Page 97 of Think Outside the Boss

“And you’d get to experience living in Italy. Honor your grandfather. Speak the language.”

“Yes, but—”

Tristan shakes his head. “This is fantastic, Freddie. I understand why they approached you.”

I nod, mute.

His smile slants. “I know you want to go.”

I do, but as I look into the deep blue of his eyes, the decision isn’t an easy one. It’s not really a decision at all, not when I feel bonded to the man in front of me. To my co-workers and the life I’ve started to build here.

My throat closes. “I asked for the weekend to think about it.”

“Good,” he says.” Very professional.”

“Yes.”

“You’re ambitious, Freddie. And brave. Two of the things I like most about you. You’ll do brilliantly in Italy.”

“I’ll miss you, though.” Somehow, I manage to keep my voice light. My smile crooked. “Amongst all the gelato shops and the Vespas.”

He smiles right back at me. “So will I. But I’d hate myself for holding you back.”

I find myself nodding. Like we’ve agreed on this, as if the decision is made, even as my heart feels like fracturing. He’s not reacting the way I’d hoped. The way I’d needed.

Tristan tips my head back and presses a kiss to my lips. It’s full of the same quiet confidence as usual, but something about it makes me want to cry. “Come on,” he murmurs. “Let’s have s’mores. They don’t have that in Italy, do they?”

23

Tristan

I rest my head in my hands, turning away from the bright glare of unread emails in my inbox. The same fucking inbox that’s full every time I look, no matter how many emails I keep reading.

Jenny’s voice comes back to me, as it does from time to time. Little things she used to say. Don’t work to live, she’d say. Right before leaving on one of her adventures around the globe, taking her to Southeast Asia or Bermuda or the coral reefs that shelter Australia’s Gold Coast. I didn’t start listening to her advice until after she’d gone. What would she tell me in this situation?

Freddie’s beautiful, elfin face drifts into my view. Olive-toned skin and brown eyes, dark hair, a beauty with fire in her eyes. And now she’s been offered her dream job. Oh, I’d recognized the tentative hope in her eyes as she told me. The warring of emotions. She’s conflicted, and it’s because of me.

I can see so much of myself in Freddie. The hunger in her eyes. I’d had the same desire, undiluted and powerful, when I was her age. Before I’d received Joshua. I will never regret taking care of him, never regret signing those papers. He’s Jenny’s greatest lesson and greatest gift, as if she’d handed me the note slow down, brother in human form. He’s a wonder.

And yet I remember the initial feeling of being held back. Of making concessions, of sacrificing pieces of your old dream as you try to make sense of the new one. I can’t ask Freddie to do that, and we can’t build a relationship that’s heavy with that decision, weighed down by her sacrifice. I don’t know if it would survive it.

She might resent me one day, not to mention how I might resent myself, because it would kill me to be the reason she doesn’t get what she dreams of.

I reach for the phone on my desk. Dial the number to the chief HR rep.

To do what, though? Instruct them to give her the job?

Or tell them to choose someone else?

Slowly, I put the phone down. For a long moment I just stare at it in horrified silence.

I can’t interfere with this. Whatever happens, it’s Freddie’s decision, and it has to be on her merits alone. My fingerprints can’t be anywhere near this. Not if we’re to have a hope of surviving past it, as friends.

Friends. Could I stand just being her friend? Receiving polite little postcards from Italy?

Never has the knowledge that she’s in the same building as me burned the way it does today. Sitting just a few floors below me, but she might as well be on the other side of the globe already for all the good it does. I can’t take her to lunch. I can’t show her the city.

I’m powerless.

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