1. Jasmine
1
JASMINE
February
Z ara Afzhal is perhaps the finest person I work with at Haüs. Since the worst moment of my personal and professional life, Zara is the only person who hasn’t avoided eye contact with me, or gone conspicuously quiet when I’ve walked into a room, or suppressed a giggle after I’ve walked past.
“Hi, Jasmine,” she says from behind the receptionist desk as I step into the office after lunch.
Normally, I’d eat at my desk. As Ana?s’s assistant, I work closely with her, yet she insists I sit with the team in the open-plan, bullpen-style office. Naturally, that has made lunchtime incredibly awkward.
The noon sun reflects off the glass buildings around ours, illuminating the minimalist white and gray decor of our foyer, making the space golden and hazy. Sunbeams reach toward the mostly open workspace beyond the front desk and filter through the spiral staircase that leads to the private office on the second floor, giving the impression that this place is a honey-colored paradise rather than a washed-out prison for my dreams.
Swallowing back the unease that bubbles up inside me each time I step through the front door lately, I tap the salt and slush from my consignment designer booties.
“Ana?s and Butch want you to go straight up to their office.”
“Oh.” My heart stumbles and I stop dead as the door clicks shut behind me. A meeting with Ana?s is nothing unusual. A meeting with her and Butch? Not good. Not good at all. The last time an employee met with both of them, privately, he was fired. He messed up all the papers on Butch’s desk, yelled obscenities while he stormed out, and supposedly took a dump on Ana?s’s BMW’s hood. I didn’t witness the last one though.
I grimace at the box of six gourmet donuts I picked up to enjoy with Jade tonight. It’s probably unprofessional to arrive at an ominous work meeting with baked goods in a box emblazoned with the words Glory Hole across the top.
“I’ll take those,” Zara says. Her heels, most definitely designer and not sourced from a consignment website called Luxury Flea Market, tap on the concrete flooring as she comes around the desk. “Leave your coat here, too. I can take it all to your desk.”
“Thank you,” I say, voice shaky. Before I hand over the donuts, I pull two out. A vanilla sprinkle and a s’more. Ana?s won’t eat it if it’s not gluten-free, dairy-free, and locally sourced, but Butch is a trash can for baked goods.
As I climb the stairs to their joint office, I am almost certainly rocking a terrible case of toque-head, and I have to pee. This isn’t how I wanted to be fired: a laughingstock with my control top nylons squeezing my bladder. A chill runs down my spine while, somehow simultaneously and inexplicably, my armpits sweat.
Oh, how far the perfect fall.
The tap of my heels on the stairs echoes in the stark space. As I ascend, I tell myself I won’t, but it’s no use. Holding my breath, I glance at Mitchell’s office. The members of the sales team have offices rather than cubicles, and his is one of the first behind the reception desk. He’s not there. Probably at a client lunch or a job site.
My calves scream as I reach the top of the stairs. Curse these booties and workplaces where everyone is “family” yet aren’t treated like family unless their blood runs as blue as those in power. Because I’m balancing the donuts in napkins in both hands, knocking on their office door with my forehead may be my only option. But then Ana?s opens the door from the inside, her smile glowing, her hair glowing, her skin glowing.
Ana?s is aglow.
“Jasmine, darling. Viens ,” she purrs. My name slips off her tongue, Jasmeen , in her impeccable French accent. It curls around all her English words, her lips pursing, her eyes casting upward when she whispers a quiet how do you say . But Ana?s isn’t French or even Quebecois. She grew up an hour north of Toronto in a very anglophone suburb and went to French immersion high school.
At least dating Mitchell had one perk: access to his parents’ secrets.
Butch rises from behind his desk as Ana?s shuts the door behind me. He cups my elbows, air kissing both cheeks. “Hey, doll.” When he pulls back, he only has eyes for my donuts. “Are those…?”
“I picked them up at lunch.”
“You’re an angel.” He grabs two plates off the bar cart set up with a vintage coffee grinder and a French press and places them on the low coffee table in the seating area between their desks.
As Ana?s’s assistant, I’m typically busy running errands to the garment district for fabrics, organizing her schedule, or managing her Instagram account. I spend a surprisingly small amount of time in their office and now my eyes can’t help but snag on the details. Her side of the office is what I imagine Le Petit Trianon looks like. Delicate and elegant with gold leaf accents. Instead of a computer chair she sits in a hand-carved armchair upholstered in blue silk. Her laptop is set up on a traditional ladies writing desk. Each piece is beautiful, but they must be murder on her back.
