Chapter 21: Chapter Twenty-One

“It’s unanimous,” Paul announced, standing in my office doorway on Wednesday afternoon.

I smiled up at him from behind my desk. He often started conversations right in the middle. Some days it drove me crazy, but most of the time I liked the puzzle of Paul-speak. Even though I couldn’t wait to take over the VP role, sometimes I got a little hitch in my chest when I thought about him leaving for good. I wondered if he’d ever invite me out to coffee or over to his house for dinner once he’d retired.

“What is?”

“The interview team found Max to be the best candidate for the senior programmer position,” he said. “I’ll be calling his references in the next couple of days, but that’s a formality. He was phenomenal in the interview, and more importantly, he’s already proven himself to everyone here in the past couple of weeks. The developers worship him. He’s dedicated enough to leave his own job interview to help you with a difficult client, for goodness’ sake. Personally, I think he’s a nice guy and a great fit for the team. We’ll get an offer drafted early next week.”

Yes! I did an internal fist pump, picturing the look on Max’s face with that offer in hand. Now we just needed to hope Cole Taggert wouldn’t find out about it and call Paul.

I bit my lip, wondering how that conversation would go. “Come in and shut the door a minute,” I said impulsively.

He closed the door and perched in my visitor’s chair. “What’s up?”

I took a deep breath, praying this gamble would pay off. Paul may or may not trust Max over Cole Taggert, but he sure as hell should trust me. “I want to tell you something about Max, in case you get a weird phone call.”

I summarized the story Max had told me over lunch yesterday, emphasizing his overall brilliance for designing the antivirus software in the first place, while trying to make it clear that Taggert was a grudge-holding thief. Someone who was not to be trusted. “Obviously, I have no idea what Taggert says to the employers when he calls, but I wanted you to know the actual history.”

The frown lines on Paul’s forehead creased deep. “That’s extremely troubling.”

Oh shit. Maybe I’d done something terrible here. Maybe Paul didn’t buy the fact that Max had developed the anti-ransomware all on his own. Maybe I shouldn’t have brought it up at all.

“To think that such an esteemed executive would stoop to theft.” Paul shook his head, and I breathed a sigh of relief. I hadn’t been wrong to trust him. He had always been a solid judge of character.

“I appreciate the heads-up,” he said, standing. “I’m not that surprised about Taggert though. He’s still thought of highly in the business community, but in tech circles he’s getting a reputation for sloppiness.”

I gaped at him, surprised. “Really?” Paul did routinely attend technology conferences around the city and country. We were actually going to one together the following day. I’d forgotten, though, that they could be so valuable in terms of industry gossip.

“Indeed. Word on the street is that SideDoor’s last two projects didn’t go well because they can’t keep top-tier talent,” he said.

In the back of my mind, it registered that his comment lined up with what Max had said at lunch about Taggert’s churn-and-burn philosophy when it came to programmers. But it was hard to focus on that when Paul had actually just used the phrase “word on the street.”

He paused, a hand on the doorknob. “One more thing. You should know that I recommended a slight re-org. Max’s position is not going to report to me—or, eventually, to you—anymore.”

I shook my head, confused. “Oh?”

“You’ll already be managing four teams and sixteen people. I can tell you from experience that you don’t need the additional workload of another person’s status meetings and performance evils and all that.” He looked straight at me. “Also, it’s against company policy for someone to date their direct superior,” he said bluntly.

I felt my cheeks blaze with heat. “Oh!” I dropped my pen. “We’re not—” Wait, were we? Weren’t we? How did he know? I let out a horrible little peep of embarrassment and resisted the urge to dive under my desk.

Paul’s lips twitched before turning up into a full smile. I got the distinct impression that he was enjoying my flailing discomfort. “I’ve known you six years, Tess. And I’ve never seen you smile at anyone like you do at Max.”

He opened the door and stepped into the hallway. Then, for the first time in our professional relationship, he gave me a sweet, conspiratorial wink. “Good talk.”

