Page 25 of Love & Other Disasters

Violet strode from the break room and debated hiding in the bathroom and pretending she hadn’t heard him. But it was best to get the losing-her-job part of the day over with and headed for his office. J.P. was on her heels.

“Take a seat, Violet,” he said, closing his office door. Her name sounded foreign on his lips.

She paced the beige carpeting instead. “Do I need a box? Cause I’ll pack up my stuff and go quietly. We don’t have to do this.”

“Look at me, Violet,” he said, standing in the doorway. Then she steeled herself and looked into those blue eyes for the first time since they’d done the horizontal mambo. “I’m not firing you.” J.P. moved to his desk. His office remained plain with nothing on the walls. “But you lied to me.”

“You didn’t tell me your real name, either,” Violet shot.

Frat Guy tapped the top of his desk, bringing her attention to a name plate sitting front and center it read: Jordan P. Harper. Well, crap.

“Jordan. Paul. Harper,” he said, enunciating each word. “J.P. has been my nickname since I was a kid. And I’m guessing that Katia is not a nickname for Violet Elaine Murphy.”

“You read my personnel file?”

“Only name, job, and salary.”

Violet folded her arms over her chest. “You told me you went to Indiana for college, but your bio says University of Chicago.”

“Indiana for undergrad. Chicago for my MBA. What else you got for me?”

Nothing, she had nothing, and shrugged. “I’m out.”

Taking a seat in his chair, he motioned at one seat in front of the desk. “Please sit. We need to talk.”

“I can’t do this here. It’s my job.” Violet crossed to the door. “Fire me, if you must, like you did with half the department.”

“Wait…” he stood, chair bumping the wall behind him. “I didn’t have a choice.”

“Sure you did. We all now have double the work. Most of us are doing the work of two people for the same pay, and afraid that we’ll lose our jobs if we don’t. And all for what? So you can make the bottom line look better?”

His face fell. “Wait a minute, here,” he paused, shoving one hand into his hair. The sides were shaved shorter now, and she hated recognizing that he’d had a haircut.

“Putting our personal issue aside for now, I took the necessary actions.”

“Necessary?” she asked, her hands trembled, and she clasped them tight in front of her. “You’re defending pushing an old man out of the company he helped found before he was ready?”

“The board did that. He ran this company into the ground.”

“No, he didn’t. I’ve seen the books.” Did he take her for an idiot?

“Obviously not all of them,” he shot back. “The company will be insolvent in six to eight months at the rate it was going. I had to let those people go to save the company.”

The room whirled. J.P. lied. There was no way. “I review all of the spreadsheets that Melvin sent me.”

“The P & L?” J.P. asked; she nodded, gripping the back of the chair for dear life. He reached down and tapped the keys on his laptop, then turned it around revealing a spreadsheet. “This one?”

Numb, she moved in front of the chair on the opposite side of his desk, and pulled his laptop toward her. The spreadsheet had numbers on it she’d never seen. Violet scrolled back to the top and checked the date, second quarter. “Second quarter just ended. I wouldn’t have seen this yet.”

“Last year and first quarter were dismal too. You didn’t notice?”

Violet shook her head. “No, we made a profit.”

“This company didn’t make a profit—”

“Are you telling me I don’t know how to do my job. I’ve done it for five years, and I’m good at it.”

“Do you know the difference between a profit and a loss?”

---