Page 1 of Key West Homecoming

CHAPTER 1

Emma Kendrick saved the file, pushed back from her desk, and rolled her shoulders until something in it let go. She had been sitting in that position since noon.

It was Sunday, and the thirty-second floor was dark except for her office and the lamp at her assistant, Marcy’s desk outside it. Emma had stopped asking herself years ago why she worked so many hours because she didn’t have an answer.

The presentation was forty-two pages and had taken her three weeks to perfect. In the morning she would walk seven partners through it in the conference room at the end of the hall. It set out how Ashcroft & Payne was going to win a consumer products account. The firm had been chasing it for two years, without success and with increasing frustration.

One more click took her to the last slide, and she wasn’t happy with it.

“If you change that chart again, I’m taking the mouse away from you.”

Marcy stood in the doorway with her handbag over her shoulder and her reading glasses pushed up into her hair.

“I’m not changing it,” Emma said. “I’m admiring it.”

“You’re changing it. I can tell by the look on your face.”

“I might adjust the color slightly.”

“Emma!”

“What? It’s a terrible blue, Marcy. It looks like a hospital corridor.”

“It’s a perfectly nice blue, and it’s the same blue you used for Brookfield, and they gave up the account.”

Marcy came in and set a fresh cup of coffee on the desk. “I finished the appendix. Page thirty-eight was numbered wrong and I fixed it before anyone important noticed, so you can thank me properly tomorrow. It’s time to go home.”

“I will.”

“You won’t.”

“Soon, I promise.”

Marcy gave her the look that had been getting Emma out of the building since roughly 2020, then gave up gracefully and went toward the elevator. “Six o’clock,” she called back from halfway down the hall.

“Understood.”

By six o’clock the thirty-second floor had gone almost completely quiet. The ventilation was the loudest and the cleaning carts had started their slow rounds.

Emma stood and stretched then walked to the window where the Chicago River lay flat and dark beneath a gray May sky. A water taxi nudged toward the Michigan Avenue bridge. One by one the lights came on in the buildings across the water. On a good day she could see all the way to the lake from here. This was not a good day, but it wasn’t a bad one either even if she had chosen to spend it this way.

In the glass her reflection came back at her, and she studied it the way she’d have studied a slide that wasn’t working. Her dark hair came loose from behind her ears and her gray eyes were tired at the edges. The thin gold chain her mother had given her at graduation lay flat against her collarbone, where it had lain for thirteen years. She had been thirty-five for six months, and tonight she looked older from exhaustion.

When had that happened?

Her mother had been gone almost three years, her grandmother, Gloria, a little over one. There had been a long stretch after her mother died when simply getting dressed in the morning felt harder than presenting to a potential client.

The thing that saved her, if save was the right word, was the work always told her what came next. She knew her job and could handle any obstacle thrown in her path. Grief was shapeless and enormous and impossible to hold, but a forty-two-page presentation had a beginning and an end. She could get her arms around that.

When Gloria died a year ago, Emma chose work over dealing with the pain. She had never once stopped to wonder what it meant that the second time had been so much easier than the first.

The coffee Marcy had left for her was stone cold. She took one sip and then set it down, reached for her jacket, and had genuinely intended to leave when the desk phone rang.

On the display was a Florida area code, and not one she recognized. She let it ring three more times before deciding to answer it.

“This is Emma Kendrick.”

“Ms. Kendrick, my name is Samantha Larson. I’m a real estate broker with Coastal Title and Realty, out of Naples. I’m sorry to bother you at the end of your day. I’m glad I caught you at the office, since I didn’t have a cell number for you. Do you have a few minutes?”