As the end of the workday approached, I hung up on Kat and indulged in a long stretch. Apparently, she and my mom just had a long chat about what outfits they were planning to wear for Kat’s party on Saturday. My mother had also instructed Kat to appeal to me not to wear anything “too revealing.” There was no clearer sign in the universe that my mother was feeling more herself.

I caught a glimpse of my face in the small makeup mirror that hung on the back of my office door. I was grinning like a loon. And no wonder—Max had called me beautiful. We’d stopped the teaser from being released. Max was getting the job. Even my mother was cooperating by recovering. Talk about a good couple of days.

I felt so great that I put on some lipstick, tucked my hair behind my ears, and marched straight over to Max’s cube. Maybe I’d been wrong to be so freaked out by whatever was growing between us. Hell, Paul approved.

Luck was on my side yet again. Only Max sat in the cluster of cubes. Furiously typing, he didn’t turn as I approached. “I hear you, Boots,” he said. “One sec.” With a flourish, he finished some command and dozens of lines of text scrolled upward on his screen.

He swiveled in his chair. I liked that his eyes needed a second to rest on my legs before shooting up to my face. “Hey, you.”

“Want to go on a real date?” I blurted. We hadn’t done that yet. We’d had drinks and sex and breakfast and lunch and whatever it was when he drew me a bath. But we’d never followed a waiter to a table for two and flirted over a menu. Tonight, I wanted to do that with him.

“I know a great place in Greektown,” I continued, warming to the idea. “The restaurant has half-price bottles of wine on Wednesdays.”

Max cocked his head. “Can we order saganaki?”

I crossed my arms and looked down at him sternly. “As if it’s even possible to go out for Greek food without getting a plate of cheese on fire.” Inside, giddy bubbles burst in my stomach. We could yell “opa!” and then I’d tell him about his impending job offer.

Behind me, I heard the distinctive click-click-click of a short stride in dainty high-heeled shoes. Had Abigail changed her entire look? I’d never seen her in anything but sneakers, which was one reason I always towered over her. I whirled around to take a look.

“Oh, hey!” Not Abigail. Instead, Aria stood there smiling, looking like a little Audrey Hepburn in tiny black pants and a tinier black sweater. A perfectly in fashion black bomber jacket was folded neatly over her arm, and a Tumi laptop bag was slung over her other shoulder. “It’s Tess, right?”

It took supreme effort to not let my smile drop right on the floor. My stomach, however, plummeted. “Yes! Nice to see you again.”

She angled her head around me and waved at Max. “You ready? You want an Uber, or should we take the ‘L’?” Straightening, she looked up at me. “Trivia night at CJ’s pub. The food is terrible, but we can’t resist the challenge.”

“Fun!” My stomach returned to its proper place in my body and abruptly turned to stone. The leaden feeling spread to my chest.

I glanced back at Max. He’d risen from his chair and was tugging at his hair. “I forgot all about it,” he mumbled.

Aria snorted. “You forgot about the bar trivia we’ve done every Wednesday night for six years?” She nudged me and giggled. “You guys must keep him pretty distracted.”

I tried to giggle back but couldn’t manage it. A wheeze was all I could do. “We do try.”

I lifted my lips again at her and did a sort of good-bye gesture over my shoulder at Max. I couldn’t look at him. I was too humiliated. How could I keep forgetting about her? About them?

“Tess, wait,” Max called.

Nope. Not interested. “Forgot that I have a call with the West Coast!” I yelled. “You guys have a great night!”

I hightailed it back to my office and dropped into my chair. A minute later, I heard them coming down the hall so I picked up my phone and said, “So true. There are a lot of synergies that we could leverage once we have the bandwidth.” Max looked in as they walked by, but I ignored him, babbling into the fake call and twirling a pencil in my hair.

When I knew they were several offices down, I got to my feet and peered after them. Aria was talking, and he was nodding down at her. Even in her heels, she came up only to his bicep. He was carrying her laptop bag. When they reached the end of the hall, he stepped forward and opened the door for her.

