“That’s it for stories, Bean. Time for bed.” Kyle tried to use his best fair but firm parent voice. Olivia had always been better at the bedtime routine, but he and Caroline were working out a reasonable balance.
His phone rang somewhere down the hall. He half rose to run and answer it, but Caroline made an ominous sound of protest, and anyway, it was after eight, so he was off the clock to clients.
“I’m thirsty.” Caroline coughed and batted her eyelashes dramatically. Kyle screwed up his mouth and arched an eyebrow in a way that made him look like a comic book villain.
“Thirsty?”
“And I have to pee.” She shimmied under her covers. Down the hall, the phone rang again.
“Go to the bathroom. But no water!” he said as Caroline flung the covers back and scrambled out of bed. “You’ll only need to pee again later.”
“Okay!” She ran down the hall and slammed the bathroom door behind her. Kyle went to his bedroom, where the phone vibrated on the dresser. The screen showed it was Shannon.
“This is Kyle,” he said.
“Hello?” Shannon’s voice was broken and distorted.
“Hello?” Kyle said.
“Hello?” The connection crackled.
“Shannon, are you in the car?”
“Kyle, I’m in the car. Can you hear me?” The line was filled with static, then, “Hello?”
“Shannon,” Kyle said. The door slammed down the hall, followed by the sound of running footsteps toward Caroline’s bedroom. “Shannon, I’m putting my daughter to bed. Can I call you in five minutes?” The line crackled, then there was a beep followed by silence.
By some little girl miracle, Caroline was in bed when Kyle checked on her, already wrapped up in her blankets, and a glance over his shoulder told Kyle that none of her toys had disappeared from the shelf where he put them each night. She had a tendency to smuggle them into bed with her when she thought he wasn’t paying attention, and then he’d hear her giggling a half hour later as she staged elaborate situations where one princess was kidnapped by an ogre or a dragon and the other princess had to mount a rescue attempt.
He went back to the kitchen, where his laptop was set up. In his pocket, the phone rang again.
“Hi, Shannon,” he said.
“Kyle?” The connection was better, but she sounded uncertain.
He frowned. Who else would it be? “Sure is! What’s up?”
There was a pause on the other end. “Sorry about before. I was in the car.”
“Yes, I heard that. But I don’t think you could hear me.” He pulled out a glass from the cupboard and filled it with water.
“No,” she said. “Well, a bit, but I didn’t want to—”
“Did you get the updated itinerary for the Maine trip?” he asked. “Sorry it was a bit late, but I think you’re going to like it.”
He hadn’t been a bit late. He’d been few days late in fact, which was a lifetime when Shannon’s plans changed hourly sometimes. The original deadline had been Saturday evening, but between his second date with Adam, a playdate for Caroline with Ben’s girls on Sunday, and his job interview at the conference center on Monday, he had wound up emailing Shannon’s itinerary very early on Tuesday morning.
“It’s fine, Kyle,” Shannon said. “In fact, I don’t think the trip’s going to happen.”
Kyle clenched his teeth and took a sip of water, which was harder to do at the same time than he had expected, so that he could rein in the disappointment at the idea of planning yet another trip.
“That’s okay,” he said, pleased at how polite he sounded. “We’ll keep it on file in case you change your mind. Did you have somewhere else you wanted me to check out?” He hoped she’d decided to go back to Vegas, so he could resurrect the trip he’d already planned. With Rebecca’s event and the town hall meeting coming, he had a lot on the go, and he had a feeling the conference center interview had gone well. With any luck, there would be regularly remunerated employment in his very near future. If the job came through, he wouldn’t have time to plan a new trip for Shannon.
“No,” Shannon said, and there was still a weird edge in her voice. She usually talked in longer sentences. Kyle rarely had to fill space when Shannon called him. “No, it’s . . .” There was a sigh on the line, then “Ted lost his job.”
