Page 1 of The Austen Escape
Chapter 1
How can I help?”
The world stilled. It wasn’t the first time I wondered how one voice, one presence, could quicken the air and simultaneously stop all motion.
Nathan.
I offered a stiff and awkward smile as he propped himself against my desk. His knees bent and touched mine as he handed me a Starbucks cup.
“Thank you.” I sipped and rolled my chair back a few inches to break contact. A clear head requires distance. “You can’t. An engineer is only as good as what she designs and... my project is a failure.”
The technology and math worked. The science worked. The breakdown was in the design. In the subjective, not the objective—it was in me.
Nathan nodded—a long, slow motion. I knew that look. He was trying to think up a plan, and if this had been another time or place, or I’d been another girl, I’d have hugged him for the effort. But I was ready to pay the price.
“It has potential,” he said, “but Karen has other goals for the company right now. Even so, I’ll talk to her.”
I shook my head to clear it of his optimism and my lingering illusions. “There’s no talking to Karen. There’s no working with her either.”
“That won’t do, Mary.” Nathan stared at me. “You’ve got to try.”
“Why don’t you plead for it yourself?” Moira said.
We’d spent the last half hour leaning against her cubicle’s outer wall and staring across twenty other cubicles to the closed conference room door. I wondered that the sheer force of our concentration didn’t burst it open.
“Karen will do what she wants.”
“So you expect Nathan to do all the heavy lifting?”
“That’s insulting and vaguely sexist. I can take care of myself.” My look dared her to laugh.
She kindly banked her smile. “Good to know, as I was thinking more of insanity than anything else. What’s that definition again?”
“Very funny,” I said, but she didn’t smile. “Fine. Doing the same thing over and over but expecting a different result.”
“And so we wait.” She, too, kept her eyes on the door.
“Nathan’s suggestions weren’t going to work. First, he wanted me to ask Benson and Rodriguez for help, as if I couldn’t solve the problems myself. Karen would’ve jumped all over that. She’s itching for a reason to fire me. Besides, she never would have approved their hours. And then Nathan wanted—”
“Stop.” Moira held a hand to my face. “It wasn’t so much aboutsolving a problem as it was letting them in. We’re a team. At least that’s what that poster over there says.” She pointed across the floor to where Lucas, our head programmer with an affinity for inspirational quotes, had hung
TEAMWORKMAKES THEDREAMWORK
“You help them all the time. What were you doing here last weekend?”
“Rodriguez needed a hand. It was no big deal.” I waved away her comparison.
“For two full days... And he’d do the same for you in a heartbeat. You know I’m right.”
The door opened.
My heart skipped a beat as Nathan emerged. It always did when he appeared. But this time he was coming from a meeting that determined the fate of my project and possibly my job.
He looked around and paused when his gaze crashed into mine. One steady look, then he turned away to speak to Craig.
“That was not good,” I whispered to Moira. I rounded into my cubicle and flopped into the chair. “Karen killed it. Nathan looked like the grim reaper.”
Moira’s chuckle followed me. “Nathan is just a consultant who will soon be gone. You should have been watching Craig, the CEO who makes the final decisions.”
