Page 34 of A Conflict of Interest

And I woke up to another nightmare, because I trudged in a haze through making breakfast and morning coffee and took a shower that mostly involved me standing there staring blankly ahead at the wall under the hot running water, and I was just getting out of the bathroom when I heard a quickthump-thumpat the door before footsteps rushing down the stairs. Package delivery. I didn’t remember ordering anything, but… I would have absolutely forgotten after yesterday.

I popped the door open enough to peer out at a white USPS box with a label taped to it—home delivery. My heart sank as I took it, stepping back inside… no return address, but madeout to my address. Maybe it was the heft of the box and the sound it made, or maybe it was just the situation, the world, everything, that made it obvious what it was, but I sat down with it and opened it anyway, my hands moving dutifully for me as I peeled off tape and pulled out a beautifully-wrapped gift box, red wrapping paper with cute little reindeer designs on it and a big green bow on top. Because… of course she knew how to cater it perfectly to my tastes. Pulled the bow off gently and peeled tape to open the wrapping paper without tearing it, wanting to treasure it impossibly, and I opened a little white box inside to find that stupid red-and-blue nutcracker, nestled in tissue paper with a note.

Stole him for you,and a little heart at the end. My stomach twisted in tight knots.Thanks for letting me work on this project with you, Kelce. You’re a lot sharper and have better instincts than you think.And then below it,Sincerely, Nic.

I wanted to be furious and scream and throw the thing in the trash, but… the shipping label was dated from before yesterday. It had just been bad timing… not her trying towin me backwith gifts again. I slumped back in the couch, curling up into myself, welling up a little looking at the nutcracker.

“You’re a menace,” I said, my voice cracking. “Apparently you causedtwoscenes at that café. Do you realize that?”

He didn’t say anything. That was good. He passed the test. No evil haunted nutcrackers here.

I sighed. He really was a cute little guy. Even more than in the pictures… he had a lot of charisma. A real winning smile. A funny little hat.

Dammit.Why did she go buy the nutcracker off them and send him to me? Did she think I was going to be so charmed with it all that once I found out she was Veronica then I’d just be like,oh, that’s fineand I’d let her have sex with me?

No… because she said she was going to tell me after the project was done because she knew I’d hate her for it. And then that just left me with, well… maybe she just did this because she wanted me to have something I liked.

When my phone pinged with a Slack message, I forced myself to look, hoping maybe it was someone calling me back into the office with a big serious task to take on and I could go forget about Veronica Preston and her perfect brown eyes and the way they’d gleam when she laughed while it was just the two of us, but no such luck—Lucy Masters, with a message,Morning, Kelcey, just checking in on if you’re doing all right. Anna and I are here for you. You can talk about anything.

Could I? Could I really? Because I didn’t think I could talk about this. And yet… maybe I did think that, because I stared at the phone, and back at the nutcracker, and back at the phone, for a while, before I hit the call button on the chat, and Lucy picked up like she was expecting me to.

“Hey,” she said. “You hanging in there okay?”

She was at the office already. It wasn’t even eight yet. I wouldn’t be surprised if she and Anna had slept there together. I meant, I already knew they’d slept together there before, but… that was something different. “Why does it keep coming back to her?” I said, my voice shaky, and she sighed.

“Dunno… she’s a difficult one, that’s why.”

I paused. “Wait. Do you already know?”

“She told me and Anna about it last night.”

I swallowed, a sick feeling in my throat. “What—she did? Why?” I said, my voice wobbly, sitting up taller, antsy in every part of my body.

“Ah…” She cleared her throat. “Do you really want to know why?”

“Ugh. No. But I need to. Please tell me.”

She was quiet for a second before she said, “Well… she came around and went to pluck Anna’s eyes out for having the audacity to fire you.”

I froze, clutching the phone.

“That’s hyperbole, by the way,” she said. “Everybody’s eyes remained in.”

“She’s trying to… what, get me the position back? In hopes it makes me want to be with her again?”

“No… in fact, she told us that we’re strictly, expressly forbidden from telling you she did that. So I’m in trouble now that I did,” she said, and I could hear Anna’s laughter softly down the line. My chest ached, thinking about the two of them together in their office. “If I disappear, you know what’s happened.”

“But why…” My voice came out strangled, and Lucy made a soft sound down the line.

“Well… she does seem to care. A lot, actually. Surprising to me as much as anyone.”

I swallowed, hard, looking back at the nutcracker. A little, quiet gesture done for me without fanfare, just to make me feel good. After she’d been on a date desperately trying to move on from her ex… from me. But it hadn’t worked.

Despite her false identity, she hadn’t strictly lied about anything, not really. So all the parts about how she’d screwed up so badly with her ex, how she missed her so badly and didn’t know how to move on… how she didn’t know how to recapture that light she had when she was with her. Was that all true, too?

She’d always been talking about how intelligent and capable and talented I was, telling me not to give credit to those people who said otherwise. And not just empty words, but talking in explicit detail to try to convince me that I reallywasbetter than all those things people had said.

She didn’t… know how to own her feelings around people. And she’d said she felt safer doing it while she was anonymous.

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