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“Are you working?” she asked without preamble, her voice tinged with unspoken accusation.

“No, your majesty. I’m playing DE.”

Her mouth opened. “Hah. I didn’t realize you played anymore…I thought you’d quit when we stopped getting together as a group.”

“I haven’t played in months, since our group last ran around together. But I wanted to get to the bottom of this Lord Sisyphus mystery.”

She flipped on the light, and I squinted. She entered the room, apologizing as she pulled off her hoodie. “It’s a mystery? You still don’t know why it’s there or who put it there?”

“Nope.”

“You’re the CEO of the company. They can’t hide that from you, can they? You should demand answers. You’re the boss of them.”

I avoided looking up at her—shame, anger, and embarrassment burned in my chest. If she only knew…

The news of the BOD’s ultimatum was still like an anchor weighing me down. Not an hour went by where I didn’t think about it or how to rail against it.

Sighing, I closed the laptop, mid-game, knowing it would log me off automatically.

“You feeling okay?” she asked. “Do you need me to refill your water bottle?”

“I need you to come over here and talk to me for a little while.”

She smiled. “Okay.”

She plopped down on the bed and took my hand. I told her about the weird visit from Heath, and she asked me questions. She resolved to check in with him and also speak to Kat. But she said that he’d gone into a similar depression when he broke up with his previous boyfriend, years ago.

We were quiet for a long stretch, each lost in our own thoughts. She stared up at ceiling, her fingers fiddling with mine. But she seemed to be very careful about not touching me in any other way.

I didn’t feel much like it these days.

I didn’t feel much like anything. It was too exhausting to even feel.

“You okay?” Her soft question broke the silence.

I gave a slight shrug.

“You seem down. I know that getting sick and incapacitated can be extremely hard on a person like you, so…just checking.”

“A person like me?”

She smiled. “Yeah, the ones that are always going constantly and never resting. The ones with too much purpose and not enough time.”

“‘Too much purpose’? Is that my problem?”

“I’m starting to come to the conclusion that your addiction isn’t to work. It’s to achievement—you’re addicted to accomplishing the next big thing.”

I didn’t like that word—addiction. It had too many painful associations for me. But she wasn’t wrong, either. Problem was I had no idea what that next big accomplishment would be, and with all this struggles with the company, I was beginning to question my direction there, as well.

“Sometimes I feel like…I’m standing at a crossroads. Like something big is about to change what I need to focus on.”

She turned and looked at me for a long time. My eyelids began to feel weighted down. “I’ve been wondering when you’d get the itch to start finding the next big thing to work on.”

My eyebrow twitched. She wasn’t even surprised by this news. Why did I get the feeling that, in so many ways, Emilia knew me better than I knew myself? I gently brought her hand to my lips and kissed it.

She got ready for bed soon after that and fell asleep in minutes. And even though I was practically smothered in a layer of exhaustion myself, I couldn’t sleep. I lay in the darkness staring up at the ceiling, feeling more helplessly enraged over the powerlessness of my health, my company, my future. I was hanging on a precipice, all right. In more ways than one. And that only brought on another headache.

Fuck. My. Life.

 

 

Chapter 12

Mia

In a stroke of the worst luck ever, Adam’s waltz with the Epstein-Barr virus led to me showing up alone at a neighborhood dinner party. The good news? I only had to walk a few hundred yards to the other side of Bay Island in my heels in order to attend. The bad news? The company. They were nice people, our neighbors, but…so not my crowd.

There’s fish out of water and then there’s…human visiting an alien planet. I was Spock, the only Vulcan in Starfleet. Beam me up, Scotty. There’s no intelligent life down here.

I would have loved to cancel—citing Adam’s illness as the excuse, of course. But Adam and I had already backed out of previous dinners three times. I feared that our chance of offending the neighbors was reasonably high—even with the very legitimate excuse of his health. So here I was, taking one for the team. Hopefully, my teammate would be duly appreciative.

These things were bad enough when I had Adam at my side. Then I had a captive audience to rain down all of my snark on—usually in the form of muttered comments only he could hear. He at least pretended to find them amusing.

Here I was, in Newport Beach’s most exclusive neighborhood, where I now lived. And I was their neighbor, the future wife and future co-owner of a neighborhood home, of that “tech genius kid,” as I sometimes heard them refer to Adam. Indeed, Adam was, at the very least, a decade younger than any of them. And while some, like him, were self-made, most were from second- and third-generation wealth.

“Mia, so good to see you,” Sonya, my hostess, greeted me at the door. She was one half of a power political couple. She touched her cheek to mine and kissed the air. “How is the sick fiancé? Probably playing it up, like men always do.”

“Sonya, so glad to see you,” I said, handing her the bottle of wine along with some of Chef’s fresh gourmet butter, packaged in a fancy stoneware crock. Sonya remarked on it, saying she couldn’t wait to try some. I was relieved, almost letting out the breath I was holding. Hostess gifts were a source of half a week of stress for me. It was almost by accident—or the good fortune of having fantastic advisors like Adam’s chef or his assistant—that I made any of the right moves.

I moved on to shake the hand of Sonya’s husband, Congressional Representative Alan Thurston, an attractive man at least a decade and a half older than her. “Thanks for the invitation, and Adam is so sorry he has to miss out.”

In truth, Adam was at home playing DE in his pajamas, the fucker. He had cried exactly zero bitter tears that I was going without him. For the sake of his health, he’d refrained from teasing me about having to go alone. But I could tell that he’d been tempted to skirt dangerously close to that edge.