Butch’s side has a more masculine, modern edge, though Ana?s’s touch can be found in the details. Dark woods and blacks and grays, a glass desk instead of a heavy wood monstrosity, and rather than animal heads mounted on the walls, great white trillium flowers and eastern white pine branches are pressed into hand-carved frames.
Maybe it’s the knowledge that her accent is fake. Or that Butch hasn’t spoken to his elderly parents in years, but the entire room feels fake. Like I could pull down the curtain and I’d find a sad girl from Richmond Hill pulling the strings, accompanied by her insecure Texan husband and a buttload of money.
The money, at the very least, is real.
At first glance, they ooze perfection, the kind I strive for. Maybe I don’t want a fake accent, but I do want the love they have for each other. Though, as I sit across from where Ana?s has settled and smooth my hair, my back straight, clasping my hands to keep them from trembling, I question. I doubt. Is their love even real?
Butch pours coffee into short espresso cups with matching gold-accented saucers and sets them in front of us. He settles on the couch beside his wife, his arm thrown across the back of the gray leather. A king secure in his throne. Ana?s settles a perfectly manicured hand on his thigh and turns her gaze to me.
“How have you been?” she asks with the kind of emphasis that makes it clear this is not a casual hi-how-are-you; it’s about the breakup. It’s about the silence that fell over my colleagues when I entered the building, cheeks flushed, and cupcake icing smudged against the translucent walls of their carrier.
Maybe they’re not firing me?
Even so, my stomach twists painfully. “Is this about Mitchell?”
Butch shifts, avoiding eye contact, and Ana?s purses her lips in a way her dermatologist would encourage her to avoid.
Great, now they think I’m a resentful ex.
I gaze into the depths of my espresso. “Sorry, I thought you were…firing me?”
Butch slaps his thigh and throws his head back, laughing. “Of course not.” He can’t speak, he can only boom.
I work hard not to wince at the volume.
“Darling, never. No.” Ana?s shakes her head, but the way she’s looking at me—like she’s secondhand embarrassed—makes me itch. She’s remembering the week I took off after he dumped me. I never wanted to be that woman, but it was just so mortifying. “We love you, and your relationship with Mitchell will never change that.”
“Plus, that’s illegal, sweetheart,” Butch says. I think he’s going for fatherly, but he comes off mansplainy instead.
That doesn’t assuage my fears the way it should. I know it’s illegal to fire me without cause, just like they know I don’t have the funds or the time to take legal action against them.
“I was worried, I guess,” I say. “That it had something to do with him.”
An expression that looks an awful lot like pity flickers over Ana?s’s face. My sweat glands renew their efforts.
I pick up my espresso to give myself something to do with my hands and bring it to my lips.
“Speaking of Mitchell…” she starts.
“He’s engaged,” Butch booms, too loud and too fast, as if he believes this news is the kind best delivered like a swift punch to the gut.
I choke on the espresso, instantly flipping through a mental calendar to figure out exactly how many days it’s been since he dumped me. Because at this point, days are still a reasonable metric of measurement. Days .
“How is that possible?” I wheeze.
This is why all those advice columns warn against dating co-workers. Because, inevitably, you will be locked in a mortifying tableau with your bosses whom you’d once hoped would also be your in-laws.
Our history sits between the three of us, an awkward, sore pimple. Is it possible to simply curl into myself continually until I implode? Ceasing to exist would be lovely right now.
Butch picks up a donut, my donut, and sticks his finger in the gooey melted marshmallow on top.
“It was a whirlwind.” Ana?s laughs, throwing her hands in the air like what can you do?
“Thirty days is pretty fast, even for a whirlwind.” My shrill tone echoes back at me in the sudden quiet of their office.
Her smile fades and she looks to Butch for help, but Butch has lost himself completely to the second donut. I wish I were lost in a donut right now.
Mitchell was cheating on me. If the news that he’s engaged felt like a punch to the gut, this is like being trampled by a horse. He replaced me. Like I was nothing. Like he’d been waiting for the better version to come along. I was exemplary, the exact kind of woman he should want; ambitious, talented, poised. I made myself perfect. Yet not even that was good enough.
“Why…” My voice cracks and I take a deep breath before I start again. “Why are you telling me this?”
“We’re hosting his engagement party in a couple weeks,” Butch says.
Wearing an apologetic smile, Ana?s slides a four by six piece of thick, textured paper across the coffee table.
