Page 4 of Her Wicker Temptation

He laughs as though I’ve made a joke. I decide there won’t be a second date and that this one can’t end quickly enough.

Stephen is next. He owns a consulting company, has excellent teeth, and begins telling me about his work before we’ve ordered.

“The biggest problem with consultants,” he says while I’m still opening my menu, “is that most of them have never actually run anything.”

Apparently, Stephen has.

By the time our entrées arrive, I’ve also learned about his golf handicap, his son’s law-school applications, and a fence his homeowners association believes is six inches too tall.

Stephen doesn’t need any encouragement to continue. By the time the server offers dessert, he hasn’t asked where I work or learned one thing about me that wasn’t visible when I sat down.

I decline dessert.

Three dates. Three entirely different men, and none of them has made me sorry I’m going home alone.

Over the next several weeks, I keep trying. Dinner, coffee, drinks, one disastrous brunch, and enough polite conversations to make me wonder whether dating apps should come with continuing-education credits. A few men are perfectly nice. One makes me laugh. Another has a job he loves and a grown daughter he clearly adores. I even agree to second dates twice.

Nothing takes. Thirteen men in, the problem no longer feels like bad luck. I haven’t met anyone I want to rearrange my life around.

Several weeks into my dating experiment, I’m halfway through reviewing an employee-relations file when Caroline from payroll appears in my doorway with one hand half-raised as if she started to knock and forgot how. She looks back down the hall twice before speaking.

“Laura. Something’s wrong with Megan.”

I’m already out of my chair. Payroll is only a short distance away, and clinical staff are there before Caroline and I arrive. Several people have been pushed back from Megan’s desk to give them room.

She’s on the floor beside a filing cabinet. Her face is gray, and her eyes won’t focus on anyone. One of those enormous silver hoops is caught at an angle against her neck.

At first, that’s all I can see. The same earring swinging while she griped about potatoes. Her hands moving as she dismissed three paint samples as beige. The woman from the cafeteria and the woman on the floor occupy the same space in my head and refuse to fit together.

Then a nurse asks everyone to move farther back, and Caroline is standing beside me with both hands pressed over her mouth. I guide her away from the clinical team.

“She was fine,” Caroline says. She pauses as though she forgot she was talking, then she speaks again. “She was talking to us five minutes ago. She said her head hurt and then she just…”

She keeps looking past me toward Megan.

“They’re taking care of her,” I say.

The words are inadequate, but they’re all I have. There’s nothing useful I can do for Megan while the clinical team is working, so I find a conference room for the payroll staff and get someone to cover the phones.

News reaches us in fragments. They’re running tests. Her husband, Greg, has been contacted. Someone mentions bleeding in her brain, and later I hear the word aneurysm. Aneurysm. The word is too large and too clinical to belong to the woman who complained about my potatoes.

Then one of the hospital administrators comes into the conference room and asks me to step into the hall. She closes the door behind us.

“She didn’t make it,” she says quietly.

The words don’t make sense at first. “What?”

“I’m sorry, Laura.”

A cart rattles around the corner. The elevator opens and closes farther down the hall. Somewhere, somebody laughs.

Megan’s purse is still under her desk. Her coffee cup is probably beside her computer. And Greg has three cans of paint at home because they still hadn’t decided which one to use. He left for work this morning expecting to come home to a woman who had opinions about every shade of beige, and now there is an unfinished guest room waiting for him.

I know what it is to have an ordinary day become the last day without anyone realizing it.

I put my hand against the wall and leave it there until I can make myself move. Then I go back into the conference room, where everyone is waiting for me to tell them what happens next. We arrange support for the department, coordinate what can be said after Megan’s family has been notified, and stop a well-meaning manager from sending a hospital-wide message before Greg has even had time to absorb what happened.

The sheer normality of it makes me want to close my office door for ten minutes.