30

KYLE

Imore than half expected to see Clarissa when I stepped into the office. Instead, I saw Jenna looking rather frazzled, speaking with some woman I didn’t know.

“What are you doing here? she said as she looked up and saw me.

“This is my office,” I said.

“James—”

“I’m going there now.” I cut her off as I breezed past her into the back of the office. I stopped when I got to the place where James’s office should’ve been. Instead, I was face-to-face with a staircase headed up to the second floor.

“James’s office has moved,” Jenna said as she came behind me.

“I see that,” I snapped out. I started to climb the stairs when she stopped me.

“Where are you going?”

I turned around. “To see James,” I told her. “I’m getting tired of this little game. I’m clearly here to find out what has been goingon in my absence, and I will be relying on James to provide me that information, thank you,” I said, dismissing her.

“Nobody is upstairs,” she said.

“What do you mean?” I had been under the impression from Alayna before she quit that the creatives, the architects, and drafts team had all moved their offices upstairs.

“Nobody’s here,” she repeated.

“You’re here. Are you gonna tell me what’s going on?”

“If you give me a chance. I’m in the middle of something, and then I can catch you up with anything that I know. Why don’t you take a look at your new office space, and I’ll be in as soon as I can?”

“I think this is something you need to fill me in on right now,” I said.

Jenna let out an exasperated sigh and crossed her arms. “I get that you’re used to snapping your fingers and having somebody jump to your needs, but I’m not your personal assistant right now. I’m in the middle of training somebody, and I need to at least show her how to answer the phone before I can walk away and have a chat with you.”

I wasn’t a fan of her tone. “Do you talk to James like this?” I asked.

“When he is being unreasonable, and right now, you are being unreasonable. If I had known to expect you, maybe I would have been a little more available. I’m only asking for maybe ten minutes.”

“Fine, is my office at least in the same place?”

She actually rolled her eyes. “No, your office space is now in the area where Philip and Michelle had their working spaces. We didn’t change anything from the last set of blueprints.”

She returned to whatever it was she said she was doing. I guess she was training a receptionist. Which made sense considering Clarissa spent her afternoons being the department intern. If I recalled correctly, we had had some issues with keeping a temp in the afternoon receptionist position.

My new office had more square footage than I had ever worked with before. I remembered when we were designing it, feeling that sense of achievement in my career where I would finally have all the space I needed to not only work but display models and hold meetings in one place. The furniture looked sad and minimal as it was overwhelmed by the magnitude of the size of the office. I was going to have to talk to somebody about having some interior design work done as I dropped my briefcase on my desk. Who the hell would that be since Alayna quit?

I had just unpacked my laptop computer when Jenna walked in.

“I’m really surprised to see you here. I thought you were going to be in Hong Kong for a while,” she said.

“Well, when Alayna notified me that Nick was leaving and that she quit, I figured maybe I needed to come back and do some damage control.”

Jenna stood in the door to my office with her arms folded. She shook her head. “You might be a little too late for that. Alayna was very definite when she quit. She left me with a stack of files and contacts to go through, but I’ve barely had time to catch up.”

“Why isn’t there anybody here?” I asked.

“Technically, the office is closed for the week. Everybody has taken a few days of vacation. We weren’t able to shut down the week between Christmas and the new year like James used to do because of the buyout and other business items that needed to be wrapped up before the end of the calendar year. We were all hands on deck putting in a lot of hours the week after Christmas, so he went ahead and closed for this week.”