I glanced around at the empty hallway and decided that with the way her voice carried, the stairwell was our best option. I opened the heavy door again. “Have a seat,” I offered, and we each took a step.
Octavia and I had a productive conversation. She managed not to raise her voice (too much) or get defensive (to a great degree). Instead, we talked honestly about how the Four-Squared project had gone awry and why she hadn’t asked for help with it. She wouldn’t say it directly, but I did get the feeling that the issue was that I was younger and less experienced.
Then she said it directly. “I’m older and with a great deal more experience. However, I did become overwhelmed. I should have reached out to you. I do understand why Beckett chose to promote you, instead of me.”
She may have understood, but she sure didn’t seem happy about it. If I were in her shoes, I wouldn’t have been, either. “When I met with him this morning, I let him know that you and I are now working much more collaboratively,” I said. “I told him that we get along just fine.”
Her eyebrows drew down and she studied me. “Why did you say that?”
“I think it’s true. I also think that you’re a good lawyer, but things did get badly off-track and that absolutely can’t happen again. You have to tell me that you need help. I’ll tell you, too.”
“You do everything on your own. You never need help,” she scoffed, and this sounded much like a conversation I’d recently had in the new truck on the way to the memorial service.
There was a story for that—I’d thought about it and what Silas had been trying to say made sense, in an odd way. “Let me tell you about a little boy stealing a crate of ice cream,” I said, and she stared at me.
“Is this more about your life with the criminal element?” she asked, and I became instantly enraged.
“Silas isn’t—”
“I don’t mean him,” she told me. “I’m talking about your former boyfriend. Your fiancé, Dax Miststuck.”
I stared at her in shock. “What do you know about Dax?” I asked, and the answer was plenty. Apparently, Octavia hadn’t been missing too much around here, from Rashelle’s pregnancy (when it actually had been a secret) to the fact that I had been engaged to someone she termed “a horse’s patoot.”
“He was awful,” she said. “Your relationship sounded pathetic.”
“How do you know that?” I asked, still amazed.
“That song about you was quite telling,” she explained. “Full of sour grapes.”
“You listened to it? When? How?”
“It got a lot of airtime,” she sniffed, “although I found the flow and lyrical quality to be less than compelling.” Then, to my surprise, she cleared her throat and started to rap. “‘She moved like a baby hippo, but with an ass that made—’”
“Please! I don’t want to hear that again.”
“I was certain that you hadn’t stolen his jewelry or done any of the other terrible things he talked about,” she said. Then she tilted her head and raised her index finger. “I did have a question. It mentions that his mother’s name rhymes with—”
“People call her Mitch,” I explained.
We ended up going to lunch instead of staying in the stairwell any longer. I turned the conversation away from my former relationship and onto our company, and she had a lot of interesting insights into the history of the Whitaker family who had founded it. And as we ate, I learned a lot about her, too—like that she had been married before, when she’d been in law school, but she had been happy to divorce.
“I’m very content with my life now,” she explained. “Grosvenor is more than enough to manage.” Absentmindedly, she rubbed her wrist—that was where he’d bitten her on their holiday cruise.
“So, you don’t feel any…” I stopped, because what I’d been about to say was intrusive and not appropriate. Not that anything had ever stopped Octavia from asking those kinds of questions herself, but my mother had worked hard to raise me better.
“Go ahead,” she urged. “I personally don’t hold anything back. I may have upset Iker this morning when he showed me a picture of his pregnant wife, and I mentioned that if she gets any larger with that baby, she won’t be able to fit into their car.”
“Oh, no! You didn’t really say that, did you?” I briefly closed my eyes. “You’re going to have to apologize to him. No, I’m going to have to get HR on this. Octavia…”
She seemed unperturbed. “What were you going to ask me?” she pressed.
Well, if we were all going to be rude, then I would just go right ahead. “I was wondering if you ever felt any regrets about not staying married or having kids.”
She didn’t even have to think. “No,” she answered immediately. “No, that’s not for me.”
“It’s definitely not for everyone,” I agreed, and I thought of Silas. He wasn’t interested in marriage or in children. Just this morning, before he’d started his online class, I’d tried to show him a very, very adorable video of a little boy’s first steps. He hadn’t even looked at my phone as he murmured something about yeah, cute.
“Personally, I think that you’d do better to focus a bit more on your career and less on your boyfriend,” she advised. “You’ll advance further and faster if you don’t engage in romantic twaddle.”