“We’re inviting the whole office, but we wanted to let you know first because…” Butch trails off, staring wistfully at the donut crumbs on his plate.
My already trampled-on heart crumbles further as I scowl at the engagement party invitation, the high-quality cotton blend paper, the looping calligraphy, their names, Mitchell and Catherine.
Of course, her name is Catherine. A woman with a name like that is poised and gracious, smart and successful. Catherine has a master’s degree and her PhD. Catherine never had to drop out of school. Catherine can afford designer clothes and to send her sister to school. Scratch that—Catherine doesn’t need to pay for her sister’s education because Catherine’s father isn’t an asshole who started a newer, better family without her.
“We didn’t want you to feel like you had to come,” Ana?s says.
“I’m invited?” My stomach sinks like waterlogged trash to the bottom of Lake Ontario. Nothing could make me go to that party.
“You know Mitchell. He wants everyone to be friends and get along,” she says, which is a laughably charitable view of him, even for his mother. Mitchell is insensitive, sometimes by accident but also on purpose.
This is bordering on cruel. Would he really be this unkind? When I walk out of this office, will I find him watching me, wearing a smug look?
“But you don’t have to come,” she says again, more firmly this time.
Turns out there is one thing that could make me go to this party.
“But I am invited, right?”
They look at each other again, brows furrowed, another silent conversation between married people.
“Yes,” Butch says slowly.
I swallow the taste of bile, straighten my already straight back, and clasp my hands tighter, the pale pink of my at-home manicure an unintentional color match to my mid-length charcoal gray skirt.
“Then I wouldn’t miss it for the world. I’m so excited to meet Mitchell’s new partner.”
My smile—saccharine and innocent—is one I’ve practiced so many times, it feels real. It feels like a trophy compared to the shock that crosses over Ana?s’s face.
“No, no. We don’t want you to feel uncomfor?—”
I stand abruptly, cutting her off. “It’s not uncomfortable,” I say, despite the way the word acts like a noose around my neck. “I just want everyone to get along as well. Especially now that I can introduce Mitchell to my new partner.”
I’m still wearing that smile as I leave their office a few moments later and jog down the breakneck spiral stairs. The expression is a Band-Aid to the sharp pain in the balls of my feet and the numbness creeping into my pinky toes. The smile doesn’t falter until after I’ve locked myself in a bathroom stall and leaned against the door, my palms sweaty and my stomach churning.
“Fuck,” I whisper. The only response in the blessedly empty bathroom is the rhythmic drip of a tap. Why couldn’t they have just fired me? It would be preferable to this. Because now, on top of being a laughingstock, I’ve turned myself into a liar. I most certainly, definitely, do not have a boyfriend.
I kick the cursed booties off, flinging them into a pile of my sister’s shoes. My throbbing feet are so relieved to be bootieless I can’t even bring myself to grumble about her mess or line my boots up with the other shoes on the mat. “Jade?”
The TV is too loud. The hall light, the kitchen light, and I’d bet the bathroom, and her bedroom lights are on. I could choke on the artificial scent of Provencal lavender fields, Jade’s favorite candle.
But at least I’m home.
The century-old floorboards creak as my little sister stomps around the corner from the living room. When she stops in the hallway, she glares pointedly at my hands.
“What?” I ask, dipping my chin. Only then does the realization hit me. “The donuts.” A frustrated huff escapes me. I left them on my desk.
Jade resembles a potato sack in her baggie blue sweats. Her short hair is pulled back from her face in chunky barrettes as she grows it out from her latest experiment with a pixie cut. A crease appears between her brows as she growls, “Where are they?”
Her attempts at intimidation are lost on me though. The little girl she once was sits just below the surface, complete with button nose and freckles that don’t fade in winter.
“Hello, sister,” I say in an attempt to distract her. “How are you?”
Her nostrils flare. “Don’t change the subject. You promised you were bringing me donuts.”
My stomach sinks. “I know. I’m sorry. I had a terrible day. I forgot them at work.” I hang up my coat and hers—which was draped over the small bench at the front door—then gather her school and gym bags along with my work bag and hang them all on the hooks above the bench. I’ll deal with her shoe pile later.
With a harrumph, Jade shuffles back into the living room, where another documentary about cheetahs—her most recent hyperfixation—plays and a cornucopia of snack foods sit on the coffee table. The couch sags in the middle as I sit next to her.
Despite her disappointment, she leans into me. “What kind of donuts did you get?”
