Page 30 of The Wrong Boss

Hailey made a strangled noise. “Wait. What? How?”

“I haven’t been fired,” I hurried to answer, keeping my voice low. “But, Hailey. Ohmy God.”

“What? What’s going on? Are you okay?”

“It’shim.”

There was a short pause. “Who’s him? What him are we talking about? And which him is he?”

“The guy from your wedding,” I hissed back. “Cole.”

“He works at your new company?” she screeched, and I heard the scrape of her chair’s casters against the floor of her home office. “Hang on. Start over.”

I leaned against the sink and massaged my temple, closing my eyes against the reality I had to put into words: “He’s my boss. The big boss. The one who runs the company.”

Hailey inhaled, long and slow. “Oh. Oh, wow.” The phone ruffled, and I imagined her pushing herself up to her feet to pace while she talked. She’d never been someone who was able to sit still. “Well, it’s not a total disaster. Maybe he didn’t recognize you.”

“He did,” I said, misery soaking into every syllable. “We made eye contact, and heknew, Hailey.”

“Okay,” she said, still in that no-nonsense voice. “That’s fine. That’s okay. It’s just a job. And so you had a one-night stand? So what? It doesn’t mean you can’t have a working relationship, right?”

“We have a child together,” I hissed, glancing at the door, imagining all my new coworkers pressing their ears to it to learn all the juicy gossip.

Hailey grunted. “Well, yes. That’s true. How did you react when you saw him?”

“I fainted.”

“Youwhat?”

“I fainted.”

“You—”

“Lost consciousness and collapsed, yes. Woke up with him cradling my head on his office sofa. Then he fed me trail mix and tried to get my direct boss to call 9-1-1.”

In the silence that followed my words, I could hear Hailey’s breaths, and I could tell she was trying not to laugh.

“This isn’t funny.”

“It’s a tiny bit funny.”

“It’snot,” I insisted. “This is a really, really big problem. It’s adisaster, Hailey.”

“Right,” she said, but the smile was evident in her voice. Unable to resist, my own lips curled in response. Hailey recovered first, and she asked the question that had been plaguing me since Cole had turned around and pierced me with his gaze. “How are you going to tell him about Evie?”

NotifI would tell him.How.

Because I didn’t have a choice. My daughter deserved a father, and Cole deserved to know he had a daughter.

But he had money, power, lawyers. What did I have? I couldn’t even give my daughter her own bedroom. We’d slept in the same queen bed since she’d outgrown her crib.

“I have no idea how I’ll tell him,” I told my cousin. “It’s not like I’ll be interacting with him all the time. We work on different floors, and he runs the whole company. I’m at the bottom of the executive assistant totem pole. The fact that I met him at all was only because my manager wanted to give me credit for fixing a problem this morning. She did it in thehopes that he wouldn’t immediately fire me if I messed up, which is his usual way of doing business, apparently.”

“So he’s a great, considerate boss that everyone loves.”

I groaned at her sarcasm. “I don’t know what to do.”

“Just—don’t rush into anything. You’ve got time. Yeah?”

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