Thirty minutes later, I sauntered into our largest boardroom. Sam’s team had the detailed prospectus pulled up—charts, projections, revenue forecasts. Words that used to thrill me. Numbers that used to mean everything.
Now they blurred and sounded like excruciating noise.
I sat down in my usual chair at the head of the table, but something poked me through my pants pocket.
I shifted. The poking continued.
Frowning, I reached in to see what it was.
My fingers closed around something small and hard.
I pulled a red pasta noodle.
Dry this time, and perfectly intact.
I stared at it in my palm, my heart suddenly hammering.
Theo must have slipped it into my pocket this morning when he hugged me.
It was the missing piece.
Sam started running the team through the document, line by line, but the roar of my pulse in my ears tuned him out.
Jessa was my missing piece too.
Not only Theo’s.Mine.
She’d filled all the empty spaces I didn’t even know I had. Made me remember what it felt like to want someone to go through life with. She made me whole.
We made a baby together.
And I’d let her go. I fucking let her go.
The walls of the boardroom closed in. The voices around the table became white noise. All I heard were the things Jessa had said to me.
“Maybe you’re working for the wrong thing, and all the wrong reasons.”
“The baby needs a father, not a landlord.”
“Give me one reason to stay that has nothing to do with money or contracts.”
I closed my fist around the red noodle and shot up out of my chair.
The room went quiet, all eyes on me.
“I-I need to take care of something.”
Sam huffed. “Now? We’re in the middle of?—”
“It can’t wait.”
I hurried out the door, the red noodle clutched in my fist.
“Griffin!” Sam shouted at me down the hall, his shoes squeaking against polished marble. “What the hell are you doing? You can’t just walk out mid-meeting.”
“There’s something more important I need to do.”
He caught up with me at the elevator, huffing and red-faced. “The entire executive team has been working hard?—”