“All your favorites.” I snuggle into her in return and pet her hair.
“It was Butch, wasn’t it?”
Once, I ordered an overpriced gift box of four hand-stuffed gourmet chocolate chip cookies for Jade’s birthday and had them delivered to the office to surprise her with that night. Butch interrupted my business call to ask me if he could try them. Not actually listening to him, I whispered furiously with my hand over the phone, I’m on a call, yes, yes, whatever , and he took the whole box like the villain from an absurd children’s movie.
She’s never forgiven him.
Neither have I, honestly.
Either way, I omit that Butch did in fact enjoy two of our donuts today.
“I have news.” Aptly timed music from her nature program accompanies my announcement. From the tone, a baby gazelle or injured wildebeest is about to be eaten alive. That’s how I felt today, like the weakest member of the herd. Easy pickings for Ana?s’s plastic smiles and Butch’s hushed whispers.
Jade grunts.
My heart pounds once again, but I force the words out. “Mitchell is getting married.”
“ What ?” She lurches with such force that a half-eaten bag of chips falls to the ground. “To who? You just broke up like a month ago. Oh my word.” She presses her hand to her chest. “Was he cheating?” she whisper-hisses.
“I don’t know,” I say around a mouthful of floor chips. The news is still sinking in, like waves of realization from deeper and deeper depths. The shock, the betrayal, the humiliation. Emphasis on shock and humiliation. And let’s not forget my foolishness.
“But that’s not the news.” I grab her by the front of her U of T sweatshirt. “I told Ana?s and Butch that I have a boyfriend.”
Jade slowly chews a carrot stick, unperturbed by our sudden closeness. “Jasmine Rosemary Palmer,” she says sternly. “That was a lie.”
“I know.”
“Also, why?”
With a defeated sigh, I dive into how pride and shame, in equal parts, got me into this mess.
She passes me a new bag of ketchup chips, unsullied by floor. “It’s going to be okay,” she says firmly. “We’re going to fix this.”
We’re not. We’re absolutely not. There’s no way I’ll find a man I want to date in just a couple weeks and convince him to be my boyfriend. Oh, and also get him to lie about how long we’ve been together.
“I have to quit my job,” I say into the bag of chips. There’s chip dust on my fingers and the bag is lighter than when Jade set it in my hand, but I don’t even remember eating them.
That’s a lie. I can’t quit my job. I can’t run away from this hole I’ve dug for myself. If I could up and quit like that, then I’d have never walked into work on Mitchell’s birthday. I would have saved myself the embarrassment. Even though there’s no solution to this, it feels better just being here, telling my sister everything. With her, the incessant need for perfection doesn’t drag me around by the teeth.
“ Noooooo . We’ll find someone. Let’s comb through Instagram and see who’s lookin’ good.” She shimmies on the couch, snapping her fingers to some beat in her head.
I’d rather pull out my eyelashes one by one than use social media to find a boyfriend. I only go on Instagram to periodically update my sewing account. My timeline is a singular reminder of everyone else’s personal and professional success—PhDs and MBAs, entrepreneurships, first homes, renovations, even secondary properties, travel, weddings, promotions—and a stark contrast to the lack of my own.
The last vacation I went on was to Disney World before our father left our mother to start a new family with a younger woman. And the idea of purchasing a home in Toronto’s astronomical market is more tragedy than comedy, even though I’ve been good with my money. I’ve stayed in this tiny Annex apartment far longer than I should. I’d planned to leave once Jade graduated and I was married, but who knows if that will ever happen.
Whether it does or not, I don’t need a front row seat to all my high school friends’ achievements in the meantime.
Besides, I sank all my finances into Jade’s education, and I don’t regret a cent of it.
The only thing that doesn’t bother me about social media is the babies. I’ve done my best work raising Jade. Plus, who needs kids when you’re attracted to men.
“No way. Then I’d be no different than those creeps who slide into women’s DMs with dick pics and sugar daddy propositions. Don’t you know someone you could set me up with?” Anxiety swelling, I crumple the chip bag.
She makes a sound of protest, lifting the bag gingerly from my hands and flattening it back out. “My psychology professor is very sweet.”
For a moment I’m hopeful. I met one of her profs last year and he made tweed look like a truly luxury fabric.
“But he’s like sixty. And married. And he tucks his shirts into his underpants so you can always see his Jockeys.”
I glare. She winces.
“The Jockeys are old, too.”
