My keycard to enter the building still worked, which was a good sign. I went upstairs and put my bag at my desk. Caryn’s office was down the hall, light spilling from it to indicate she was there. Tomorrow was her last day until after her honeymoon; she was taking Thursday and Friday off to finish wedding preparations, then would be gone the following ten days.
I squared my shoulders and walked toward the rectangle of light. I had realized, as I failed to sleep the previous night, that there was no chance I was still in Caryn’s wedding. That was why she hadn’t returned my call. And that was fine, but assuming I wasn’t fired—which was a pretty big assumption—working here would be a lot harder if Caryn couldn’t forgive me.
“Hey,” I said, coming around the doorframe. I didn’t sit down.
Caryn didn’t look up from her computer. “Martin wants to see you at nine thirty,” she said brusquely. Martin was the head of the entire foundation. This was bad.
“Oh. Is he—am I fired?”
“I don’t know and I don’t really care.”
“Caryn—I—”
She finally looked up. “I, I, I, I, I. That’s all it ever is with you, isn’t it?”
“I—”
“Don’t even say it! Do you even know how many times I’ve had to cover for you? To make excuses? To remind you about things that you should know how to do by now? Everything is about you all the time. But this? This was about me. And that wasn’t okay, was it?”
I opened my mouth, but she cut me off again. “I don’t have time for this right now. I have to get everything ready for while I’m gone, and I don’t know if you’ll even still be here to do any of the work while I’m in Fiji.”
“Can I come back later?” My voice was meek. I understood this was part of my penance—letting them have their say about my flaws. And so far, none of them had been wrong.
“If you still work here? Fine.”
I crept back to my office, listening to the clock on the wall tick out its seconds, each tick bringing the hands closer to the time I would learn my fate, each tick echoing louder, like something Edgar Allan Poe created. Tick. Tick. Tick. I couldn’t pretend to work. My mouth was dry and I took a sip from my water bottle. Tick. Tick. Tick. I finally stood on my desk and removed the clock from the wall, prying the battery out of the back with a pen.
I glanced at my phone. It was 9:22. Ugh.
At 9:26, I left my office and went to Martin’s, where I knocked quietly on the open door.
“Lily,” he said, glancing up at me, then at the clock on the wall. He swiveled his chair away from his computer toward the desk, where there were two seats across from him. “Come on in. Close the door behind you, if you don’t mind?”
I swallowed heavily and did as I was told.
“It sounds like you’ve been busy.”
“Yes.”
“I got a call from the Washington Post yesterday. At home. Which was a little awkward, because normally I would direct them to talk to you.”
I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.
“I didn’t know what they were talking about, so they had to explain the whole thing to me. Then I googled it and saw the Buzzfeed story.”
I felt my cheeks turning red. Martin was in his sixties. He wore a white beard, as all scientists seemed to—the old joke at the foundation was that you couldn’t win a Nobel Prize if you didn’t have a beard, but Martin had directed the staff to stop saying that because it wasn’t inclusive. He was a strong advocate for women in the sciences, and sexism was unequivocally not tolerated on his watch. But I still cringed at the idea of someone who, were he to don a red hat and coat, would look like Santa Claus reading about my sleeping with Justin while blackout drunk.
“I’m sorry,” I said, for what felt like the five billionth time in the last twenty-four hours. The words were starting to sound like I was mispronouncing them from semantic satiation.
Martin looked a little surprised. “Why are you sorry?”
“I—I worked on it on foundation time and that’s how they found me. And now the whole foundation is associated with this and—”
The corners of his mouth turned up slightly and I trailed off, confused.
“Have you checked the analytics for the website today?”
“I—no—I haven’t.” My shoulders slumped. I clearly had not done any work yet, which couldn’t help my case.
He turned back to his computer and clicked a few buttons. Then he picked up a remote control and turned on the monitor on the wall, which mirrored his computer screen. A side button on the remote triggered a laser pointer, which he used to point out the number.
“Admittedly, I don’t look at our analytics every day—that’s your job, after all—but that seems pretty high to me.”
It was nearly ten times the typical traffic to the foundation’s home page.
“Granted, a lot of that traffic then clicked through to our staff pages to find you, but many people did stay to look at our mission statement and some of our research projects.”
I didn’t know what to say. He seemed—well—almost pleased.
He leaned back in his chair and stroked his beard. “The reporter wanted to know if you had been fired.” He looked at me as if waiting for a reaction and stopped talking.
“Am I?” My voice shook.
“How long have you worked here, Lily?”
“It’ll be eleven years in August.”
He nodded. “And how many people have you seen me fire?”
I couldn’t think of any, but that didn’t mean there weren’t any. People came and went, and I didn’t always ask for particulars. “I don’t know.”
The corners of his mouth twitched again. “I’m not exactly Donald Trump. I’ve never fired anyone.”
Relief started to trickle down my back like perspiration. I might not be out of the woods yet, but I wasn’t losing my job today.
“What did you tell the reporter?”
“The truth. I told her you’ve been here about a decade and that we don’t keep strict nine-to-five hours. I’ve seen you eating lunch at your desk for most of this year, and if you choose to do personal projects during that break time, you’re perfectly within your rights to do so. She didn’t seem to think there was much of a story if you weren’t being fired. Pity though. All publicity is good publicity and all that.”
My mouth was open. “Are you saying it’s good that this happened?”
“Not for you, obviously. And Caryn didn’t look too happy. I assume she’s Bride A? But from where I’m standing, you just brought us a bunch of free press.”
This wasn’t even remotely how I expected the conversation to go. “We won’t lose any funding?”
He chuckled. “Over a Buzzfeed article about a blog? No. I think we’ll manage to stay afloat.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Don’t thank me yet. That’s not why I called you in today.”
“It’s not?”
“Well, the blog is. But you still have your job. If you want it.”
“If I want it?”
“I read it—before you took it down. You’re a talented writer.”
I flushed, remembering the snarkiness, the description of my drunken grandmother naked in a hot tub, the graphic depiction of squeezing myself into the foundation garments that Caryn demanded I wear, the Alex and Justin debacle. Not exactly what I wanted Santa Boss knowing about my personal life.
“Thank you,” I mumbled.
“Lily, I need to ask—why are you still here?” I looked up, surprised. Was he telling me to go back to my office? “Eleven years is an awfully long time to spend on something you’re not passionate about.”
Was he firing me after all?
“Look, you can work here as long as you want to,” he continued. “I’m not going to push you out. You’re great at explaining things in a way that lets non-scientists understand what we’re doing. But part of my job is to help people reach their potential, because when people are comfortable enough to experiment, that’s when amazing discoveries happen. And Lily, you’re hiding here.”