“What happened at your meeting with the bosses?” he asked Wendy. His eyes widened as he saw her expression. “Wendy, I—”
She shook her head. She shouldn’t need to be comforted by him, when she was supposed to be his mentor. She just needed to get to Vegas and perform a miracle. She fled past Sarah’s office to her own and quietly closed her door.
She stood in the small space beside her desk with her hands pressed to her eyes, trying to remember whether there was anything hidden in her office that would incriminate her or any of her clients if the bosses fired her while she was in Vegas. Looking around the office would do no good because on the surface it was clean and pristine, with her huge bulletin board sectioned into the clients she was responsible for and their current whereabouts—though she hadn’t yet updated Brad’s column to read six feet under. Disentangling the nightmarishly junky drawers of her desk and filing cabinet would take years. Even she didn’t know what was in there. But she didn’t think she was in possession of anything that would get anyone in trouble, now that Brad McCain was dead.
A knock sounded in the hall—on Sarah’s door, not Wendy’s. “Come in,” Sarah called. Then, through the thin wall, Wendy could make out only the murmur of Sarah’s and Tom’s hushed voices. But she knew Tom was telling Sarah that Wendy had had a bad meeting. Sarah would knock on Wendy’s door any second.
Wendy didn’t want to recount the meeting to Sarah. Then she really would cry. She sat down at her desk, hoping she could give Sarah the impression that she was busy with work. She opened the top drawer and quickly closed it again. The mess was depressing. She truly was a neat person, but the appearance of neatness was more important than neatness itself. And maintaining that appearance sometimes meant she raked everything on the desk into the drawer. Repeatedly. And then she got sent to Nashville or Paris and never got a day for spring cleaning. Usually the disorder didn’t bother her, but at the moment it seemed overwhelming.
The inevitable knock sounded at her door.
She covered her face with both hands, willing that despair away, that feeling of being forever lost down a mine shaft. “I didn’t cry until now,” she called softly.
“Of course you didn’t cry,” Sarah whispered, closing the door behind her. Wendy heard the swish of Sarah’s too-casual-for-work, thinly disguised gym pants against the guest chair as she sat down.
Wendy suppressed a sob. “Don’t hug me or I’ll lose it. I have to get out of here and go home and pack and catch a flight.”
“I won’t hug you,” Sarah said in the soothing Alabama drawl she hadn’t quite shaken after ten years in New York. “So you’re not fired? Tom thought you got fired.”
Wendy explained the clause in the Darkness Fallz contract. Then she burst out, “You and I should break off and form our own PR firm. Take Tom with us.” Even as she said this, her stomach knotted in dread. Going out on her own might mean failure, and she couldn’t fail. If she failed, she would lose her savings, her apartment . . . that was all she had.
“I’m not cut out for it,” Sarah said, waving the idea away with one hand. “I love my job, but I want to do it only so many hours a week, you know? I want to be off when I’m off. I want to train for marathons. I want to hang out with Harold on the weekends.”
Wendy tried not to grimace at the mention of Sarah’s husband, Harold. Wendy hated that guy. Sarah was beautiful—or she could be, with a little makeup and any hair care at all and a proper brassiere to replace her sports bra—but Harold treated her like he was in college and she was the high school girl back home that he’d grown tired of but didn’t have the guts to break up with.
“You still have a job, though?” Sarah asked. “How’d you pull that off?”
“Lorelei Vogel asked for me,” Wendy grumbled.
“But that’s great!” Sarah said. “I mean, that’s a deep hole to dig out of, but if you were going to have to represent Lorelei anyway, you’re not significantly worse off than you were earlier this morning. Yet.”
“If I hadn’t been fired,” Wendy said, “I would have done anything to avoid this case. Lorelei’s ex, Colton Farr, reminds me of Rick.” Wendy had thought she would feel better getting this off her chest. Instead the memories of Rick threatening her loomed over her.
No wonder she’d had a visceral reaction to Zane standing so close to her an hour ago. She’d heard around the office that Lorelei wanted representation. Wendy had subconsciously made the connection to Colton, then to Rick, and then she’d started seeing Rick in everybody. The way her day was going, it had been inevitable that she would land in the one assignment that would scare the hell out of her.
“Rick?” Sarah exclaimed. “No. I see the physical resemblance to Colton, but no. You can’t let yourself go there.”
Sarah had met Rick only once, when he’d appeared in their dorm before classes started freshman year and demanded that Wendy come with him to talk alone. Sarah had rushed to call campus security, but not before Rick had backed Wendy against the wall with his thick arm across her throat.
“They both say their girlfriends are beautiful angels until they misbehave,” Wendy grumbled, “at which point their girlfriends become stupid bitches.”
“Hey!” Sarah exclaimed. “Snap out of it.”
That’s when Wendy realized she’d huddled into a ball in her desk chair, hugging herself, just as she had whenever Rick called her names.
“Colton isn’t Rick,” Sarah pointed out.
“Right.” Wendy straightened in her chair and lifted her chin.
“And if they do have anything in common,” Sarah said, “you’ll be doing Lorelei a service by helping her distance herself from Colton.”
“I would have preferred running away.”
“Yeah,” Sarah agreed. “Do you want the rundown of what Lorelei and Colton have been up to?”
“I need to get home and pack. I don’t have time for the rundown. But . . . ” Wendy cringed. “I can tell from your face it’s bad.”
Sarah nodded. “And as of today, Colton is repped by—”
“The Blackstone Firm?” Wendy exclaimed. “I have to rep Lorelei Vogel, I have to make her like me while I do it, and I have to extricate her from an Internet brouhaha with my ex-boyfriend’s doppelganger, who’s now a Blackstone Firm client? The only way that could get any worse is if Daniel Blackstone is the rep.”