Page 1 of The Reluctant Reaper
Prologue
“Don’t! Please, it can’t be. It can’t be my time yet! It’s a mistake, please. Please, I’ll do anything. Take my mother. Take... anyone. Just not me.”
ChapterOne
Amara Morrigan woke with a single goal: to be fired by lunchtime.
Ninety minutes later, she was well on her way. Goal: crushed.
“... top of everything else, you were late! Again! This office is literally three blocks from your apartment. If you lean way out the south window”—her boss demonstrated—“you can see the corner of your building!”
“Maybe stop leaning and staring at my apartment window?” Amara was rooting through her purse, which was roomy enough to accommodate several bricks. “It’s a cliché,” she added in a mutter, “but it’s no wonder I can never find anything.”
“I’ve literally given you chance after chance?—”
“Two, actually.” Amara looked up, considering. “So I suppose that’s technically correct.”
“—but we’re gonna have to let you go.”
Barf, the royal we.Amara checked her watch: 11:37. “Thank you. Also, you use ‘literally’ too much. But that’s okay, I do, too. That’s a literal truth.”
“So you better pack up your?—”
She nudged the box between them, the one he’d ignored even while she’d been filling it. (Her soon-to-be-former boss had a gift for ignoring impending unpleasantness.) An hour ago it held six reams of twenty-pound Hammermill copy paper. Now it held (some of) her earthly belongings. Including three crochet hooks. And ninety stitch markers because she kept losing them. And Post-it notes she had no immediate use for. And extra-strength Advil. And a lone Little Debbie Swiss Roll. Missing a bite.
“It’s been fun, by which I mean it’s been a living nightmare. And I once spent two weeks mucking out stalls full of cows with bovine viral diarrhea.”
“Uh.” Her soon-to-be-former boss blinked down at her box. “That’s a thing?”
“Bovine viral diarrhea? Yes. A thing. Literally a thing. Literally a terrible thing.”
“Look, Amara, if you want to stay a couple of days while we find your replacement...”
“No can do, William.” She slung the purse over her shoulder and picked up the box. “There is no replacing me.”
Her newly former boss, who would die of lung cancer in eleven years and thirty-three days, gritted his teeth. “Billy.”
“You’re a grown man, is my point.” And graying at the temples, no less. With a man-bun. Not that she gave a shit about man-buns; it was Billy’s inability to keep his hands off it that she couldn’t abide.
“Why’d you even take the job here?” he whined. “You didn’t like it even before I asked you out.”
She laughed so hard she spit a little; Billy took half a step back and wiped his cheek with the back of his hand. “Is that how you’re spinning it? You think ‘accidentally’ brushing my boobs two or three or eleven times while asking me to wink-wink ‘work late’ wink is asking me out?”
Cue the aggrieved eye roll. “Don’t even start with that MeToo crap.”
“I’m not. I’m just leaving.” She took a long look around the small office she’d spent too many hours in. The gunmetal gray carpet, the secondhand furniture, the vending machine that only took Canadian nickels, the computers with outdated software, the fridge that was barely cooler than the office, the fax machine no one ever used. Fax machine! What year did Billy think this was? “And since you fired me, as opposed to me hitting you with something heavy and quitting, I can draw unemployment. Thank you for that.”
“I’ll contest it!”
“Please do. I also cracked your server and uploaded all your emails. Work-related, private, the secretly private, the super-duper secretly private... nobody’s that sneaky unless they’re hiding embezzlement or a second family. The digging was worth the migraine.” Amara took a last glance around purgatory. “Anyway, I uploaded them to the cloud and gave the password to your soon-to-be-ex-wife. I’m betting her lawyer has them now. And possibly the IRS.”
“What?”
“I don’t know why you’re always whining about what a bitch Shelly is. She was super nice when we had lunch.”
“What?”
“And she loved my bag. No surprise; every time I’m out with this thing, people ask me where I got it.” She patted the felted messenger bag, which she’d crocheted in greens and blues for a “just hangin’ in the garden with the lily pads” Monet vibe. “They never believe I made it myself.”
