Page 56 of Take Me Home

“If I don’t take the job at my current firm, I’ll have to find someone to take me on for the postgrad hours toward my license. Sustainable architecture is a growing field. There are more job opportunities, better security. It makes better sense long term.”

“You can’t worry about that,” she said immediately. “You have to do what you love. Don’t settle before you even start. Besides, isn’t restoration architecture still pretty green? So it’s not like you’re abandoning your principles and contributing to overconsumption.”

“True.” If he didn’t have to worry about the future—that the twins could afford college, that he could bail out June when toomany auditions didn’t pan out, ease the burden on Maggie when Nick was on assignment, make sure his mother didn’t have to work until she died—he would have already decided on it.

Hazel didn’t know all these considerations. Maybe that was another reason he still hadn’t told her about his father’s MS and his role as his family’s security net, because he wanted her to say exactly what she’d said. She spoke with such conviction that it made doubting her—in turn, doubting himself—nearly impossible.

“Like you love working for Dr. Sheffield?” he challenged. “What about Dr. Tate and her prison study?”

She shrugged.

He laughed. “Why are you shrugging? That’s what youwantto do. You gave an entire TED Talk on the unjust collateral damage of incarceration in my kitchen yesterday.”

She pulled a curl over her shoulder and mindlessly twirled it. “You should have rescued me from all their questions.”

“You didn’t need rescuing.”

She shook her head, but she couldn’t suppress a tiny, pleased smile. “I wrote a request to switch labs, but I don’t know if I’ll submit it.”

“Why the hell not?”

“For one thing, Dr. Sheffield is going to be pissed. I still have to take classes with him, see him around the department. Plus, like I already told you, I can barely keep up with my assistantship as it is. I’ve always been able to handle everything academic with no problem, but this semester has been a shit show. I’m not sure that I’m—”

“What, cut out for it? That’s ridiculous.”

She laughed, surprised. “It’s not ridiculous. I’ve slipped up. I transcribed twelve hours of the wrong audio files one week because I misread an email. Twelve hours. Ikisseda student.”

He waved these off. “You’re human. Those aren’t major mistakes. Doesn’t everyone in grad school go through crippling self-doubt at first?”

“I don’t know,” she said sarcastically, but not meanly. “Do they?”

“Pretty sure it’s a widespread phenomenon. Imposter syndrome. You’re not an imposter.”

She made a skeptical sound in her throat.

He waited for her to meet his eyes again before he threw her comment back at her. “You have to do what you love, right? Don’t settle before you even start? Even if it means upsetting some old guy you don’t want to work with anyway.”

“Fine, I guess it’s not as simple as I made it sound.”

But maybe all of this—choosing a career, going for what he really wanted—wasthat simple. That new possibility swelled within him, until they were outside in the parking lot, loading their bags into her car. When Hazel closed the trunk and turned for the driver’s seat, he stepped into her path.

She looked at him expectantly, hair blowing across her face. He tucked it back behind her ear, a gesture that came so naturally he didn’t even register the intimacy of it until he saw the change in her face, the slight furrow of her eyebrows, the parting of her lips.

“Campbell?”

Ash turned reluctantly to find Travis and Derek Cline, old friends he’d have been happy to see any other time than right now. He went through the motions of introductions, though they all vaguely remembered each other. Every second of it pulled him further from what he’d wanted to say, that he knew what he wanted for his prize—to see her every day, here and back at school after their trip, and not just because he happened to work at her favorite café.

Travis and Derek were headed to the bar across the street and invited them to come along.

“If you want to go, we can,” Hazel offered.

“You don’t need to get back?”

Travis and Derek stood by in awkward silence, shoulders hunched against the cold.

“Please,” she said, “my entire purpose in life right now is avoiding that place. I don’t want to keep you from whatever you would normally do. If I weren’t here, would you go with them?”

“I can’t promise you won’t see someone you know,” he said, grasping at straws. He didn’t want to share her.

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