Page 83 of Not As Advertised

“Aiden? What happened?”

“Abbie,” he tried again, sighing. “I’m sorry. Jack just called me. This is not at all how I should be doing this. But what we have is over. My family needs me, and I can’t afford to lose this job. I was wrong to start something with you, knowing I have bigger responsibilities.”

“Aiden. Wait! Can we…” Panic bled into my voice. That was it? Had Jack told Aiden that he would be fired if he didn’t end things with me?

My meeting had gone very differently. They had offered me their full support if I wanted to seek other opportunities.

“I’m sorry. I have to go. We’ll figure out the work situation when I get back,” he interrupted me before I could say anything more.

He hung up right after he finished speaking. I wanted to sit down on the sidewalk outside of the building and not move again. I had no idea how I was going to manage to get myself back to my apartment when my world had just exploded.

Barely managing to hold myself together, my mind wanted one thing.

To run.

Hours later in my apartment, Indie and Emery, wearing identical expressions of concern, sat on my bed watching me pack. I could just imagine what my haphazard shoving of random clothing into my backpack was doing to Indie’s inner Marie Kondo.

To Indie’s credit, other than a few eye twitches, she didn’t mention it.

Mew sat between them, suspecting something was about to inconvenience his rule over the apartment. He deigned to allow Indie to give him gentle pats on the top of his head. Mew communicated his judgment silently, whereas my best friends looked torn as to whether or not telling me my plan was crazy.

“Are you sure this is what you really want to do?” Indie’s tone was carefully controlled to weed out any hint of worry. “What happened in the last six hours to bring this on?”

I opened my mouth to explain, but Emery jumped in first.

“I mean, you don’t evenlikegoing grocery shopping because it’s toopeopleyout there,” she said as she made air quotations with both hands. “And you’re telling us that since texting at lunch, you’ve decided you’re spending two weeks on a road trip down the coast alone, and you’re leaving tonight?”

“Hey, at least she’s letting us meet up with her for the last week of her trip,” Indie pointed out. “We haven’t gone away together since senior year of high school.”

I understood Emery’s skepticism, really. I was the consummate introvert (I had T-shirts that exclaimed this proudly, only worn at home, of course) and the overthinker. I always chose the path of least resistance to avoid conflict in absolutely every situation. Taking risks was not usually in my playbook.

Until Aiden. I’d taken a big risk with him, and it blew up in my face. What did it matter now if I stayed home and wallowed in my apartment or used my time to try to practice my photography as I’d always wanted to?

I watched their faces run the gamut of confused to panicked to outraged on my behalf as I explained the details of my meeting with Jack Blakley.

“So apparently, some rumor made it up to the top floor, and Jack Blakley heard about it. I guess he called reinforcements in the form of Linda and had her break the news to me. It was hard to tell what the motivation behind the meeting was, but regardless, they needed to cover the company’s ass.” I was able to deliver these details with a clinical tone that sounded like I was talking about someone else’s situation, not my own.

I had a strange numbness inside me right now. There was a wall that was keeping out the most difficult realities I could be facing. My instincts were telling me to not be in Amado when Aiden got back to the city. I wasn’t going to be ready to face him in just a few days.

I needed time to grieve our relationship and rebuild my armor if I was going to continue working at Appeal. I couldn’t do that with Aiden knocking on the door of my apartment, trying to smooth things over for the sake of our jobs.

Watching him turn back into the inscrutable man I’d met on his first day in the office would absolutely crush me.

It was time to put my needs first. Aiden could deal with his desire to clear his conscience while I was away. I no longer had an obligation to make anything better for him. He’d made that bed when he’d broken my heart in a single phone call.

“That’s awful.” Emery grimaced. “I’m sorry you had to go through that by yourself.”

“Yeah, it sucked.” I agreed. “Then Linda basically said I had three choices: I could file a complaint against Aiden, be transferred to another department, or sign an NDA, quit, and take severance if I felt I didn’t want to work there anymore.”

The initial steadiness in my voice didn’t last when I said Aiden’s name.

“It was like one giant shitstorm. I’d just left work, and then Aiden called me. He just broke up with me like… like… it was these past months could be reduced to a single sentence. What we had was special. I was falling in love with him. I thought anyway. And he just ripped it to shreds over the phone.” Tears ran down my cheeks as I spoke. “I wanted to say something, to convince… him to listen to me. Just anything other than ending it so fast.”

Emery gently took my bag from my hands as I stood there sobbing while Indie got up to lead me to sit between them on the bed. They didn’t say anything for who knows how long. They held me until my tears ran out, and my eyes felt gritty and swollen.

When I was ready to speak again, I tried to explain the work part. I wasn’t ready to talk about Aiden at all. Even though I hated the way he broke things off, I couldn’t even consider hurting his career. The guilt would eat me alive.

“I feel a call to my lawyer coming on,” Indie muttered. “What did you choose?”

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