Page 102 of Ten Years and Then…
And he hadn’t thought about it when he paged Nora. He entered the number he remembered, because of course he’d memorized the number on his assigned phone the first time he saw it. The same number he’d given Nora to write down Thursday night.
So maybe she had called back, and left messages on a now-dead phone where nobody could retrieve them.
She probably thought he was ignoring her.
Well, he could fix that. He still had her pager number. He could page her from the phone in her room.
If she even still had the pager. She’d flown home yesterday; she might have gone straight to the office and turned it back in. But it couldn’t hurt anything to try.
Nora, a little later
She needed to get to sleep already.
Nora had been telling herself that for the past hour. But every time she closed her eyes, they refused to stay shut. Instead, they kept stubbornly popping open and focusing on the phone sitting there, unringing, on the night table.
This was ridiculous. Either Daniel couldn’t call, due to illness or accident or maybe abduction by Martians; or, as much as she didn’t want to face up to the possibility, he was refusing to call on purpose.
Every time she thought about that, she dismissed the idea. She hadn’t said or done anything that could have hurt or offended him. Thursday night felt like no time at all had passed; like it was the fall of 1988 all over again, when everything between them was new and easy and wonderful.
And maybe that was the answer.
Maybe when he got back up to his room after walking her to hers, he’d had the same thought, felt just as comfortable and loved as she had. And then maybe he laid there alone in his cold bed, in the dark, in a strange city and realized there could only be one more night, or two, and they’d have to say another final goodbye. And maybe he just couldn’t face it. Couldn’t bear to say goodbye again. So he just … didn’t.
Or he was protecting her from having to say goodbye.
Either way, it made all the sense in the world.
Still, she got out of bed, walked over to the dresser to take one last look at the pager, just in case. But there was no point; it was off.
She tried the power button to no effect. The battery must be dead; and she didn’t have a cable to charge it. They’d given her one, but it was—oh, God, she was so careless—sitting on her kitchen table back in Boston.
So even if she was wrong and Daniel wanted to reach her, to say a proper goodbye—or anything else—he couldn’t.
But he didn’t know that, so if he was trying to call her, he surely thought she was ignoring him. Probably for the exact same reason she’d decided he was ignoring her.
She wasn’t sure if this was some sort of message from the gods of love and romance, or their cruel joke. She didn’t even know which was worse.
She only knew how much it hurt.
Chapter 32
After the conference—Chicago, IL/Boston, MA
Daniel, July 21
Daniel thought the post-conference debriefing was over. There had been three hours of meetings yesterday, and he’d written a ten page report detailing everything that had happened—professionally, anyway—in Kansas City. But here he was in Mr. Kincaid’s office, going over it all again.
“Well, Daniel, I had very high expectations for you,” his boss said. Then he paused; the man had a habit of doing that, making you wait and wonder whether you were about to be praised or chastised. It was incredibly annoying, but Daniel suspected that was the point. Some old boss of Mr. Kincaid had probably told him it was best to always keep his employees off balance. “And you exceeded them. I’m impressed, not just with your results but how you handled the team.”
“Thank you, sir,” he answered. Daniel expected his team to give him a good evaluation, but it was nice to hear it all the same. “They made it easy. Everyone did a great job.” Even Edward; as rude as he could sometimes—almost always—be, he’d consistently come through every time he was needed at the conference.
“How did you feel about it—I mean personally. Did you enjoy being Team Lead? Is it something you can see yourself doing again?”
Was that a trick question? He thought he’d been very clear in the debriefings, and in his written reports. “Uh—yes. Like I said, everyone made it easy for me.”
Mr. Kincaid shook his head. “You’re misunderstanding me. I mean you, Daniel Keller. Not your team, not the results—you. Did you like being in charge? Is it something you’d like to do more of?”
“Honestly?” His boss nodded. “I hadn’t thought about that. But—I guess I did enjoy it. I—pardon my language—but I worked my butt off beforehand, and it felt good to see it pay off.”
