CHAPTER ONE
Iwanted to be like Margaret Flame, or Maggie, as everyone called her—from the CEO to the mail cart delivery kid. The recognition, the praise, the awards, the gifts, the bonuses, the high-profile boyfriends, the awe...she had it all.
And then one day she disappeared.
"It's weird... I haven't seen Maggie today," Grant said, eyeing the hallway by the elevator. He’d been looking that way all morning, tapping his pen against his desk like a nervous tic.
"Uh-huh." I looked back down at my phone, pretending to study a client email while really just hiding my eye-roll.
"I should call her. Make sure she's not out sick," he suggested.
Impossible. Maggie hadn’t taken a sick day in her three years with the company. A couple of times she’d obviously been under the weather, but she still managed to come in. The flu was going around though.
"Geez, Grant, keep it in your pants. Sheishuman. And if she’s sick, she doesn’t need you bothering her." I stood beside him, lips pursed, one brow raised.
He grimaced, squinting at me. He did, however, remove his hand from the phone.
"You know, K, if you want me to take you out again, all you have to do is ask,” he said. “It's kind of cute that you're jealous of Maggie, but I'm always here forallof your needs."
I rolled my eyes and dropped into my chair, turning my back to him. I'd rather not get into all the details, but it's pretty obvious from our exchange that Grant and I had a strained working relationship. It stemmed from the one time he asked me out, called it a date, and then ignored me the whole evening for his buddies at the nightclub.
But maybe he was right. Maybe I was jealous of Maggie. I didn't know her all that well (she never accepted anyone's invitations for happy hour), but she seemed to have plenty of friends and traveled extensively. Meanwhile, I was stuck at my desk with Grant behind me, and my only plan for the entire week was driving two hours to my mom's place after work on Friday and spending the weekend with her at her new beach condo.
At first, I went every weekend to help her unpack and so she wouldn't feel lonely. It was the first time we hadn't lived in the same city, and she knew only one other person in the area.
Not too long after, she began introducing me to "the gang,” and I was the youngest person lounging by the complex's pool at their weekly Saturday night luaus. It made me look forward to retiring, but it also put my lack of a social life with people my own age (something else I’d rather not get into right now) front and center.
So maybe I wasn't jealous. Maggie simply motivated me to rethink my life. She would be my inspiration to change the things that weren't working. Except... Maggie actually cared about her job. I mostly cared about surviving mine. If someone told me the office building had exploded, I probably would have shrugged (as long as no one was inside, of course). I might even be the one accused of arson (not that I complainthatmuch).
Still, itwasstrange that Margaret Flame wasn’t at the office.
Every hour,someone would come by to ask Grant and me—as the ones who sat closest to her office and were her direct subordinates—if we had heard anything. Apparently, no one else had either. Her desk sat neat and untouched, the coffee mug still half full from yesterday.
Maggie had always been extremely professional, and never once did she call us after work hours. I felt silly texting her because, well, she’d never even given me her phone number, and looking it up in the company directory to ask her if she was okay seemed like the first step in a stalker's manual.
When the CEO peeked into her office and then looked at me and Grant, I expected him to ask us what we had done with her.“I’m not her keeper!”I could hear myself crying out.
What Mr. Gordon actually said was, “Tell Maggie to call me as soon as she’s in.”
“Of course,” I said, letting out a sigh of relief. He walked away, eyes glued to the phone in his hand.
Grant’s chair squeaked as he shifted in his office chair.
“You know, K,” he started, as he most often did, “if Maggie up and quit, you and I might be competing for a promotion.”
I stared at my monitor blankly. “It’s all yours, Grant.”
“Really? You wouldn’t go for Director?”
The last thing I wanted was to get into a deep conversation about my fear of failure with a fuckboy like him.
“Nope.” I got up to go to the bathroom and glanced back at Grant. He was playing with a pen and watching me.
“When are you going to give me a second chance?” he asked.
I sighed and took the long way to the bathroom so that he couldn’t watch me all the way down the hall.
It didn’t matter how good-looking and charming he was. There was no way a second chance would erase my first impression of him as a dating partner. When I thought abouthow he gave more attention to his phone during our dinner before the nightclub…
