Chapter one
Mel
The drive home had been short, but it felt as if I’d crawled back from a war zone in heels. Fridays were supposed to be a win, a high five. This one was sucker punched by a spreadsheet, then followed by having the spreadsheet laugh at your expense.
“Is that you, Mel?”
Sam’s voice floated in from the kitchen as I shut the front door behind me. I stepped into the living room. It smelled faintly of jasmine, with the warm vanilla of Sam’s favorite candles. The soft thump of the fridge door was the only sound breaking the silence until Sam emerged with a soda in hand.
She took one look at me and stopped cold, her expression shifting fromcasual Fridaytooh brother, what happened?
“You look like you got fired or hit by a truck.”
I slumped onto the couch with a dramatic sigh, feeling worse than a deflated balloon. “Not fired, but I might as well have been.”
“Well at least you didn’t get hit by a truck. That would’ve been a real mess to clean up,” she said, narrowing her eyes, really taking me in.
Her dark brows, the same shade as her glossy brown hair, drew together over her wide eyes. Her features were all Dad’s side, while I’d gotten Mom’s lighter hair, but we both had our grandmother’s green-blue catlike eyes. She stopped in front of me, hair scraped into a messy knot with a pencil sticking out in a flag-of-surrender style.
“Wait, are you okay? You’re not sick, are you?”
Sick? If only. A virus would be easier to fight than corporate downsizing. I shook my head.
“Pregnant?”
I almost smiled. “No. Definitely not pregnant.”
“Good. So, I won’t start lighting candles and maybe call in a lawyer, then a priest to cover the confession part.”
That earned a weak huff from me. “No. Just unemployed.”
“What?!” Her voice shot up, echoing through the house like a fire alarm. She searched my face for a hint of a joke. “You weren’t freaking kidding?!”
She reacted exactly as I did when I heard the news.
“The firm’s merging with a bigger one,” I said. “Mr. Grayson kept apologizing, all while giving me a very polite ‘we’re letting you go’ speech.”
“But I thought the firm was doing great! You guys had matching mugs and everything.”
I gave her a look. “That’s your corporate-success metric? Coordinated ceramics?”
“Obviously. That and end-of-year cheese boards,” she said, flopping onto the couch beside me. “You really didn’t see it coming?”
“I had a weird feeling. But you know me. I shoved it deep into the denial vault and threw away the key.”
Sam sighed. She knew what that meant. She might’ve been well on her way to becoming Doctor Samantha Boyd, but right now, she was just my younger sister.
Med school kept her too busy to help with the bills. Some days, she looked like it was costing her everything, with eyes shadowed from studying and too much coffee. She never said it, but I knew she was running on fumes, and that never stopped her from feeling guilty. I’d seen it in the shimmer of her eyes when the roof upgrade didn’t happen.
She exhaled hard. “So what’s the deal? Why you?”
“Julius & Faber is swallowing us whole, and apparently, they don’t need an office assistant extraordinaire, only the partners. Streamlining, consolidating, whatever corporate buzzword makes them feel better.”
“That’s such crap,” Sam muttered, her soda making a sad fizzing sound, adding to the disaster.
We sat in silence. I stared up at the ceiling, trying not to blink too hard in case tears were lurking with bad timing.
“How long do you have until…?”
