Page 32 of Suddenly Single

“Uh, no. Georgia already made me some.”

Mom got to her feet. “Georgia? So you didn’t spend the night with Asher?”

“No, we’re taking things slowly. There’s no way we can go back to the relationship we had without a little work. So, we’re doing couples counseling, and, oh, let me do that now.” I picked up the desk phone and punched in Therapista’s number. Mom waved her fingers at me and left.

After setting up the appointment with her, I decided to tackle the other thing Asher wanted. Wooing.

I went to a florist’s website and ordered six dozen roses to be delivered to Asher’s office. Now what the hell would I put on the card? I’d barely scraped by in English class, so fancy poetry was out of the question.

Roses are red

Violets are blue

I suck at poetry Asher

But I still love you

“Well, that will have to do.” I hit send on the order. “Hardly Shakespeare, but it gets the message across.”

Afterward, I set up an appointment at Saks Fifth Avenue so they could fit us for our suits. Then I set a reminder to make an appointment with the wedding planner. Lori Stallings was the absolute best, and had planned most of our friends’ weddings. Somehow, I had to make Mom and Asher’s grandmother feel like they were contributing to the wedding plans. I was sure that Lori could figure something for them to do. Oh, and I couldn’t forget Florida. It might be unorthodox to have the family maid in the wedding, but we were hardly a conventional family.

The phone rang, and after four rings, I remembered Mom was out getting breakfast.

“Camden Yates Interiors.” I answered.

“Carter, this is Dr. Johnson’s office. She wants to know if your appointment with her can be moved to a later time. It’s for Monday afternoon at three, but we’re hoping to make yours and Asher’s appointment the last of the day, so she can spend more time with the two of you. Would 5:30 work?”

“Fine. Actually, that works better for us.” I said and disconnected the call. Then a disturbing thought flew through my head.

“What if she discovers we’re incompatible? Or, she messes with…” My gut clenched. Everything was still so raw. I knew Asher didn’t want to see her. He lived his entire life in his head and rarely discussed his inner self with anyone but me or his family. Could he open up to anyone else?

Chapter 19

Asher

“Now that the pandemic is over, many of our clients wish to continue virtual meetings instead of in-office ones. In my opinion, this is the future. What do you think, Asher?” Mom asked. We were in our weekly meeting with the partners, and this week we held it in my office. Noticeably absent was Cort, but since he was departing soon, it wasn’t a big deal.

“I think it’s an excellent trend, for many reasons.”

Harry Minor, one of the founding partners, and our cousin, frowned. “Why is that good? As far as I’m concerned, we need to have private, one-on-one sessions with our clients in order to guarantee confidentiality. That’s harder to do with virtual meetings.”

Mom told me before the meeting that the old man was pissed off. Many of our staff now worked from home, and he was old school, wanting everyone in the office.

“There are many reasons to continue with virtual meetings. First, our clients genuinely like them. Customer satisfaction is more important than anything. Second, it will save us money in the long run.” I opened my laptop and opened a file I’d created specifically for this meeting. Little bells rang from everyone’s laptops as I shared it. All except for old cousin Harry, who hated computers.

“How on earth will virtual meetings save money?” Harry took a cigar from his pocket and put it in his mouth, unlit. Smoking wasn’t allowed anymore, but he was from the old days, when they had ashtrays in department stores.

“Everyone, look at the file I just sent you.” I asked. A moment later, I continued. “As everyone knows, we rent our office space from Morton G. Thalhimers. It’s expensive, but we own a smaller office space in the Manchester neighborhood. That space is currently being rented from us by a medical billing service, and the lease is expiring in ten months. If we move into that space once their lease is up, we will save approximately 110k per month on rent.”

“How can we fit our entire staff into that smaller space?” Harry asked.

“By allowing employees to work remotely, we don’t need as much space.” Mom rolled her eyes. She had little patience for the old man. “We already own that building, so let’s use it.”

I snuck a glance at my phone. Carter had been messaging me all day, each message telling me he loved me. Every single one of them brought tears to my eyes. When I told him I wanted to be wooed, he’d taken it seriously.

“But how can we monitor our associates if they aren’t in the office?” Harry shook his head. “They’ll spend all their time doing anything but working.”

“Harry, in the file I shared, you can see that productivity increased during the pandemic, despite associates working from home.”

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