Page 99 of Mr. Wrong Number

“Please. God.” I didn’t want to beg, but I felt desperate when I said, “Just let me explain.”

“I don’t even care, Colin. Goodbye.”

She slammed the door behind her when she left, and I felt like she took all the oxygen in the apartment with her.

Olivia

“Sometimes vendors come in on Fridays. Last week, they said it would be Chick-fil-A.”

“Yay, right?” I smiled at Bethanne, the other girl going through new-hire orientation with me, and tried not to let our lunch break get at my emotions. After sobbing through the shower that morning, I’d steeled myself. That asshole wasn’t going to ruin my first day, so I forced him out of my mind and focused on the new job.

Of course, it wasn’t helping that he’d been blowing up my phone all morning until I finally had to turn it off. His initial text had confused me at first because it came from Wrong Number, but then I remembered that was Colin’s actual number.

Prick.

“Yeah, I swear I could eat it for every meal.” She pushed her long blond hair back and said, “So do you have any kids? Husband? Boyfriend?”

Before I could even flounder for a response, she said, “I got engaged a week ago today.”

She shoved her huge square diamond at me. “Look at this thing.”

“Wow,” I said, forcing my lips up into a smile. “You marrying Jeff Bezos?”

She giggled. “He did good, right? But I don’t even care about the ring. I just want to spend every day forever with him.”

“Aww.” I swallowed—or tried to—but my throat felt like it had a rock lodged inside of it.

“It’s so cliché to say I’m marrying my best friend, but God, I just adore him.”

“Nice.”

“Like, I want to hang out with him twenty-four seven, all the time.”

“Enough, okay?”

“What?”

Shit, I hadn’t meant to say that out loud. The words had clawed their way out of me, and I hadn’t been able to stop them on time. I pulled on what felt like a smile and said, “Kidding.”

“Oh.”

I nodded and thought I was smiling.

She said, “Ohmigod, what’s wrong?”

I shook my head. I tried to tell her it was nothing,but it sounded like a moan or a cow braying.

“Oh, sweetie, what is it?”

I couldn’t see. Holy shit, tears had made the world—and the break room ofFeminine Rage—float away from my line of sight.

“Will you excuse me?” I got up and tried to escape to the bathroom, but I tripped over a chair at the next table that I couldn’t see and tumbled to my knees as the chair crashed to the ground loudly beside me.

“Shit,” I muttered, scrambling to my feet as fast as I could before I died of mortification.

But I got up too fast and couldn’t see the tray-carrying man to my right through my blurred vision, so I sent his tray sailing into the air when I popped up and headbutted it with a loudbang, causing macaroni to rain down upon the man and me.

I gave up hope for salvaging my dignity and literally rantoward the restroom, though the pools of tears that’d taken up residence in my eye sockets were so unrelenting that I had no idea if I’d entered the men’s or the women’s room.

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