My mom was still talking and I tried to sniffle quietly so that she couldn’t hear. No tears were actually falling yet, but I felt them gathering. “We feel like we haven’t seen you in so long,” she told me, and now I felt guilty on top of my loneliness and Dax-related misery.
“I’ll drive home soon,” I promised. “I miss you.”
“Daddy and I are worried about you, Camille.”
I knew that. I also thought that she might have heard me sniffling just now, and I quickly pulled myself back together. “You really don’t have to be,” I assured her. “Did I tell you that I’m going to join a bird watching club? And I started crocheting again. I plan to volunteer as a mentor and I’m doing really well at work.”
“I’m so glad. You always make us very proud.”
I nodded, not able to speak due to throat-closure issues. I made a funny noise and my mom immediately asked, “Are you crying?”
I shook my head. Still no tears but I might have turned red by now due to holding them in.
“Daddy and I will drive up,” she said decisively and I frantically cleared my throat. I had been avoiding a visit from them since the day I’d moved to Detroit.
“No, no! I’m going to come down soon. I’m going to come!” I said. “Let’s decide when, right now.” She liked to have things calendared and that did make it feel very official. We set the date, just like I had been trying to do with Dax for our wedding. He’d felt like his part was done once I wore the engagement ring, but I’d been working to convince him that actually getting married was the end goal.
We had never managed to confirm a time and place, but now my mom and I got it done before we hung up. Rashelle in my office had a date, too, for her real wedding that was now just around the corner. I was pretending not to see through ourglass walls as she spent more and more time nailing down last-minute details for that, rather than doing her work for Whitaker Enterprises. If I had been the one with a marriage ceremony and reception only a few weeks away, then I also would have been knee-deep in issues with flowers, food, and…
This was the limit! I had to stop crying, right now. I swiveled my chair to face the wall and took a moment to breathe deeply, but when I turned back around, I saw my coworkers Munir, Adam, Zosia, and Iker watching me sympathetically. They all immediately looked away. I decided to head to the stairwell, which I had discovered was a safe place to hide, but as soon as I left my office…
“Camille!” Octavia yapped sharply from the other end of the hallway. She didn’t lower her voice as she stomped her approach. “Did you even read this purchase agreement before you sent it to me for approval? You can’t have been paying attention when you drew up the closing conditions,” she scoffed. “It would have been a disaster if the client had seen that!”
“I didn’t send anything to you for approval,” I said calmly. “You asked to see it.” But then I got worried. Had my emotional state affected my job? “I’ll come to your office and you can show me what you mean.” That was better than the hallway, because the glass walls did block some sound. Not everything, though, because she spoke very loudly.
But fortunately, there was nothing in the closing conditions that would have caused the disaster she’d foretold. She vehemently disagreed with some of the language that I’d used but, again, she wasn’t my superior here. I suggested that I would speak toour actual boss when I saw him this weekend, and then I turned the tables by asking about her project in West Michigan. It ended our discussion, because she told me that she could handle everything and that there was nothing to talk about. I agreed.
As I had hoped, Beckett was pleased with my work product when we went to his house on Saturday. I got to see Juliet briefly and the best part was that Octavia didn’t attend. Munir and Rashelle were there and they were bowled over by the size and grandeur of the Forsman home.
“Can you imagine?” Rashelle whispered as we exited to the driveway. “I would kill to live in a place like this!”
“Not me,” I said.
They both turned. “You don’t like it?” Munir asked. He was also whispering.
“I think it’s beautiful,” I assured them. I had eyes, just like Stone, Mr. Flip Phone. “I want something…” I looked at the mansion behind me, with its four stories of imposing height and what I would have called a turret. “Something smaller and homier. Cozier.”
“No, I would love this. I would pretend to be a princess,” Rashelle said, and we all laughed. “My wedding dress also makes me feel…oh. I’m sorry.” She suddenly looked remorseful.
Maybe she liked to gossip a little too much, but she wasn’t a bad person. “You can talk about your wedding,” I said. “It doesn’t bother me. Dax and I made a reasonable, measured, and adult decision to end our relationship on a mutual basis.” The groundseemed firm under my feet and not at all like it was going to open and swallow me up for telling the terrible lie.
I had practiced that line so it sounded believable, but Rashelle’s nose crinkled and Munir scratched his head. “Really?” he asked, and they looked at each other.
“Yes, really,” I answered, and I smiled in a reasonable and measured way. “Really.”
“So you didn’t dump him.”
“No, it was mutual,” I repeated, and the two of them shared another glance, but this time Rashelle was nodding.
“The song’s not about her,” she told him. “I didn’t think so.”
“What song?” I asked.
“The rap song,” she said. “I told Munir that it wasn’t your story, even if it does talk about Dax.”
“There’s a rap song aboutmyDax?” I pointed at my chest, like I’d been hit with a flying engagement ring in that spot. “Dax Miststuck?”
“It calls him ‘Jax’ and it never says his last name,” Munir answered, “but it’s about a guy who moves to Detroit to be a club promoter. I thought it might be your ex-boyfriend. Sorry.”
