Page 77 of The Austen Escape
I was getting fired. I set down my glass and pushed out of the chair. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
Isabel was still at dinner or in the ballroom. I looked around our room at the scattered dresses and ribbons, at the silks and wools. This wasn’t my world. I grabbed my phone and my computer and I fled.
I headed back to the narrow stairs and the long hallway of cupboards. That first night, while fixing Clara’s flashlight, I’d noticed a small room. It had a table, stools, and rows upon rows of jars lining the walls. I assumed it had been the canning room at some point. Tonight it was my hiding place.
I perched on the stool and opened my computer. My hands felt too heavy to move, so I just rested them there. I thought it would hurt more—losing a job after five years, losing a man after five minutes.
It’s just a job.My brothers had thrown out that line countless times over the years—to me, to my dad, to each other.It’s just a job.
And not even one I’d picked... Craig had picked me. Hounded me to join his start-up. He was the one who started the conversation in that elevator and practically grabbed the device I’d created for my professor from my hands in his eagerness. And working in that garage was stifling... There were only ten of us that whole year, working eighty-hour weeks and living on Craig’s wife’s casseroles and Tamarind Jarritos. And the new offices? Always cold and gray. All those divider walls were gray.
It took me twenty minutes and an equal number of data drops to send every remaining scrap on my work to Benson—stuff I’d left off the shared server. Another 13 percent of my hard drive was now free. Golightly and everything else I’d been working on was his.
Why did you never share your Golightly work with Benson or Rodriguez?
Karen had harped on me daily about “collaborative creativity”and “dialoguing across sectors” and “an atmosphere of free data exchange and ideation.”
It wasn’t that I didn’t agree with any of those concepts, once I took out the buzzwords, or that I thought Benson or Rodriguez would steal, ruin, or diminish my ideas. WATT wasn’t like that. I wasn’t like that. But this one—that’s what I couldn’t explain to Nathan, but Craig, on some level, had understood—it was asking for judgment on a piece of my soul. I never should have started designing Golightly in the first place. That was my mistake.
But just as Isabel had said today, I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun. I was originally testing my emotions, remembering that movie and even my mom, with some ocular advances the physicists discovered. Then Craig found out, saw the marketability, and pushed me forward. Something tentative, small and private, went above and beyond me before I could balk and call an end to it all. I let it roll me in hopes I’d catch up. I never did.
I scrolled through my e-mails in search of one I hadn’t truly considered but also never deleted. MedCore had reached out ten times over the past two years. Maybe it was time to reach back.
I sent a query—just three lines. It hardly took any time at all.
Then I tapped my phone.
“I didn’t expect to hear from you.” The delight in my dad’s voice almost made me smile. It was soft and croaky. He cleared his throat. “I’m taking a coffee break. It’s a beautiful day here, by the way, down to seventy-eight degrees... I had a good talk with Isabel today.”
“I told her to take over the updates. She said she’d call Dr. Milton too.”
“She was going to do that right after we talked. I expect I’ll hear from her again. She sounds good, strong. You did well, Mary.”
“Thanks, Dad. How’s the Historical Society building?”
He sighed, either at the change of subject or his surroundings. He was probably stuck in the basement or perched on a ladder in the attic, because electrical wires were never housed in the pretty parts of a building.
“Wait until you see it. All the old woodwork is restored and the wiring is original—1928 knob-and-tube. I saved you a couple of the porcelain knobs. They’ve got the Benjamin Company stamp right on them.”
“That’s great. We can build something with them together.”
“I bet you didn’t call to discuss knob-and-tube.”
“Not that I’m not interested, but, no, I didn’t. I called to say I’m thinking of a change.”
“A change.” It wasn’t a question. It was a statement of disbelief. “And what are you planning to change?”
“Hey. I change stuff.”
“When? What?” Now he was chuckling.
I blew out a breath. This was not going as anticipated... So I’d had the same hairstyle since I was seven. I lived in the same apartment I found upon graduation from college, even though I could afford something far better, with a view instead of sitting on a highway. I worked off the same grocery list each week.
“I didn’t know I was so pathetic.”
“Hey, Peanut. I didn’t say that. What’s going on here? It’s not that you don’t change things, you simply go with prevailing winds.”
Prevailing winds?
