“Congratulations on your fucking grant.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
The pleasure of stomping out that little glimpse of hope on Lewis’s face is short-lived, and all too quickly replaced by an oxygen-sucking pressure. I weave through the rows of tables, past the islands of laughter and busy food carts, my only goal to get as far away from Lewis as possible.
“Hey, watch where you’re going,” someone calls as my hands fumble for my phone to call Karo. The news about Lewis winning the grant and keeping it a secret is tearing my chest in half and lighting the leftovers on fire, and I know Karo is the only one who can extinguish this horrible, sickening feeling.
But nobody picks up the phone, even when I try calling again.
“Frances, are you okay?”
I look up from my shaking hands, only to find Vivienne a few paces ahead, untangling her hand from Jacob’s arm.
Absolutely fucking brilliant.
Just the people I needed to run into.
“Yes,” I say, but it sounds unconvincing.
She closes the distance between us. “Were you looking for the bathrooms?”
“I’m—”
I’m good, I want to say, though I’m not sure my body remembers how to breathe. Vivienne seems to know better. Hand on my elbow, she steers me toward the psychology building.
“You don’t have to go for the smelly excuses of a toilet out there.” Rummaging in her bag, she swipes a card across the reader and pushes the door open.
I don’t have to pee, but I tell her, “Thanks. I’ll be quick.” My words come out hoarse.
“On second thought,” she muses. “I better go as well. Since I’m here already.”
The corridor ahead is dark, but the overhead lights turn on one by one as we walk, and when we reach the bathroom, Vivienne stops in front of the paper dispenser. She pulls out a towel and holds it under the faucet, as I wrap my hands around the other sink and take a deep breath.
“Here,” she says, and that’s when I see myself in the mirror. Strands of hair curling around my face, my cheeks reddened and splotched with smears of mascara.
Have I been crying?
Surely, I would’ve noticed.
Right?
Come to think of it, my throat does feel raw. Hoping none of my colleagues saw me lose control, I grip the sink tighter and focus on the porcelain against my skin. Solid, cool, grounding.
How is it that I know how the different cells on the human retina transform a visual image into a highly complex electric signal, yet seem to have no idea when tears are running from my eyes?
After what must be a solid minute of breathing in and out to collect myself, I take the towel from Vivienne’s hand and scrape it over my skin. Vivienne leans against the edge of thesink, arms crossed in front of her, and quietly watches as I clean the gunk of mascara and tears from my face.
“Didn’t you want to go…” I trail off, nodding my head toward the bathroom stalls.
She shakes her head. “Look, I know I may not be your first choice when it comes to talking about anything, for very obvious reasons. But if you feel like you need to get something off your chest, I’m happy to listen.”
I do need to get something off my chest, a lot actually, but it’s not like I can tell her about any of it. My dream job is tangled up in the research funding Lewis got, but so what? Vivienne’s working for her fiancé, so that’s clearly not an issue for her.
“I don’t think you’d understand,” I say, disposing my tissue in one of the bins.
Try me, her lifted eyebrows say, and I don’t know if it’s the challenge, or the fact that my emotion regulation is nowhere near as good as I’d like it to be, but I blurt out, “Lewis’s future lab has offered me what is basically the position of my dreams, but there’s no way I can take it because it’s his money. I can’t depend on that. I can’t have people thinking I got my job because I slept with the boss, which…”
I stop myself there, my brain chantingDon’t get involvedandIt’s her relationship, but I’m too angry at Lewis, at Jacob, at all of them, to even care.
