Page 29 of Charmed by the Obsessive Boss

"I'll have a revised proposal at six. No forced layoffs. A wholesale contract, a lease on the west wing, a voluntary retirement package, and a loom-master position for the one woman in this building who can keep the Drapers alive. I'll walk you through every number and I'll walk the board through it, and if they don't like it they can fire me." I breathe in. "I'd rather they didn't, but I'll understand."

"Roman. This is not you."

"No," I say. "It's a better one."

"You've never lost a company, and you've lost exactly one bet to me, and that was a clerical error—" She stops. She's a very quick woman. "She's not coming around, is she?"

"She took it apart in an evening and drew a better one. It's her plan, Margaret. It's hers. I'm only the one who can read a spreadsheet." I look at the dark floor. "Tell Hallett to stay awake."

"You've lost your mind."

"Probably."

"I'll tell the board you're ill."

"Tell them I'm presenting."

She's quiet for so long I think the call's dropped. Then she says, in an entirely different voice, the one she used at my first review when I was twenty-four and had told a client the truth, "I'll hold your seat, Roman. Don't make me regret it."

I hang up. I open the laptop on the long table, in the place where I first sat on Friday morning in a good coat, and I pull up the file. The cursor blinks at the top of a blank slide. For a moment I just sit there with my hands flat on the keys.

Then I take the order form out of my jacket pocket, the old, soft, folded purchase order with a floor plan drawn on the back in blue ballpoint, and I smooth it flat beside the keyboard. Her handwriting is firm and slanting. East windows, it says in the margin. Long table here. A small arrow, a doorway, a tiny X marking the spot where somebody might someday stand.

I type her name at the top of the first slide. Operations Plan: R. Brewer.

My phone lies beside the laptop with her number in it, burning. I turn it face down.

Chapter 7 — Rosemary

He goes.

That's the thing I can't stop turning over, standing in my own kitchen with a dish towel wrung to a rope in my fists. I told him to go and he went, and I hadn't known until the front door clicked shut how badly I'd been waiting for him not to.

I stand there until the sound of his shoes on the porch steps is gone. The skillet ticks. A pancake smokes gently in the pan, burned black on one side, round as a coin, and I turn the burner off again though it's already off because I need to do something with my hand. The table is set for two.

There's a mug of tea at my place, long gone lukewarm, and beside it the little blue dish with the honey in it and the wooden dipper laid across the top, exactly where I'd put it every morning of my life if there were anyone here to do it for.

I sit down and take the dipper. I let one slow spoonful go into the tea, and I stir it, and that's what breaks me, a spoon of honey, because he got it right.

Mae told him I like to do it myself, Mae told him it's the only part of the morning that's mine, and a man who wanted nothing from me but a number would not have bothered with a dish.

I cry for about four minutes. Then I wash my face at the sink, which doesn't drip, and I get to work.

By ten-thirty the skillet is clean and the kitchen smells like lemon soap instead of smoke.

By eleven the sheets are in the washer and I've stripped the bed with the grim efficiency of a woman performing an exorcism, on my way down with the laundry I find a button wedged in the corner of the fourth stair, small and white and pearled, one of the two he lost.

I stand there holding it. I put it in my cardigan pocket and tell myself it's so I don't lose it in the wash.

My phone is on the counter. At 10:20 I check it. At 11:05 I check it. At 11:40 I take it into the pantry and put it in the bread box, shut the lid, and stand there with my hand on the cold metal and my heart racing.

He hasn't texted.

I keep waiting for it. Danny would've texted forty times by now, Rosey, come on, you're being dramatic, I can explain, the whole sweet barrage, so much sweetness it took three years to realize none of it was an apology.

Roman Caldwell, who has talked his way into and out of a hundred rooms, who couldn't pass a sentence without a flourish, has said nothing at all. I told him to go and he went and he's left me alone with it, and I don't know what to do with a man who does what I ask.

My mother's Buick pulls up at noon.