Page 13 of Take What Hurts

Mackenzie laughed again, and her resolution died as she found herself grasping for something, anything, to say to keep the conversation going. “Do you live around here?”

Elliott nodded. “Belltown. But, like, north Belltown. Away from the bars. You?”

Mackenzie smiled. “Oh—I’m in Lower Queen Anne. I’m surprised we haven’t run into each other over the vanilla-cream cakes before now.”

Elliott laughed. “I only moved here a few months ago. I stayed in the U District after grad school to save some money.” She shrugged with a hint of misplaced embarrassment, Mackenzie thought, before she went on. “Was worth it not to have roommates. And I try not to make this”—she lifted the cake—“or coming to Whole Foods and spending most of my budget for the week a habit. The Safeway uptown is my regular.”

They stared at each other, Elliott clutching the vanilla-cream, Mackenzie running her eyes over Elliott’s tousled hair and the small uptick at the edge of her lips. Mackenzie shook her head. “Right,” she murmured. “Well—” Her brain fought with her mouth, which wanted to explode with an apology for the text message she’d sent on Friday night. Her brain screamed at her to shut the fuck up. Her brain, mercifully, won the battle. “I’ll leave you to it. It was nice to see you—” She paused, a fluttering erupting low in her belly, because—Yeah, she thought, as her eyes ran themselves down Elliott’s long, lean frame—it was really nice to see her. “Um, I mean, you know. Outside of work.” She choked out a soft laugh and ran a hand over her forearm. Feeling the heat rush into her cheeks and fighting the urge to fucking run away, she lifted her hand in goodbye and forced her legs to calmly move in the direction of the registers.

“Mackenzie.” She turned at the sound of Elliott’s buttery-smooth voice and found her lips pulled apart in a grin, those slightly crooked front teeth glinting in the fluorescent light. Her hands lifted the cake in goodbye. “Thanks. It was nice to see you too.”

NINE

ELLIOTT

“Matilda, I need you to look at the offer properly.” Elliott had been over this several times already, and the restlessness that had started in her feet and legs moved north to take root in the rest of her body. She shot up from her desk and began to pace.

“It’s insulting.”

It was, and Elliott had agreed with Matilda what had to have been a thousand times by now, but they needed to deal with it properly, and Elliott needed something more from Matilda than a repeated “It’s insulting” by way of instructions.

“I understand, but we need to either go back to them with an outright rejection or put forward a counteroffer.” Elliott wondered how many times she’d said that just today. Rather than trying to recall, she leaned her forehead on the cool glass of the window overlooking downtown and north toward the Seattle Center and Space Needle and resisted the urge to beat her head against the thick glass.

A muffled scream came over the phone into Elliott’s ear. She would have been concerned had Matilda not explained that her therapist had suggested letting her frustration out by screaming into a pillow. “Okay, I want to go back to them with the offer I gave them last month. That was fair.”

Elliott wondered if she should start keeping her own pillow under her desk for these moments. “I think we should file.”

Matilda went silent, then stuttered, “D—do you mean court?”

“Yes. Anna is entirely unreasonable, and based on the file, her legal team has encouraged it, probably for fees. The pool gets smaller every day, because all the money is going to legal fees. Your life is literally this. Do you really want to keep going like this?” The burning of anxiety raked her limbs as the intrusive push and pull of whether she’d gone too far and said too much warred with the worry that she hadn’t pushed hard enough. God, it was infuriating, the never feeling sure of herself. Elliott kicked her foot against the window lightly, focusing on the rhythmic thunk of her shoe against the thick pane of glass.

Matilda sucked in a breath. “No, but I don’t want court. She’ll be worse; she promised me she would be.”

Elliott frowned. “What do you mean, she promised you she would be?”

“When I told her I was leaving her, she told me if I took her to court, she’d—” Matilda cut herself off on a choked breath.

A prickling started in Elliott’s gut. It wasn’t clear whether it was rage or fear for the woman on the other end of the phone. “She told you she’d what?” she asked gently, almost afraid of the answer.

Matilda sniffed, and Elliott’s heart sank. “That she’d make my life a living hell. I didn’t clarify what she meant. But Elliott,” she sighed, “she’s—well—she’s a bit, um, a bit ruthless.”

The feeling in Elliott’s gut intensified. It was fear, then. “Go on.”

A beat of silence before Elliott could make out Matilda’s quiet voice through the phone. “When I performed at the Hollywood Bowl, there was a—well, a situation, I suppose you could say. I was named as the opening act for another pianist from Europe. A relative newcomer to the scene.”

Elliott frowned. “Seems like a strange choice.”

Matilda laughed—a full-bodied sound that eased Elliott’s concern about her state of mind. “We all thought so. But Anna in particular. I told her not to worry, but she—she was furious.” She sighed, and Elliott waited. She almost didn’t want to hear the rest. “Well, a day or two after the announcement, the pianist pulled out of the show.” Elliott heard the click in Matilda’s throat—the sound of a hard, dry swallow. “He’d—well, he’d apparently had an accident and sustained an injury to his right hand. He hasn’t performed professionally since.”

“And you think⁠—”

“I don’t know. I—I’m ashamed to say that I never asked. I took the headliner spot, and Anna proposed and I said yes, and I—” Elliott heard the sniffle in her ear, and her stomach clenched uncomfortably. She was faintly nauseated.

“Right. Okay.” Elliott’s brain was trying to kickstart, but it was behaving similarly to an old truck with a dead battery. Ticking over lifelessly until the operator gave up. She didn’t have that option, though. “Right. Um—” She shook her head and frowned at her notes in front of her, unseeingly. What’s the next logical question? What had they even been talking about? Fucking hell. “Okay, so she—she threatened you, essentially?”

“Yes.”

“Did she do it verbally, or did she do it in writing?”