I’m shocked by her deception. Then again, she did skillfully let Frank Castillo think he was charming her when she told Oliver she didn’t like him at all.
“Didn’t you used to be some hotshot runner?” I ask, watching Charlie expertly prepare Oliver’s drink.
“Yeah,usedto be,” Charlie corrects me.
She finishes her task and we walk back to our corner of the office together.
“Well, I’m sure you can put a few people in this office in their place,” I tell her. “They might need it.” I picture Charlie running past Celine, giving that woman a dose of humility.
The mental image is clear: Charlie in running shorts and a sports bra, cheeks flush from the run, her stomach bare, her legs tired. She leans down to do a post-run stretch. I might be able to help her aching muscles. I push those thoughts away to focus on Charlie’s response.
She shrugs. “Eh, some things are more important than team bonding or sticking it to people on high horses.”
I have to bite back a laugh. “Like what?”
“My health.” Charlie’s answer is sharp; she is trying to cut off this line of questioning.
She seems perfectly healthy to me. I think of what I’ve seen other runners go through. “ACL, MCL, or meniscus?”
She adjusts her glasses but doesn’t answer. We’re nearly back at my office.
“Shin splints from hell?”
Charlie is quiet, one of the first times she isn’t chattering on. She’s on the receiving end of the questioning this time. Maybe because it’s her business and she doesn’t want to run with us. Or maybe she does have plans to divulge information to someone in the Order.
“Achilles?”
Charlie turns to me, tight-lipped. “Nope.” And ducks into Oliver’s office with his mushroom coffee. She emerges and sits at her desk, ignoring the fact that I am still standing there.
Turns out Charlie Ross does have secrets. Are they what I think they are? Or something else?
“I’m glad to see you can keep a secret, Charlie,” I say, willing her to look up at me. “But sometimes honesty is the best policy. We have to trust each other.”
At this, she glances up at me and drops the envelope in her hand to her desk. “That goes both ways,” she says.
She’s right. I haven’t been able to give her that trust. Still, I wait for her to elaborate further.
After a beat, she nods for us to go into my office.
“I’m allowed to not want to run,” Charlie begins as soon as the door is closed. “Some people assume being the daughter of Tom Ross, ‘legendary running coach’ –” she adds air quotes – “would come with a lot of pressure. It did. In a good way . . .” She hesitates before continuing. “Pressure to push myself, to compete against who I was yesterday and the day before. It didn’t hurt that I was a natural, or perhaps a lifetime of subtle coaching from Dad turned me into the best runner. A machine. Perfect form. Perfect timing.”
Charlie takes a breath. Her cheeks grow pink; she is agitated and trying not to show it. “But I retired from running and from being his assistant coach for a reason. I need you to respect that.”
“OK,” I tell her, still turning over her words in my head. I get it, I think. She has her reasons to not want to run. Little Miss Sunshine has some dark and brooding thoughts, some mental block here. My quick judgments, my snap reactions, have led me so wrong.
Charlie leaves my office and returns to her desk. She begins to sort the mail again.
I know I should get to work. Force her from my mind. But now I have a new mystery to solve: Charlie Ross.
21
CHARLIE
Thursday is chaos! I get to work and I have a mountain of stuff on my desk. Crowding out my neon Rubik’s cube, array of comical rubber duckies, and a framed photo of my parents is a tower of mail to sort. A shipment of misprinted T-shirts from race ops that they need me to send back to the printer. And that’s just the physical items. My email has a barrage of requests. Many of them from Celine.
A famous football star is planning to do one of our triathlons; Celine needs me to help coordinate the entire day and extra-VIP experience for his wife. Trey and Shauna have an email on travel etiquette they want to send to the entire company that I need to proof before I send it from Oliver’s email account. Everyone on the marketing team has been subtly hinting that they want an assignment at the Exponential Endurance Championships because, hello, work trip to Fiji sounds amazing. The Smithsonian wants “something” from FIRE’s first year in operation. Oh, and my computer is giving me the blue-screen-of-death. One of Ian’s team said he would be over soon to help. Which means I’m left to manage everything from my phone.
“Ugh,” I groan as Declan passes by.
