I left an hour and a half or so later, feeling optimistic AF. Dr. Cobb was nice, seemed fair, and had a wicked sense of humor I appreciated a lot. He seemed to like me, too, so that was a plus. He said he had a couple more interviews to conduct, but that he’d contact me as soon as he had something to report.
He’d grimaced when I’d told him about the place with the crosses on the walls and church ladies on staff. Grinning, he’d promised that it would be more likely for us to have subtle rainbow themed artwork around the clinic than anything religious, even though most other places would rather have the latter.
The next morning, when I woke up a bit late for once, I had an email waiting. Dr. Cobb told me that he was meeting some people to finalize some details, but that once that was done, likely the day after, he’d want to see me again for another conversation about whether his clinic was a good fit for me.
I took that as a good sign, because I needed one.
Chapter 2
Ben
“Yes, Mom, I promise I’ll be careful.” I tried not to sigh audibly. She would get pissed off at me. “I’m flying to Chicago O’Hare and renting a car there. It’ll be fine.”
“Are you sure that’s safe?” she asked for the fifteenth time. “What if—”
“Mom, you know I fly for work all the time. The odds of something going wrong are—”
“Benjamin, the odds of your cousin dying like he did—”
“Right, right, I know.” I rubbed my forehead. I had loved my cousin Henry when we were little. His death in a school shooting when we were in our teens had changed everything for his family and for mine.
I could hear something in the background and then heard my father’s voice.
“Look, sweetheart, just…stay safe for me, all right? Dad’s home and we’re having dinner with the Hewitt’s.”
Saved by the Hewitt’s; who would’ve thought. “Okay. I’ll call you once I’ve settled in Joliet, okay?”
“Sounds good. Bye!” She ended the call before I had time to do anything else.
I chuckled humorlessly. My life had been like this ever since Henry died, and it hadn’t been much easier before that.
Looking around in my spacious room of my shared house in the Shadyside neighborhood of Pittsburgh, I felt…odd. It was like a mild discomfort I couldn’t place. I knew it had nothing to do with Mom, or the house itself, even if she’d hated the place ever since she’d heard the name of the neighborhood, silly as it was. No, this had more to do with a feeling of not belonging.
At first, when I’d moved here a bit over a year ago, I’d felt fine. I’d been happy with the place, the area, the roommates, even. I loved my job as an editor for a big publishing house, and I really enjoyed working with most of the authors assigned to me.
Earlier this year, we’d lost one of our authors, Ruth White, to some sort of congenital thing nobody knew about. I’d only been editing for Ruth—who wrote as Anneliese Harris—for the last two books of her excellent thrillerslashwestern romance series that did all sorts of bending the genre norms and sold a lot. Like alotlot. They were even doing a Netflix series based on it soon, which I was waiting for more than Christmas.
Since Ruth passed, her agent, who worked as the liaison between Ruth and the publisher, contacted me to ask if I was willing to help Ruth’s nephew finish the manuscript Ruth had been writing before she died.
Now, as much as I wanted there to be more of Ruth White’s words out there, I was hesitant, initially. I didn’t know this nephew from Adam, and frankly I wasn’t sure if I wanted to.
I’d always been picky about people. That’s what my mother called it anyways.
In school, when I was little, I had one friend who I didn’t even call a best friend. Her name was Noora, with two Os because her family came from Finland. We were friends because she had a weird accent, and I was the chubby, little, ginger boy with the glasses and crooked teeth. Losers unite, or something. It was a sad thought now, to think that we bonded over that sort of thing when we weren’t even ten years old.
Then, when I was eleven, she moved away, and I never spoke to her again. I hoped she’d found happiness and a place where she wasn’t considered weird.
Anyway, when I went to high school, there were new kids everywhere. There was one thing I liked though; I wasn’t the most obvious choice for others to pick on. There was more individuality, and those who didn’t like that had easy pickings—pun intended, I guess.
I learned to keep my head down and concentrate on studying. The only thing I was truly good at, where I felt somewhat of a tug or a “calling” like my mom called it, was English. Language just made sense to me on a level that other things, say math, never did. I could learn languages easily, too. Whatever had happened with my brain when it was forming to make it so, I was happy.
Now, if I could only care about people as much as I did about books and words, it would’ve maybe made me different in a way that was more widely appreciated in the world.
Since I’d finished packing already and had several hours before I could go to bed and know I wouldn’t wake up too early, I decided to do what I loved the most: I picked up the novel I’d been reading and curled up on my couch.
The book wasn’t as good as Ruth’s had been, but it was definitely one of the newer ones that had been influenced by her series. Something about the setting and my earlier musings made me think that maybe one of the friends I’d had in high school, River, would’ve liked it.
We’d always talked about books. He’d been an avid reader, too, but he liked science fiction where I leaned more towards historical back then. I’d always liked to read autobiographies, because it felt like I was getting a glimpse into lives and worlds I’d never get to experience myself.
