“Snow?” Jen stands over me with a binder in her hands.
“Mhm?” I glance up, pausing the e-mail I’m in the process of drafting. “If this is about the schedules leading up to Christmas, I already have those sorted. Maintenance will be here in an hour to start decorating the halls with all your approved decorations and I have the pay slips from everyone who’s getting paid double for working Thanksgiving last week.” Whatever she’s preparing to throw at me, I’m ready.
“I’m not here about that.” Jen leans forward against my desk and glances around, checking who is within earshot before she speaks. “The nurse wants to see you.”
My stomach drops.
“She says she tried to call you,” Jen continues, “but you didn’t answer. I explained my new no phone policy and she tried to give me shit for it, but I think it’s improving productivity, don’t you think?”
Anything else she says washes over me as I cling to her first sentence.
The nurse.
This is about my test results.
Standing slowly, I close out of the email and walk away from Jen in a daze, deaf to her attempts to tell me anything else.
My heart begins to pound and by the time I reach the elevator, it’s racing so fast that I can’t hear anything else.
Not the hiss of the elevator doors, not the click of the button as I press for the next floor, nor the familiar clunk as the elevator hums into life and takes me up two floors.
I remain in a daze, bubbled by my own thunderous heartbeat until I’m outside the nurse’s office, knocking.
“Come in,” calls a soft voice.
Pushing open the door, I’m hit by a sudden rush of warmth that alerts me to how cold my hands are.
The nurse sits at her desk typing away while a heater sits at her feet, flooding the room with warmth.
She glances over her shoulder and smiles at me.
“Noelle?”
“Yes, that’s me.”
“Come in, come in. Close the door, would you? I’m trying to preserve what limited heat this little guy churns out.”
I do as she asks and walk forward until I’m parallel with the chair beside her desk. “Can I sit?”
“Of course you can.” She chuckles. “I’m Abby. I’m so terribly sorry it took so long for your test results to come back. We’re usually much quicker in these situations, but this time of year, with so many people unwell, it takes time, unfortunately.”
She finishes her typing with a satisfying click and then swivels to face me. “I can’t imagine how difficult the last few weeks have been for you.”
“They wanted to keep me off work for longer,” I say as I sit and clutch at my knees. “But I was bored out of my mind so Jen, my boss, let me come back for strictly admin only.”
“Did it help keep your mind off things?”
I shake my head.
The only thing that helped was Xander, but he put his foot down and denied me the only thing keeping me sane.
He was right to.
I was spiraling down a dark path with how my life was crumbling around me, not thinking straight at all. While it’s still in shambles, I’m sleeping again and no longer acting like my life is over.
Unless what Abby is about to tell me changes that.
Maybe my lifeisover.
