could keep my job.
Any job that would help me be the responsible, repentant elder sibling, determined to make amends for abandoning her brother that one night.
To my right, I heard two women resume speaking.
“He’s at the door. The one and only Mr. Tassater.”
The other woman sighed and muttered under her breath, “God, if I’m going to be fired, I’d take it from a guy like him.”
I looked quizzically at the two women just as someone tapped me on my left shoulder.
A young woman with auburn hair and a beautiful blue sweater that I would totally kill to borrow was standing next to me.
She was breathing a bit fast, and going by the looks of it, she was pregnant.
“I’m Amelia Miller,” she said in a whisper.
“Executive assistant to Mr. Tassater,” she added.
“Oh! The assistant? Hey, would you know if it’s a mass layoff today?” I whispered back as the people around us turned to us at the mention of the L-word.
“Or are we keeping our jobs?”
“This is hardly the place to be discussing that,” she said with a small frown at me.
“Now, if you would please follow me.”
I picked up my box, and we slipped out of the conference room quietly.
There was no man at the door, but I briefly saw a trace of a navy-blue suit head into the restrooms down the hallway.
I followed Amelia, who was walking slowly in the opposite direction in a well-lit, high-ceilinged hallway.
She glanced down at the brown cardboard box in my hands and simply said, “I’ve reserved meeting room 5A for you.”
“Just me?” I clarified as we walked, and Amelia nodded.
My heart sank.
It is as bad as I feared.
They were definitely firing me.
Couldn’t they have waited until the end of the day at least?
This was turning out to be a horrible morning.
I turned to see the room she was pointing to and found it was occupied by a forty-something woman with short black hair and red-rimmed spectacles, looking stern.
This did not bode well for me.
My mouth went dry as I considered the possibilities.
Were they really firing me in the midst of a conference meeting?
Was this so that the others wouldn’t know?
My fingers twitched, and I wished I didn’t have to hear the words I knew were coming.
Henry was going to be so disappointed.
Before I walked in, I heard a noise down the hallway behind us.
For a fleeting second, I saw someone walk out of another room, and it was as though I’d seen a ghost. My heart caught in my mouth, and I froze, just as Amelia stood in front of me, blocking my view.
“This way, please, Ms. Nichols,” she said firmly.