Page 19 of Shades of Grey & Gold

Carla opens her mouth.

“Thank you, Carla. Really.” I pick up my coffee. “Working with you has been wonderful. I appreciate everything. I mean that.”

She closes her mouth. She nods. She knows me well enough to know when I’ve already decided on a course of action and she has to let me run with it.

I’m down the stairs and out the door before I’ve fully registered that I’m moving. Anger and something sour bloom in my chest. It’s distracting enough that I don’t think about Wildhorse or Cal or anything else.

Because my mind is set on one thing, and that is burning Ellison & Parker to the ground.

The sign is going up when I get inside the building.

Two guys on a ladder, familiar big, gold letters being pressed into the dark brick next to the elevator: ELLISON & PARKER. The P is slightly crooked. I stare at it for a second.Somehow that makes it worse. I frown and my stomach turns, the coffee in my hand is nearly empty after I busied myself with sipping while I walked the two blocks to get here.

The lobby is still half unpacked—boxes in corners, a receptionist desk that doesn’t have a receptionist yet, the smell of fresh paint underneath the older smell of the building. A directory board on the wall still has the previous tenant’s name on it. Nobody stops me when I walk to the closed elevator and press the call button.

The doors open quickly.

Patrick is inside.

And Brenda.

Inside my mind, I throw up, stomp my feet and scream into the void.

They’re standing close together the way couples do when they’ve forgotten anyone else exists—her hand looped through his arm, his head tilted toward hers mid-sentence. He looks up at me, frozen mid-step, and something moves across his face. Not guilt, exactly. Something more complicated than that. It’s a grimace, like pain, like someone slapped him.

“Max,” he says. And his voice is—warm. Genuinely warm, which is somehow worse than if he’d been cold. “Hey. I didn’t know you were—this is a surprise.”

He says it with a low shocked laugh and goes to take a step before noticing my frozen state. Brenda smiles at me. It’s a careful smile, one that is guilty.

I look at the elevator walls, then I look at the floor. I look at the small seam where the elevator doors meet in the middle. I picture falling through the small slit in the floor so I can get out of this. But that doesn’t happen, no thanks to the universe.

“I’ll take the stairs,” I mumble to the floor, and I step back out before the doors close.

Two flights. Concrete stairwell, fluorescent lights, my heels on each step.

I cannot believe I am doing this.

I cannot believe I quit the job I loved in the building that used to hold those gold names in the lobby and moved an hour away and built an entirely new life in an entirely new town and Patrick Ellison has followed me here like a bad smell wearing expensive shoes and now I have to walk into his father’s office and negotiate my own terms like a sane adult when what I actually want to do is—what?

Oh, right, right, burn the building down, yes.

First landing.

This merger is an opportunity. I know it’s an opportunity. The career-driven part of me is trying to reconcile that with this being my literal nightmare. The cases E and Phandles are real cases, meaningful ones, the kind I went to law school hoping to take on and then didn’t get to take on because I dropped out of law school to sit outside Patrick’s glass office in a pencil skirt—

Gasoline, matches. Patrick’s fancy desk as kindling.

Second landing.

Here we go.

I hit the crash bar of the door with my whole palm.

It flies open harder than I intended and bangs against the wall. Every head in the office turns to look at me including three people I don’t know, one paralegal I recognize from the old office, and—

“JENNI.”

My voice comes out at approximately double the appropriate volume and an octave higher than my normal voice. Jenni, sitting at a desk near the door, startles and then blinks and then frowns.