08:04 Matthew:the original stables/garage situation at Trench is coming down today. I’ll send you a pic after demo.
10:29 Matthew:how’s your morning?
11:10 Matthew:are you a pumpkin spice latte fan?
11:11 Matthew:random question, I know.
11:13 Matthew:Shan lost her shit this morning when she saw that they’re back at starbucks.
11:16 Matthew:she’s sent her boy toy, I mean Tom, to get refills three times already.
11:17 Matthew:she’s prob going to be rocking in a corner soon and awake until next wednesday
13:47 Matthew:what’s your evening looking like? Call me when you’re in for the night. preferably when you’re in bed.
13:50 Matthew:I don’t care what time. I’m around.
14:13 Matthew:btw, Sam’s insisting there’s no actual pumpkin in those lattes.
14:17 Matthew:and this is how I spend my days: mediating debates about coffee flavoring.
I thought about the unread emails, the missed calls, the to-do lists, the calendar reminders, and the scrumptious man asking for some of my attention, and I wanted to scream. There was enough work on my plate for me and my three clones, my friends were moving on to shiny, new lives with their husbands and babies, and I couldn’t schedule time to have sex with my architect even if I wanted to.
Everyone else was marinating in a special blend of late twenty-something wisdom while I tried on every size and style of hot mess. I wanted to hold it all together, but most days I was barely holding myself together.
It was so much easier when I was crying in stairwells over closed offices, so much easier before I knew what I was missing, before I truly understood the sacrifices I was making for my work. I let the tears fall, and tapped out a quick message to Matthew, not caring that I was breaking all my own stupid rules.
15:35 Lauren:I’m sorry I haven’t been around to talk or respond much. I’m really stressed right now and haven’t been getting a ton of sleep. Strange story, I’ll tell you later.
15:36 Lauren:I do want to hear how it’s going at the site. Let me know when you can talk.
Chapter Eighteen
MATTHEW
Penance. That’s whatI was doing.
Penance for the Back Bay brownstones running more than three months behind schedule and six figures over budget. Penance for letting Riley take a crack at Angus’s Bunker Hill properties when I should have been the one jumping in front of those bullets.
Angus pushed the designs across the table and sneered. “That’s pathetic.”
And penance for minding my own fucking business. I should have yanked Riley out of Patrick’s office sooner. He was young and green and needed miles of direction, and Patrick expected everyone to be as brilliant as him. He could barely speak to people unless they existed at his level of architectural genius.
Unlike Patrick, Shannon, Sam and me, Riley never worked in the office as a kid. We used to go there after school, and we could read and write bluelines by the time we were seven or eight. That’s where we made our mistakes and learned the basics, but Riley never had that experience, and it showed. By the time he was old enough, Patrick and Shannon were already out of the house, and Angus’s projects were limited to small restorations requiring little more than basic designs. He also gave up on being instructive right after my mother died and he elected to view the world from the inside of a scotch bottle.
I tightened the arm across my stomach and pressed my fist to my mouth for a moment, biting into my finger to channel my aggravation. The numbers in my head weren’t helping. “Would you like the build on that? Perhaps tell Riley what you don’t like?”
Angus folded his hands over his belly with a scowl. “I hope you didn’t pay much for that education, because if this is all you got from it”—he gestured to the designs—“it’s not worth the paper it was written on. That gutter rat mother of yours didn’t pass along too much intelligence, did she?”
Whichever mechanism in my brain that once allowed me to ignore him, the element that switched on while he tore us down and allowed me to sit there, emotionless and detached, was malfunctioning. Angus’s comments used to roll right off my back, but today they stuck, and the fury was suffocating.
“Yeah, that’s gotta be the most constructive feedback I’ve ever heard,” Riley muttered. “If you have nothing else, I’ll just—”
“There are a couple of crews that need laborers. You’d be good at that,” Angus said, his chin jutting toward Riley. “Come on now, this work isn’t for turnips like you. You barely graduated high school. I always knew you were slow as shit. Just like your cunty sister.”
“Do not talk about Shannon that way,” I said, my jaw tight and my teeth grinding together. “You can go. I’ll take this from here.”
Angus huffed and murmured about my mother being a dumb drunk, Riley being a brain-dead turnip, and me thinking I knew everything there was to know about anything, and eventually clattered his way out. He kept his tirade going as he rotated through each of the offices, and on a different day I would have intervened. I would have talked him down and pushed him in the direction of the nearest pub, but I didn’t have it in me right now.