Kyle’s mouth dropped open. Ted was Shannon’s husband. It had never been clear to Kyle what he did exactly, other than he worked for an investment company. Shannon had described it once, but Kyle had got the impression she didn’t understand what it was her husband did either, other than it had to do with trading and financial models and more money in a day than Kyle would see in his lifetime.
“I’m so sorry,” he said.
“It’s fine,” she said, but it clearly wasn’t. “But Ted says we’re going to have to scale back a bit. You know, money-wise, until he can get a new job. He’s got good skills, knows a lot of people, it shouldn’t take long.”
“Right. So no girls’ weekends while the money train is parked in the station.”
“Right,” Shannon said. “And Kyle, there’s another thing. To cut back expenses.”
“Sure.” He opened up his laptop and started a new file so he could make some notes. “Just let me know what else you need.” He ran through a mental list of the regular tasks he did for Shannon. There would still be bills to pay, and he’d already registered Shannon’s daughter for summer camp, and that was paid for too. He’d have to look at the cancellation policy, if they decided to pull Madison out. There were a number of charitable donations he usually made for Shannon in the fall. There would probably be fewer of those, but that was still months away. If Ted was working by then, would it be business as usual for Shannon again? Would they make smaller donations, or donate to fewer organizations? He’d have to find his list of charities and send it to her to review.
“Kyle, did you hear what I said?” Shannon asked. She must have spoken while he was taking stock.
“I’m sorry, what?” He heard her sigh, then there was another long pause, then a deep breath. A strange feeling worked its way out from his chest. The feeling said he should be sitting down. His free hand reached out, groping until it found the back of a kitchen chair. Trembling, he pulled it toward him, and collapsed into it.
“Kyle, I’m so sorry. I hope you understand—”
“No.” He cleared his throat. “No, I didn’t hear what you said.”
“I’m so sorry,” Shannon said again, and this time there was a distinct wobble in her voice, almost like she might be crying. “I can’t keep you. I can’t . . . I have to let you go.”
In the silence of the kitchen, the fridge whirred to life.
“Oh.” It was all he could think to say.
“It’s not personal,” she said, “but what you do for me . . . It’s a luxury, you know? To have someone like you.”
Kyle bit his lip. A luxury. Like a fancy car, or an expensive dinner. And equally disposable when the chips were down. “I know,” he said, and he did . . . sort of. But what he really understood was that she probably couldn’t begin to imagine that what she paid him barely kept him afloat in Seattle, and paid the grocery, electricity, and cable bills here, while he tried to put enough together to get a place for him and Caroline that wasn’t his dad’s house. His mind churned like a sewing machine, doing the math, calculating the income he’d be losing.
“You have other clients though, right?” she said.
He did, but they were mostly one-offs, or they’d come to him for specific projects, like book launches and special events. Shannon was his only long-term retainer client.
“Right.”
“I’ll . . . I’ll call you tomorrow. When it’s not so late. I know your contract has conditions if I terminate early.”
He’d forgotten there was a contract. They’d drawn one up when he’d stopped working for her full-time, but he didn’t remember what it said. They renewed it every year, though. He must have read it at some point.
“Of course. I uh . . .” His voice cracked. “I have a bunch of information I should send you. Records and . . . passwords . . . for different . . . things.” He wondered if she understood how much information he managed. How many accounts there were online, and how many documents he had on file.
“That’s fine,” she said. “I’m really sorry, Kyle.”
“It’s okay.” It so wasn’t okay, but what was he supposed to tell her? “Call me in the morning, and we’ll go over everything.” Everything. Five years of everything.
He hung up and stared at nothing. The fridge clicked off again, and the ensuing silence tried to swallow him.
He should be making a plan, but his brain was sluggish and felt stretched. His chest tightened, and there was a panic attack forming: he could feel it, even as his stupid brain wouldn’t let him do the things he needed to do. He wanted to talk to his dad, but his dad wasn’t home. He wanted to talk to Olivia, but she would never be home. It was only him, still alone. Only him and—
With shaking hands, he picked up the phone and dialed Adam’s number. It rang three times.