With a huff, I drop my head into my hands. I don’t want to do all this again, the this of meeting someone new, learning about them, what makes them happy and what doesn’t. It’s exhausting figuring out a person, what they need and what I need to do to be enough for them.
“Is it still cool to say FML?” I whine.
She pats my back. “It was never cool.” Her smile is bright. “But I’ve been thinking about the men you date.”
I groan into my hands. Not this again. The men I date are never good enough for her, regardless of how charming or successful they are. That’s easy for her to say when she barely dates, and when she does it’s definitely not cis men.
“Just listen, okay? You give all of yourself to your partners. You give too much, and you never get anything back.”
“What does this have to do with lying to my bosses about having a boyfriend?” I ask, gathering up empty snack plates and chip bags and three cans of pop because apparently people don’t experience gut rot until their thirties.
Jade follows me to the kitchen, her socked feet sliding along the floor. “You deserve a partner who will be good to you, who’s just as serious and invested as you are. Even if it’s just for a date to an engagement party.”
I sort trash and recyclables and stack dishes next to the already full sink. Through the window above the sink, a family of raccoons peers at me from the balcony across the alley, their eyes glowing in the dark night. The dishes need to be done, and the front hall needs to be tidied up. I’ll have to check Ana?s’s emails at least twice before bed and schedule reminders for her appointments tomorrow morning.
I may not be sure of what I deserve, but I know for a fact that the kind of relationship Jade envisions isn’t real. It isn’t real for me, and it wasn’t real for our parents.
“You should sign up for this matchmaker,” she says, shoving her phone in front of my face. On the screen are happy smiling couples of every age, race, and body type. Same-sex and straight-passing, they snuggle like whatever they’re feeling is real and they haven’t been paid for the use of their likenesses.
“They do one-on-one interviews and have an algorithm with a ninety-nine percent success rate,” she says when she sees my dour expression.
Normally, the words near perfect algorithm would be all the argument she’d need to make. Taking the emotion out of it, the feelings, the misconceptions, and the preconceived notions, makes dating crisp, clean. Sterile. Things I love. But I’m immediately defensive at the idea of a computer telling me what to do.
I take the phone from her to navigate to the services page. When I see their pricing, I drop the sponge into the sink.
“I can’t afford this,” I screech.
“We have the money to spare.”
“In our savings.”
“Exactly,” she says. “ To spare .”
I make a mental note to create a slide deck about personal finances. I’ve clearly failed her on this subject. “That’s not how savings work.”
“Jazz, please. First of all, they’re not our savings. They’re your savings. You’ve invested so much of your time and money into me. Rent, food, school . And I’ve seen your bank balance. You definitely have the money to spare.”
“You shouldn’t be snooping,” I say tightly.
“You deserve this,” she says, ignoring my chide. “I want this for you.”
Jade has always had the ability to channel a big-eyed woodland creature in times of her highest need and she employs that talent now. Terribly unfair. She knows I can barely deny her when she’s not using these tactics.
“It’s a lot of money…” I say. In our family, that amount of money is the kind our mom stole from our college funds to buy into another pyramid scheme.
But she’s right. I can afford it. I’m thrifty. My budget could be a case study for the spreadsheet Olympics, but if there’s one thing I learned from my father, it’s that I can never be too prepared for my entire life to blow up in my face. There’s no such thing as too much of a rainy-day fund. While using some of it now wouldn’t hurt my bottom line, the idea of parting with it is painful.
In a perfect world, one where I have no worries about stability, security, or the future, I’d invest in a business. I’m already contributing to a retirement fund, and I have a small, medium-risk investment portfolio, but neither gives me the freedom and flexibility of a silent partnership or the enjoyment of working for myself. For a while, I thought I could make an offer for a small share of Haüs, but that was a plan for the distant future, and it was reliant on me being married to Mitchell.
And yet, an ache forms under my breastbone. I ache to be desirable, to Mitchell—or to men like him—his parents, the people I work with. To be seen , appreciated, loved.
I’m tired of being so easily cast aside.
Those five pairs of reflective eyes blink at me through the window and when I turn to Jade, she’s somehow managed to make the same pouty, wide-eyed face of our animal neighbors.
“Fine.” I sigh. She bounces on the balls of her feet, making excited squeaking sounds. “Let’s sign me up for matchmaking.”
Blue phone light already illuminates the little V between her eyebrows. “I’ve already started your application.” She smiles, her tongue poking between her front teeth. She shoos me away. “Go get the credit card.”
And I do.