“Yep. It felt great, Kate. You should try it sometime.” Courtney grins widely, and for a moment I almost forget that she’s my enemy. That Max is her latest challenge. A flash of regret slices me. Now I’d have to deal with Magda all on my own.
“Maybe,” I say quietly, glancing around to make sure that Magda or her tattletale assistant aren’t within earshot. “What are you going to do now?”
“Have a cocktail!” A carefree smile lights up her face. It’s the same one I saw her repeatedly flash Max at the concert—the grin that made my stomach hurt, especially when I saw how he’d smiled back. “Want to join?” she asks hopefully, then quickly adds, “You know we haven’t hung out in a while. You know, just you and me.”
“I can’t. I’m sure Magda is waiting on me,” I say, holding up the comforter to indicate I’ve already spent enough time out of the office.
“I understand,” Courtney says sincerely as she eyes the duvet. “Oh my God—did you just buy that?”
“Oh, this?” I say, pulling the bag to my chest, embarrassed. “I know, it’s—”
“—totally awesome!” she finishes, setting her box down and pulling the duvet out of the shopping bag as if it’s a pile of money. “They’re saying orange is the new black. It was all over Fashion Week!”
“Really?” I say weakly, a hard ball of anxiety lodged in my throat. How is it that she and Max agree again—and about something so random? “It’s for our bedroom.” I deliberately linger on the word as I study her reaction.
She flinches slightly as she leans over to pick up her box. “So I guess this is good-bye,” she says as she stands up, a look I can’t read now flitting in her eyes. “For now, anyway. I’ll call you later, okay?”
“Sure,” I say as I watch her glide to the elevator, her feet barely grazing the floor.
? ? ?
Predictably, Magda spends the rest of the day on a rampage, her protégée telling her off and quitting in one fell swoop clearly not sitting well. Even though I had wished Courtney onto Magda’s shit list, the truth was she had always been Magda’s favorite and I knew, even with my interference, it was only a matter of time before she reclaimed her special place in Magda’s heart. But then she’d quit—throwing everything off. I was dependable and consistent, but Courtney had that extra something I didn’t. It was her flashes of brilliance when she knew just how to handle our cranky art director so we could meet our looming deadlines, or when she thought of a fresh idea after hours of brainstorming. Despite how Magda had thought she’d been feeling about Courtney’s work, there was no doubt we were all going to feel the gaping hole her absence would leave.
Magda raged on about an innocuous mistake a junior associate had made, making me confirm details about a campaign we’d already gone over ad nauseam, and snapped at me when I missed a small typo in a memo she had sent out. As the day wore on, I felt a slow anger burn inside my chest toward Courtney, the image of her practically skipping to the elevator stuck in my head. Angry that once again I was left to deal with a mess she had created. Sure, maybe I had been the one who had set all this into motion, but still. The bottom line was that, so far, my wishes seemed to be creating more problems for me than solutions.
? ? ?
“Hey,” I say as I walk into our living room, immediately noticing Max’s silhouette on the couch, watching the Dodgers game on mute. “You’ll never guess what happened today.” I throw my purse on the table and slide myself into the crook of his arm.
“I have some crazy news too,” he says. “You first.”
“Courtney quit,” I say, trying my best to twist the expression on my face into a mix of equal parts serious and contemplative. “I hope she’ll be okay.”
Max breaks into a grin. “She’s going to be just fine!” he declares with more confidence than he had when he convinced me that bungee jumping on my thirty-third birthday would be a great idea.
Panic rises inside of me. “What do you mean? How would you know that?” I glance at my watch. “She’s been jobless for half a day.”
“She’s not unemployed anymore,” Max says cryptically.
I squeeze my eyes shut, not wanting to hear where this is going but unable to control my impulse to find out. “Care to elaborate?” I ask, trying unsuccessfully to control the clipped tone in my voice.
“Well, it was a crazy coincidence,” Max starts, his eyes glimmering with excitement. “But long story short, she was hired at my company—in the marketing department. She’s going to be a product manager!”
“What the fuck?” I blurt.
“I know, right?” Max says, mistaking my shock as happiness instead of frustration.