“Hey there,” Adam said, and Kyle immediately regretted calling him. He slid his thumb towards the End Call button. “Kyle?” Kyle couldn’t say anything. He didn’t want to saddle Adam with this, not until Kyle worked out what it meant, what his next step would be. He should have called his dad, or Ben, or . . . “Hello? I think you pocket dialed me.” Adam laughed, and the sound made Kyle’s throat close over like he was going to strangle himself from the inside. “Kyle, can you hear me? Hello?” His voice grew louder, like they were playing telephone hide-and-seek. “Kyle? It’s me, speaking from your pocket. Hello?”
Kyle leaned forward until he rested the side of his face on the cool surface of the kitchen table, the phone still held to the opposite ear. He felt like he weighed a thousand pounds, like if he stayed in this position, his weight would eventually pull him through the table and down onto the floor. He couldn’t drag Adam down with him.
Adam chuckled again. The sound was fond, and Kyle could almost see the way Adam smiled as he laughed. Kyle closed his eyes, burying himself in the silent dark of the kitchen.
“Okay,” Adam said, “I’m going to go. It was nice talking.”
Kyle’s heart fluttered at the thought of being left alone in his dark house. “I’m here.”
“Oh,” Adam said. “I think you pocket dialed me.”
“No,” Kyle’s tongue still felt thick, but the tightness in his chest was easing. He focused on breathing, and kept his eyes closed. “I finger dialed you.”
“Oh,” Adam laughed again, but the pause at the end of it this time said that Adam thought this had gone from funny haha to funny hmm. “Did you, uh, did you hear what I uh—”
“Yeah.”
“Oh. Okay.” There was another silence, follow by a rustling noise, like a plastic bag, and then a distorted crunching while Adam chewed. Kyle sat with his head on the table and listened.
“So,” Adam said, “did you call to be sociable or was there uh—”
“I lost my job.” The words tasted rancid in Kyle’s mouth.
“What?” Adam’s voice lost all of its joking tone in an instant. “What do you mean?”
“Shannon called and said she has to let me go.”
“When?”
“Now.”
“No, I mean, when is she letting you go?”
“Now.” Kyle felt exhausted.
“Are you okay?”
“Um . . .” Kyle opened one eye. Still in the kitchen. It was dark; he hadn’t bothered to turn a light on when he’d come in, since he’d thought he’d grab his laptop and go work in the living room after he finished his call with Shannon. “Sure?”
“Do you want me to come over?” Adam said. There was a different sound, farther away, like Adam was already standing up and heading for the door. Kyle hadn’t considered that he might come over.
“No,” he said, closing his eye again. “No, keep talking.”
“Can she really do that? Let you go? Don’t you have a contract?”
Kyle pinched his eyes together tighter. Apparently he was the only one surprised that he had a contract.
“Yeah.” He sighed. “Yeah, I haven’t looked at it in a while. It probably has a minimum amount of notice she has to give, but it also says that all my work is as needed. So technically, if she gave me notice, she could also then say she didn’t need any work done between now and whenever she officially let me go.”
“But did she say why?”
This problem-solving Adam was comforting at least. It was nice to have someone else do the thinking for a change.
“Her husband lost his job. Cutbacks. Cost savings.” Kyle felt a sting of annoyance at himself. He hadn’t exactly been the most attentive virtual employee lately. There were all the missed calls when he’d got back to the parking lot after the hike with Adam over the weekend. And the number of times he had ignored a call because it was outside of his official business hours. He’d been flexible with those hours in the past; his sudden change in attitude probably hadn’t helped him keep his job.
“Are you going to be okay?” Adam asked.
