I stood abruptly. “Okay,” I managed to get out.
It sounded hollow and brittle. More a gasp than a word.
“Heidi,” Julia said. There was anguish in her voice. Her eyes told me she wanted to reach out to me. Her body said that she wanted to comfort me. Her hands told me to stay…to figure out what was going on…to let her answer all the questions I had bubbling under the surface.
But I bit my lip and took a frantic step backward. “Okay,” I repeated.
“Are you sure you don’t—”
“Yep,” I interrupted her.
If I didn’t leave now, I wouldn’t be able to hold my head up high as I walked out of that office. And I needed that. I wanted to hold on to my pride until I was gone.
I wrenched the door to her office open and stormed out of there like a thundercloud. As soon as I was out of her office, I went from near to tears to anger to pissed to wanting to fucking murder someone in about three seconds flat. My hands were clenched into fists at my sides. My heart was galloping at breakneck speed. My ears were ringing. I was seeing a tinge of red to everything.
My head snapped into Landon’s office. I was ready to blow a gasket, but I was unprepared for him not to be there. The office was dark, and the door was closed. I never looked in there anymore for fear of this. Exact. Fucking. Thing. And then, the day that I did, the day after we’d gotten back from the PGA Tour Championship, he was missing.
“Fuck.” I slapped onto his closed office door and then marched over to my desk.
“What was that about?” Matt asked.
He could clearly tell something was wrong. He looked confused and concerned. I just wanted to tell him to fuck off, but I held my tongue.
“I’m going home,” I told him instead of the truth. I scrambled to collect a bunch of my personal effects. I’d worked here for six years. I couldn’t get everything in one trip, but I wanted to make sure I had the things I really needed.
“Why?”
I slammed my hand down on the paperwork I was organizing. “Do I look like I want to talk right now?”
He shrank back. I was usually a sarcastic bitch, but I didn’t raise my voice.
“No.”
“No, I don’t.”
I tossed everything I had managed to get together into my oversize boho bag, wiped any personal files and passwords I had off of the computer, and left everything else. I for sure thought Matt was going to try to say something else to me, but he didn’t. He just let me pass. He probably thought it was PMS or something equally sexist. That was the MO in the office.
I left the office in a daze. I somehow made it out of the Wright Construction building, past the sign out front with the company motto, What’s Wright Is Right, and to my car without being accosted by anyone. Tossing the contents of my purse into the passenger seat, I threw myself into the driver’s side and just fucking sat there.
My gaze drifted up the side of the building I’d worked at for so long, and everything hit me at once.
I had been fired.
I would never work here again.
I had no source of income.
Everything I had worked for was for nothing.
My life as I had known it was over.
The tears that I had been holding back with shock and anger released like a torrent from my body. Suddenly, I was sobbing into my steering wheel, my hands on either side of it, as I uncontrollably heaved up and down. A choking sound came from my mouth, and I tried to suck in oxygen that couldn’t seem to get to my brain.
There was no oxygen. There was no air. There was nothing.
I couldn’t breathe.
My body shook as the tears continued to stream down my face, and I turned into a blubbering mess. I started to cough loud and desperately. My chest ached, my fingers and toes felt numb, and my head felt fuzzy. I hiccuped over the tears, fighting my body’s response to the horrible news.
I was hyperventilating.
I was having a panic attack.
I needed to calm down.
“Fuck,” I gasped out through the tears. “Calm down. Calm down. Calm down.”
No matter how many times I told myself to stop what I was doing, it didn’t matter. Panic attacks weren’t rational. There was nothing that anyone could do to be logical about the situation. Calm was not a word that you even understood when it hit you. There was only that moment when your brain stopped functioning, you stopped breathing, and the tears refused to stop falling.
It had been so long since I had an attack. Years, in fact. The last one had been the day when my dad was sent to prison. I hadn’t cried in front of him. I hadn’t said a damn word. He’d pleaded with me. Begged for one more minute with me. A chance. I’d coldly stared into his pale eyes that were so like mine and then turned and walked away. When I’d gotten back to my car, I hadn’t been able to leave the courtroom for nearly an hour.
I couldn’t do that today.
I couldn’t be here another minute.
Despite the dangers, I revved the engine and peeled out of the parking lot. My breathing was erratic, and my tears refused to stop. My face was hot, and my eyes burned. Still, I didn’t stop. I didn’t pull over.
I made it home without remembering a single thing I’d done to get there. As soon as I was inside, I went straight to the shower, turned the water on as hot as it would go, stripped out of my work clothes, and stepped under the spray.
The tears eventually subsided to a low keening and chest-rattling breaths. I moved into the living room and turned on some mindless TV, staring at it, unseeing.
That was how Emery found me when she got home after school. “Hey! You’re home early!”
I slowly turned to look at her and then back at the TV. “Yeah.”
“What’s going on?” she asked after seeing my splotchy red face and the clothes she had dubbed my Tinder breakup pajamas. Emery hurried to the couch and sat down. “Did you and Landon break up? What did he do to you? I’ll kill him.”
“I…I…” I coughed over the words, trying to get them out. “I got fired.”
Emery whipped back, shocked. “You got fired?”
“Yep.”
She gaped at me. “You’re the best employee they have. On what grounds could they possibly fire you?”
“Probably fucking my boss.”
“It’s just rumor and speculation,” Emery insisted. “I mean, what do they know? They’re grasping at straws. You can deny it. Landon will stick up for you. We’ll tell Jensen and Morgan. We’ll get this straightened out. They can’t do that. It’s unlawful.”
“They have proof.”
“What proof?” Emery squeaked.
The tears came again when I thought about it. “Landon and I went to a golf tournament together this weekend, and someone took videos of us together. I watched one of us kissing.”
“Oh.” Emery tucked her legs up underneath herself and chewed on her finger. “Well…fuck.”
“Yeah.”
I bent forward, putting my head in my hands. Emery rubbed my back and held me as I cried.
“Who sent in the videos?” she asked after a couple of minutes.
I sniffled. “I don’t know. I had to get out of Julia’s office…”
“Julia?” Emery gasped. “She fired you?”