I awkwardly muscled my suitcase into my room and shut the door. The Costa Rican team made me look great today. But for the rest of the retreat, I’d have to win on my own. I was confident that I was up to the challenge.
9
MY TOO-TEMPTING NEIGHBOR
Bag weight at SFO ticket counter?
Bridget:49.1 pounds.
Cole:Zero. I carried on.
COLE
“Here you go, Stan,” Bridget said with a grin.
I clocked his stony jaw and his sluggish reach for his card key.Perfect.
Bridget didn’t seem to notice. “Akil, here’s yours.”
Our new CFO was on the phone with his wife, but he took the key from Bridget, then stepped into the shadow of a potted palm tree in the resort’s lobby. “What do you mean, my mom isn’t there yet?” he murmured. “She was supposed to be there an hour ago. I’ll call her. Just make sure you’re resting.” He nodded a couple more times, then ended with a “love you, bye.”
I snagged my card from Bridget, then shuffled closer to Akil. “Is your wife okay? She’s on bed rest, right?”
“Yeah. The other kids are a lot for her to handle.” He frowned. “My mom is supposed to be there, but she’s running late.”
I squeezed his shoulder. “Why don’t you go to your room and sort things out? There aren’t any planned activities until dinner.”
“I know you wanted to, um, strategize.” His gaze flicked to Bridget, who was still acting as our tour director by pointing Miguel toward the elevator bank.
“It’s all good,” I said. “You have important stuff to deal with, and I think, actually, we don’t need to do anything. Everyone’s so pissed off to be here. She’s dug her own grave.”
Even Gina’s smile seemed to pull down at the corners. She’d mentioned on the ride from the airport that she was missing her son’s basketball game today.
Akil nodded. “I’ll see you at dinner.” He wheeled his suitcase away.
Hands on her hips, Bridget watched Gina and Miguel traipse toward the elevators. Without her skyscraper heels, she looked like a pocket-sized version of her normal, terrifying self, and when she glanced at me, there was a flash of vulnerability before her blue eyes hardened to steel. “Ready?” she asked.
I could swear the block on the color-coded schedule she’d handed each of us in the van said this afternoon was free time. “For what?”
“You and I are in the bungalows at the far end of the resort. They couldn’t get us all in the same place.” She looked even more delicate as her shoulders rounded. “I figured we’d walk together?” She winced when her voice rose.
“You need someone to haul that beast.” I nodded at her suitcase and grasped the handle.
“I can get yours,” she said.
“No need. Just lead the way.”
She pursed her lips—they were the same deep berry shade she wore in the office—then walked through the automatic glass door at the back of the lobby. I trailed behind her, pulling both bags like a porter.
Outside, we walked along a paved path that wound through blooming bushes and trees dotted with clumps of orchids. Back home, many trees had lost their leaves, but here, everything was lush. A hummingbird stuck its bill into a red hibiscus, and a bright-green anole scurried across the path in front of Bridget’s sparkling white sneakers.
“Wow.” She stopped abruptly, and I bumped into her back. “Oops, sorry. But look.” She pointed up the trunk of a palm tree, and a few feet above our heads, a green iguana clung to its side, basking in the afternoon sunlight. He must have been there a while since he’d turned almost the same brown as the trunk. Only his striped tail and orangish back spikes gave him away. Bridget gazed at the motionless lizard. “One good thing I learned in that anger management class was to try to be more present and enjoy the world around me instead of racing ahead to the next goal. If I hadn’t been paying attention, I’d have missed him. You don’t see those guys in California.”
Guilt prickled under my skin. We’d both been arguing, yet Stan had made only Bridget take that ridiculous anger management course. And now she’d turned the punishment into a positive. Her resilience wasn’t the only thing I admired. The sun sparkled on her glossy ponytail, and her tactical pants hugged her ass in a way that gave me not-safe-for-work thoughts. “No,” I choked out through my tight throat. “Costa Rica is pretty amazing.”
“Right?” She turned to face me. “So why aren’t people happy to be here?”
I considered lying for a moment, reassuring her that everyone was, in fact, thrilled to be on a corporate retreat.She might even have enough hope to believe it and ignore the signs of discontent, setting herself up for an even more colossal failure. But gazing into eyes the same color as the water we’d flown across, round and open and wanting answers, I couldn’t.
