“It’s all right. No rush. Do you want to just finish up and then we could head out? Maybe we could get dinner at Top O,” he suggested.

“That sounds great. There’s no way I’m finishing all of this tonight anyway,” she said. The piles of emails would still be there tomorrow for her to take care of.

“What do you have to do?” Hayden asked, walking over to her computer, reading over her shoulder.

“Just some basic stuff. Layout, editing, new material. The usual.”

Liz began to pack up her other stuff as Hayden scrolled through the mass of emails she had neglected while working in New York. She had so much other stuff to do on top of the newspaper that she probably should have just stayed, but how often did she get to see Hayden these days?

“You have a lot here,” Hayden said.

“Yeah. I’ve been pretty swamped the past two weeks, and then the New York Times on top of all of that,” Liz said, shrugging. “I’ll get through it all.”

She heard Hayden sigh as she tidied up her desk and pretended to put it into some order. If she had known he was going to be here, she would have made some kind of effort to make it look presentable. Now she was just doing it out of habit because she knew that he liked things tidy.

“Liz, you know I really don’t like that you’re dropping the ball with this kind of stuff,” he said, his voice carrying the edge of authority he used when he had been editor of the paper. She had always thought that voice was commanding in a gentle, nudging way. Right now . . . it didn’t have that quality. It sounded a whole hell of a lot more like her boyfriend was about to reprimand her.

“Dropping the ball on what?” she said, turning to stare at him, her hands on her hips. She didn’t know why the comment immediately made her defensive. She was editor of the paper now, not him, and she was doing just fine. In fact, sometimes she thought she was doing a better job than Hayden had, because she didn’t have to micromanage people.

“You have about a hundred emails in here. Things that really need to get taken care of. I know you have this big internship lined up at the New York Times, but that doesn’t mean you can let my paper turn to shit.”

Liz froze, her blue eyes narrowing. “Excuse me?”

“Look, I picked you for this position because I thought you could handle juggling everything at once. If you can’t, then maybe you should think about how that affects the newspaper and not jeopardize its reputation for your other projects.”

“You think I’m jeopardizing the reputation of the newspaper by having a few unread emails?” she asked, crossing her arms over her chest.

“Stop making this sound bad. I’m just saying that you should consider the impact of your carelessness. I would have never let this go on like this,” he told her.

“Well, I’m not sure if you noticed, Hayden, but I’m not you,” she said, rounding on him. “And the only reason anything is being neglected is because my boyfriend took a job hours away. So sorry if you wanted to see me.”

He quickly tried to backtrack. “This isn’t about us.”

“No. I think this is very much about us and actually has little to do with the paper. So perhaps you could just spell out to me what’s going on.”

Hayden shook his head in frustration. “See, this is it. I built this paper into a well-oiled machine. I took what a bunch of other editors had done and made it all run like it was on wheels. I laid the foundation and now you’re trying to dig away at what I created by being as selfish as all the other editors before you.”

Liz’s eyebrows rose sharply. “Selfish?” she said in a strangled voice. “I’m being selfish by pursuing my career? I’m being selfish by visiting my boyfriend who wants me to see him? I’m being selfish by not being you?”

“Lizzie . . . , calm down, please. It has nothing to do with our relationship.”

“You keep saying that, but it’s not what I hear. All I hear is someone who is pissed off and jealous because his girlfriend is interning at the New York Times when you stood no chance at the Washington Post, and reminiscing about the good old days in college. And now you’re being an ass**le to me when I don’t deserve it,” she spat.

“I’m not jealous. That’s f**king insane. I got internships in D.C. too; that doesn’t mean you’ll get a job at the New York Times out of college, especially not with the way you’re running this newspaper,” he retorted harshly.

“Fine,” she snapped, shaking her head. “You know what? I’m going home.”

She slammed her computer closed, stuffed it into her bag, then grabbed it and started walking out of the office.

“Lizzie, come on. Why are you leaving?” Hayden asked, reaching for her.

Liz wrenched her arm back. “Stop it.”

“I came all this way to visit you,” he said earnestly.

“Then you should have considered how you were going to treat me. I’m not a punching bag for your emotions.”

She turned on her heel and stormed toward the exit. He didn’t even follow her this time, and that just fueled her anger.

They had never had an argument in the almost year that they had been dating, and her whole body ached at the thought. She hated being angry with him, but he deserved it. Tears stung her eyes as she shouldered open the heavy double doors.

Liz wasn’t sure why, but as the door slammed behind her, her thoughts strayed to Brady. He would have never belittled her career like that. In fact, he had always been interested in where her life was headed.

She ground her teeth together to try to hold herself together. It didn’t matter what he thought. That ship had long since sailed.

Liz wrapped her scarf around her neck and braced herself against the cold. Winter was rearing its ugly head a little too early for her Florida fancy. She didn’t like the cold, nor was she used to it, and she wished in that moment that she had remembered her gloves. They were stowed away in her glove compartment, little good that did her.

Rubbing her hands together, she tried not to think of Hayden and his jealous, antagonistic attitude. Every time she tried not to think about her boyfriend, it brought her full circle to Brady, another person she didn’t want to think about. She had been doing so well on that front for so long that it was weird that her mind immediately drifted there. Why couldn’t she just forget about these boys and focus on her career?