He doesn’t ask any of the questions I’d expect him to ask about my internship or the work or the company itself. He wants to know about my personal life—not in a weird way—but he always wants to know more about Amy, how we’re doing without Mom, if I’ve talked to my dad lately. We’ve talked about baseball and my high school team and a recital he saw Amy perform in when we were sixteen.
If he did this with all the other interns it wouldn’t seem so strange. But he doesn’t talk to Mark, his own intern, as much as he talks to me, and it makes me suspicious, like when the conversation quiets the second I walk into a room and everyone does their best to avoid eye contact with me.
“Hi, Mr. Skyler.”
“Call me Dick.”
I’m...not going to do that.
“How’s it going?” I ask instead.
“I’m well, son.” He smiles at my stack of coffee cups and my tenuous grasp on the files. “Coffee fan?”
That’s another thing about Richard: for a CEO and all-around brilliant marketer, he’s a little clueless.
I glance down at them. “One is for Ms. Blunt,” I say slowly.
“Right,” he says. A sad little frown creases his forehead. “Is she getting on all right? Does she need any help preparing for her presentation?”
He jingles the change in his pocket and the sound confuses me as much as his question does. The tinkling is so out of place partnered with his concern.
I pause to stop the confused stutter from escaping. “I think she’s getting on fine?”
He turns his frown toward me. “Well, you know,” he says. “What with her mother’s cancer and all.”
Blood rushes through my ears so I don’t quite hear what he says next. His eyes glint, like he’s sharing a tasty morsel of gossip rather than the news of someone’s potential death sentence. He shakes his head in that way people have—feigned regret—his mouth still moving but all I can hear is the beep, beep, beep of my mom’s heart monitor.
My head spins as we step onto our floor. Richard walks to the Hill City lobby doors but I’m still trying to catch up with his news. And the fact that he thought he should be the one who gets to tell me.
“Are you going to be okay, son?”
I’m not your son, I almost snap.
I’m not anyone’s, really. Not anymore.
“Why...why wouldn’t I be okay?” I ask, my mouth barely forming the words past the dryness in my throat.
“Didn’t I say?” He leans back, his hands in his pockets, still jingling that change, like an unconscious tic. “She has ovarian cancer, too.”
In the silence afterward, Richard blinks. Takes a step away. I’m scowling at him, I realize. My face contorted into a gargoyle’s version of itself.
I shake my head to clear the expression, but it does nothing to extinguish the sudden urge I have to throw all the crap in my hands to the floor and deck Richard Skyler right in the mouth.
“If you need to take any time, just let me know.”
“I think I’m late,” I say, turning away. My feet feel like they move faster than the rest of my body but I still can’t get away from that conversation fast enough. Not until I’m in the hallway, standing in front of my desk outside Ms. Blunt’s office, do I let myself stop.
The pounding heart is replaced by a tightness in my chest that might be heart failure. I shake my head trying to keep the images from behind my eyes. But it all comes back.
The grayish color to her skin, the sound of her labored breathing, the smell in her bedroom. Feeling alone once she was gone and still feeling that way now, months later.
Everything in my body wants to stay out of that room. Walking in there would be reliving it all again, from the beginning. But I have to go in. And not just because I’m late for our meeting.
Corrine Blunt doesn’t like me and her reasons for that might be misguided but right now I might be the only person in this building who knows exactly what she’s thinking.
The files start to fall as I push open her office door.
“I know. I’m late. I’m sorry,” I say, grabbing and pulling at the papers so they don’t fall all over the floor. I grapple there, in pointed silence, until all of the files are straightened.
