Page 10 of Claiming the Grump

Brynn wasn’t listening. Neither was Tatum, apparently, nor Kayleigh. Sloane said nothing, which was its own kind of answer. Rachel stood there for one moment, the length of time it took her to understand that this was the shape of this group, that blame found her by default, and then she said, very calmly, “I’ll catch up with you,” and walked away.

The bathroom at the far end of the festival grounds had a single paper towel dispenser and no hot water, but it had a mirror and privacy and that was enough. Rachel worked at her sleeve until the worst of it was gone. The jacket was probably salvageable. It was a good jacket.

She checked her phone. Almost two hours until dinner with Keith. She was looking forward to it. It would be the highlight of her day. Not only because the bar was that low, but because of Keith himself.

Her phone rang. Ana.

She picked up.

“Tell me you’re somewhere I can fall apart,” Ana said.

Rachel left the restroom and marched in the direction of a quiet side street. “I will be in a minute. You can start right away. What happened?”

What happened was that Ana had been fired. Three months into her first management position, the job she had worked toward for six years, the one she’d called Rachel about at eleven-thirty on a Tuesday night when she got the offer, speaking so fast Rachel had barely understood her—gone. The official reason was restructuring. The actual reason, as far as Rachel could gather from the careful way Ana wasn’t quite saying it, was that she’d pushed back on an order she shouldn’t have and someone above her had decided not to forgive it.

“Okay,” Rachel said. “Okay. Walk me through exactly what happened.”

Ana walked her through it.

Rachel asked questions. She pulled at threads until she had the full shape of it—what had been said, what had been documented, what Ana had signed, what she hadn’t. She had done this before, for women at the shelter, this particular kind of listening that was less about comfort and more about facts: here is what you have, here is what you don’t, here is where the ground is actually solid.

“You should talk to a lawyer,” she said. “Maybe more will come of it than you think. But even if it doesn’t go anywhere, this needs to be on record.”

“I don’t want to make it a thing.”

“It already is a thing. You just get to decide whether your version of it exists anywhere.”

Ana was quiet for a moment. “I keep thinking about what I said in that meeting.”

“What did you say?”

“The true thing. The impolitic thing.”

“Were you wrong?”

“No.”

“Then there’s your answer.”

She heard Ana breathe. A long, slow exhale. “How are you always this certain?”

“I’m not,” Rachel said. “I’m just certain about you.”

They talked for a long time after that—past the shape of the problem and into the specifics of what came next, which companies were hiring, which contacts to reach out to first, which version of this story to tell and how to tell it cleanly. By the time they said goodbye, Rachel had moved to a bench near the edge of the festival, and the light had changed, and she was cold in a different way than before, a tiredness behind her eyes that had nothing to do with the headache.

She checked the time.

Oh.

She was on her feet before she’d finished the thought, already pulling up the restaurant address, already doing the math on how fast she could walk. She’d be just in time.

She walked fast, heels and all.

***

The restaurant was warm and smelled like woodsmoke. String lights hung over the bar, and a chalkboard menu covered most of the far wall in tall looping letters. Rachel stood in the entrance and scanned the room once, then twice, checked the bar, checked the far corner where she would have put herself if she were him.

He wasn’t there.