Page 7 of Coming Around Again

“What?”

“Didn’t you tell me he tried to contact you on Insta last year?”

“Yes. I blocked him, same as I did on Facebook and Twitter after he stopped answering his phone, eleven years ago. He doesn’t get to just get back to me after ghosting me, and expect me to pick up where we left off!”

“Did he ever tell you why he ghosted you?”

I just snort in denial.

“Well, hear me out, okay? I think maybe you owe it to yourself to find out why. If he’s got a lame excuse, you hear it and then you cuss him out and tell him that you will be keeping things strictly professional at work from then on. You can do that. You’re tough, Naya.”

I speak one of my fears. “What if I can’t stand to work there because of him?”

“Then you talk to HR and you say the company’s just not a good fit for you, and you put your resume out there again. You don’t report directly to him, do you?”

“No, but I’ll be working with him pretty closely, it sounds like.”

“Then you be professional, dammit! If he’s a dick to you, tell your superior. Is that person cool?”

“Michelle’s awesome.” I heave a huge sigh. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Okay.”

“You can do this,” Clover insists. “Make him tell you the truth.”

“I can do this.”

By the time Viv gets home, I’ve already eaten some soup and gone to bed. But I lie there, unable to drift off, remembering everything about that summer.

4

DESMOND

Naya. Here.

Our new hire.

The new business analyst. The person I need to work closely with.

The girl I lost.

She’s been a huge hole in my heart for eleven years, and I wish I understood why she has never let me tell her what happened.

It wasn’t my fault.

Mom was driving. She’d taken me and Megan up the Blue Ridge Parkway to this little theme park near Grandfather Mountain, a place called Tweetsie Railroad. Kinda dumb, and really meant for children, but I had actually enjoyed it. Megan, despite being a worldly-wise tween, ate it up: the dancers at the Saloon, the Old West vibe, the rides, but especially the train ride around the mountain with black-hatted bad-guy “robbers” stopping the train and then getting chased off on their horses by white-hatted “sheriffs,” all clearly actors. Cheesy, yes, but we’d had a good time.

On the way back, Mom had told us that our summer of worry, with Dad back in Pittsburgh fighting to reorganize GoPlay, was about over. She explained that her father and uncle, along with Dad and her brother, had managed to find some outside funding to get the company out of the hole that Grandpa had dug for it. “But there’s a cost,” she’d said, blinking back tears.

I’d sat in the front seat staring at her, surprised at her emotion. “What is it, Mom?”

“First, Grandpa has to step down and Uncle Doug will take over as CEO. Second, we have to give up slightly more than half of the stock. The Brickells won’t ever have a majority on their own.”

“Well, that makes sense to me,” I’d said, probably braver than I was wise, at that age. “That way nobody can make stupid decisions without getting stopped, which is how we got in trouble in the first place.”

Mom gave me an agonized look, then refocused on the road. “Third,” she said, and paused for long enough that Megan sat forward and poked the back of Mom’s seat. “Ow, Megan! Don’t be rude.”

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