Kyle would be, but the question wasn’t only about him. There was his sleeping daughter upstairs. He’d come back here for her. He hadn’t expected to find anything in Red Creek beyond a safe roof over his head for long enough to pull himself back together. Instead, he’d found Adam, and now—
“We’ll make it work,” he said, forcing himself to believe it. “We might have to stay with my dad longer than I planned. But hey, maybe that conference center job will pan out.” He didn’t put much enthusiasm behind his words. The interview had gone well, but it hadn’t left him with any excitement about the position. It would just be a corporate sales job. They’d expect him to wear a suit. A gray one. Preferably a size too big.
Not that he was in any position to be choosy.
“Yeah. Yeah, it might.” Adam’s voice had perked up again. “Maybe it’s for the best. It’s not like you were going to keep the assistant job when you found a full-time position, right?”
“I guess.” He hadn’t made it that far. As much as the virtual job hadn’t always been the most gratifying work in the world, it had been his, one last lifeline to hang on to in the disaster that had been his life. He’d let it slip lately, his attention turning to Adam, and that distraction had cost him.
“I’d tell you to call the conference center tomorrow and follow up, but then I’d sound like my sister,” Adam said, and Kyle forced a smile, although Adam wouldn’t be able to see it. Adam might have diverted Kyle’s attention from work lately, but it wasn’t his fault that Kyle was now officially among the ranks of the jobless and mostly broke. That was all on Kyle, and it was going to be his responsibility to fix the problem.
“To sound like your sister, you’d have to sneak up on me when I’m minding my own business in a public space and blurt out the most random and cryptic phrase that comes to mind.”
“No wonder you two get along.”
“Are you suggesting I blurt out random and cryptic things, Mr. Hathaway?”
There was a crunch, as if Adam had gone back to snacking.
“Not suggesting, per se, but—”
“Pineapples migrate north in the winter!” Kyle yelled it into the silence of the kitchen, trying to pull himself out of the spiral of blame that was taking up residence in his head. There was a choking sound on the phone, followed by coughing. Kyle couldn’t help the smile that spread across his face. Unsettling Mr. Hathaway never got old.
“What was that?” Adam’s voice was weak, and it made Kyle’s chest warm with perverse satisfaction.
“I blurted a random thing!”
“Just because?”
“To prove a point mostly.”
“What point was that?”
“That unlike your ninja sister and her public space ambushes, I only blurt out random things in the privacy of my own home.” There was a pause, and Kyle heard more crunching on Adam’s side of the phone. “What are you eating?”
“Chips.”
“That’s not a very balanced meal.”
“I won’t tell if you won’t.”
“Daddy?”
Kyle turned. Caroline stood in the dark doorway of the kitchen, rubbing at her eyes.
“What are you doing up, Bean?”
“I had a bad dream.” Her lower lip trembled, but her earlier mischief was gone. Her pink stuffed bunny, the one Kyle had bought at the hospital when Caroline was born, was clutched in her hand.
“I have to go,” Kyle said into the phone. “Caroline’s awake.”
“Oh. You sure you’re okay?” Adam asked, and the kindness in his voice made regret twist in Kyle’s throat. “I could come over. I don’t mind.”
“It’s fine. We’ll be fine.” He needed some space tonight, time to think. This was all on him and he needed to figure out what to do next. They were a team, him and Caroline, the most important part of his life. Kyle promised to call Adam again and hung up.
“What did you dream about?” He held his arms out, and Caroline crawled into his lap. “You’re getting so big.” He grunted and held her close, as she burrowed her head under his chin.
She’d done well here, better than he had. It had been the right decision, coming to Red Creek. The choices he’d made had been about giving his daughter stability and time to heal. In that, at least, he’d succeeded.
“I couldn’t find you.” Her voice was small.
“Where?”
“In my dream. I was lost and you wouldn’t come get me.” She sniffled, and Kyle sighed as he pressed his cheek against her hair. He’d moved here for her. She was the priority.
“I’ll always find you, Bean. You know that.”
He hoped Adam would understand.