Page 35 of Best Offer Wins
Gotcha. Which restaurant?
Doesn’t have a name yet.
I only talked to him on the phone/pretty sure he’s gay so he didn’t #MeToo me or anything if that’s what you’re asking.
LOL thanks.
Damn. I scroll back through Erika’s story one more time, trying to unearth some deeper meaning.
Another order of business occurs to me:While I have you, would you mind connecting me with your real estate agent? Please don’t mention to Heath, tho. Still trying to convince Ian it’s time to dump ours.
Ofc! I’ll shoot you both an email in just a min.
I remember my auto-reply:Thanks! Use my gmail.
A chime through my earbuds—I never took them out—pulls my attention back to my laptop.
A new work email. From Jordana. Subject line:Let’s chat.
Margo,
Call me tomorrow at 11a.
Thanks,
J.
It’s not much, but it’s typical of Jordana to keep it brief. And if the news was bad, surely I would’ve heard from HR instead. This feels like progress.
Great!I write back.
I look up from my screen just in time to see a mom battling to get through the door. She pushes a double-decker UPPababy stroller with one hand and drags a little boy—maybe three years old—behind her with the other. He clutches a stuffed tiger.
The customer by the entrance is too engrossed in his phone to notice, so I rush over to help. “Thank you,” she says, her face a mixture of exhaustion and gratitude. “It’s been a morning—I didn’t think it was possible to feel resentful toward pandas.” She laughs at her own joke, and I almost miss the cue to join in because I’m transfixed bythe baby sleeping in the stroller’s upper tier. Her cheeks are smooth and plump like mochi. She has a full head of fluffy brown hair. I wish I could bury my nose in it and inhale.
“She’s really perfect,” I tell her mom.
The woman laughs again—“At least when she’s napping”—then she hustles up to the register, oblivious to the fact that she has everything. A dull throbbing begins to pulse behind my eyes.
No house, no baby.
No house, no life.
This is no time to second-guess myself. Back at my corner table, I pop two Advil and do the thing that I hesitated to do yesterday: Pull up the number for Curt’s dad’s hedge fund.
Curtis Bradshaw, Sr. must be pushing eighty, but he’s still listed there as chairman. I wait for the boy with the tiger to stop whining at his mom for a cake pop, then put my earbuds back in and dial star-67 to block my number from showing up on the other end of the call. A receptionist answers.
“Bradshaw Capital Management, how may I assist you?”
She sounds young. I hope Curt’s dad hasn’t tried anything with her.
“Yes, hello, is Mr. Bradshaw available?”
“He is in today, yes…” I hear the clacking of her keyboard. “I don’t see that he’s expecting a call right now, though. Does he know what this is about?”
“No, he doesn’t. My name is Lisa Waters. I’m a reporter atThe Chronicle of Higher Education.” Lisa Waters is a real byline there, just in case anyone bothers to Google me. “I wondered if he’d be willing to give an interview for a short profile I’m writing about his son, Curtis. You might’ve heard he was recently appointed to a senior faculty position at King’s College in London, and I’m doing a series on American professors who go abroad.”
“Oh! No, I just started, so I don’t know anything about that. Sounds awesome, though. Let me just put you on a quick hold.”
