Page 28 of That Reunited Feeling

“Do you sing Four Thousand Medicines songs all the time?”

Tom’s voice snaps me out of my self-pitying trance and makes me jump so much that coffee slops over the edge of the cup and onto my white top right between my boobs.

“Shit.”

“Oh, God, sorry,” Tom says, shoving his hands into the pockets of his jeans and strolling toward me, his forehead pinched with concern. “Did it burn?”

“Nope.” Yes, yes, it did. “All good.” I pull the fabric away from my chest and stand up. “I’ll go change and toss this in the wash before it dries.”

Now there’s a job I could do—professional stain remover. When you don’t have enough cash for clothes for yourself or your child, you become a whiz at getting out all sorts of seemingly indelible stains. Ketchup, grape juice, grass—I’ve saved our clothes from them all.

“Was I singing?” I ask him.

“Well, humming,” he says. “Is it so instinctive for you that you don’t even realize you’re doing it?”

Nicholas, the shithead I just left, said I sang and hummed all the time. It bugged the crap out of him.

“Maybe it’s what my brain makes me do when it knows someone annoying is about to show up.”

His smirk causes an inconvenient flutter under my coffee stain.

“Only here for a sec,” he says. “Just to see how it’s going. Then I will leave you in a room free of annoyance.”

I flick the screen back to the résumés in case he’s about to walk behind me and see the Divine Justice thing. “It’s going okay, but they’re hard to narrow down. Everyone’s so incredibly well qualified.”

“Yeah.” He ambles right up to the desk. The light from the window behind me illuminates the laugh lines around his eyes. But apart from the few minutes when he finally relaxed with me last night, his general demeanor suggests they weren’t borne of any joy. “Assistants are usually more qualified than me. Actually, most people are more qualified than me.”

Tom famously never went to college. Everything I’ve ever read about him mentions how he started the label in the garage of his aunt and uncle’s London home when he was eighteen. It’s his legendary origin story and the name of his company—Garage Records.

“I’m not.” I poke my chest and accidentally press the—now chilly—wet patch against my skin.

“You flunked out of high school too?” he asks.

“Oh, no. I did pretty well. But are you sayingyouflunked?” I haven’t heard that before. Could it be that I have better educational credentials than this billionaire businessman? Huh.

“You don’t really flunk out of British schools. But I failed my A Levels. Well, I got an E in music, which is technically a pass. But getting the lowest grade is pretty meaningless. Especially when it’s music.”

“But you made pretty good use of your time after that. I, however, got pregnant. And boom”—I make an exploding gesture with my hands—“a baby to look after and no partner or parents to help with childcare so I could go to college.”

“I can’t imagine how hard that must have been.” The furrow of his brow suggests he means it. “Dylan seems fun now, though.”

“He is. Generally. But the last few months have been a bit rocky. Getting into trouble for dumb stuff at school. He’s never done that before. I’m not sure if it comes with the territory of being thirteen or if it’s because things at home got nasty and then I moved us out and squished us in with Jude. He wasn’t pleased about any of that.”

“Right. Sorry. I didn’t mean to pry.” Tom turns slightly away, his shoulders hunched, elbows rigidly tucked to his sides, like he’s a tightly bound ball of string.

He pushes his hair behind the ear facing me, immediately drawing my attention to an old scar near the top of it. That’s where the same kid who did our tattoos had, in a previous body art venture, pierced it with a needle and an ice cube. It was a mess. And Maggie was furious. Guess he’s let it grow over, closing up the past.

I shrug. “It’s okay. I’ll save the gory details for another time.” Or, more likely, never. He does not need to know any of that. “At least Jude was close enough to where we’d been living for him to be able to stay at the same school. So, there’s that.”

“Is working for me today keeping you away from him? Because you can do all this some other time.”

How damn thoughtful. “No, it’s fine. Thanks. Another parent has taken a bunch of them to Beaver Creek Park. They’ll be sledding, then playing in the freezing stream.”

Tom’s face breaks into an affectionate smile. Wonder how he feels about kids?

“Okay, well, it’s no problem if you want to wrap up early.” He takes a step backward toward the door. “I’m off to help Jim with some wine-making thing that apparently requires another pair of hands.”

I chuckle, recalling yesterday when I walked past Jim’s wine-making room behind the kitchen and saw a small brown missile fly up, bounce off the ceiling, and boing across the tiled floor a few times. Jim was apparently trying to get to grips with his new corking device. He just laughed to himself, picked up the cork, and cheerfully told it, “You are a tricky little devil.”

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