For some reason, that chivalrous image—of him carrying her bag and opening the door for her—stuck with me all night. As I rode home on the Brown Line, it played in my head on a loop. I was so distracted by it that I completely missed my “L” stop. I hadn’t done that since college.

Since I lived at home, I didn’t get the typical college experience. By day, I attended classes on campus, and at night I kept an eagle eye on my mother’s fragile recovery. At first I thought I’d be envious of the other students because they got to live in dorms and pledge sororities. But when I chatted with them in class, they seemed so young. And while I was jealous of their carefree lives, I also felt a little superior. They had nothing more important to do than text about last night’s keg stand; I needed to rush home to count my mother’s pills and interrogate Kat’s homecoming date. I was too far entrenched in my early-onset adulthood.

In my junior year, I met Daniel.

Things were slightly more stable at home then, but I was always waiting for the other shoe to drop. Things never felt safe. The night before I met Daniel, I’d stayed up until 4:00 a.m. for myriad reasons. Kat’s stupid boyfriend had dumped her, and she was a mess. My mom’s doctor had recently changed her prescription, and she was suffering from gastrointestinal side effects. I was struggling with my programming classes because it was difficult for me to stay late and get extra help from the TAs.

I fell asleep on the train into the city. I would have missed my stop if a handsome young man hadn’t shaken me awake. “Excuse me, but don’t you usually exit at the Fullerton stop? We’re nearly there.”

I jerked straight to my feet, almost spilling the contents of my backpack.

“Don’t worry.” He smiled at me. “We have time.” He had curly light brown hair and brown eyes. He wore faded jeans with a navy fleece, and his skin was slightly ruddy in a way that made you think of skiing and hiking and all sorts of wholesome outdoor activities.

Daniel also went to DePaul, but he was a grad student. I liked him immediately. He was just so…adult. He’d grown up in the north suburbs, and though he was an only child, he was close with his parents and extended family. He already worked as an engineer at a firm downtown, and he was getting his master’s degree in applied mathematics. He walked me to class from the train station, listening carefully as I stumbled through my explanation of my studies and my vanilla story of why I lived at home instead of on campus. (I helped my single mother with my teenage sister.)

“I hope this isn’t too forward,” he said once we’d reached the computer science building. “But I’d love to take you out to dinner this weekend.”

I hadn’t been on a date before. As in ever. A humiliating fact for a twenty-one-year-old. But I just nodded like I got asked out every single day of the week. “I’d like that.”

We became a couple very quickly. Daniel was kind and gentle, and he fussed over me. He loved taking me for dinner and watching my eyes light up when he ordered appetizers or desserts. He found—and paid for—an individual tutor to help me with my classes. The first time we had sex, he lit candles all over his bedroom and carried me through the doorway like I was a princess. He called me “darling” all the time.

Eventually, I trusted him enough to tell him about my mother and what my high school years had been like. When I finished my sad little tale, he’d had tears in his eyes. “I hate that you were so alone.” That was the night he told me he loved me for the first time.

Needless to say, my mom and Kat adored him. He became a constant in our home. He brought flowers for all of us for no reason. He helped Kat with her chemistry homework and did small electrical repairs around the apartment for my mom. He’d invade the tiny kitchen with a sack of groceries and a cookbook, and hours later the four of us would be eating coq au vin or something else French and fancy. He stood between my mom and Kat at my college graduation, clapping fiercely as I crossed the stage to get my diploma.

On my twenty-fourth birthday, he took all of us out to dinner at an elegant restaurant that bordered Lincoln Park. Between dinner and dessert, he got down on one knee and proposed to me. When he opened the ring box, my jaw dropped at the size of the square-cut diamond. “Darling, I knew from the moment I saw you sleeping on that train that you were the woman I was supposed to take care of for the rest of my life. Marry me?” The entire restaurant applauded. Kat burst into tears.

Of course I said yes.