30. Kyle

30

KYLE

I more than half expected to see Clarissa when I stepped into the office. Instead, I saw Jenna looking rather frazzled, speaking with some woman I didn't know.

"What are you doing here? she said as she looked up and saw me.

"This is my office," I said.

"James—"

"I'm going there now." I cut her off as I breezed past her into the back of the office. I stopped when I got to the place where James's office should've been. Instead, I was face-to-face with a staircase headed up to the second floor.

"James's office has moved," Jenna said as she came behind me.

"I see that," I snapped out. I started to climb the stairs when she stopped me.

"Where are you going?"

I turned around. "To see James," I told her. "I'm getting tired of this little game. I'm clearly here to find out what has been going on in my absence, and I will be relying on James to provide me that information, thank you," I said, dismissing her.

"Nobody is upstairs," she said.

"What do you mean?" I had been under the impression from Alayna before she quit that the creatives, the architects, and drafts team had all moved their offices upstairs.

"Nobody's here," she repeated.

"You're here. Are you gonna tell me what's going on?"

"If you give me a chance. I'm in the middle of something, and then I can catch you up with anything that I know. Why don't you take a look at your new office space, and I'll be in as soon as I can?"

"I think this is something you need to fill me in on right now," I said.

Jenna let out an exasperated sigh and crossed her arms. "I get that you're used to snapping your fingers and having somebody jump to your needs, but I'm not your personal assistant right now. I'm in the middle of training somebody, and I need to at least show her how to answer the phone before I can walk away and have a chat with you."

I wasn't a fan of her tone. "Do you talk to James like this?" I asked.

"When he is being unreasonable, and right now, you are being unreasonable. If I had known to expect you, maybe I would have been a little more available. I'm only asking for maybe ten minutes."

"Fine, is my office at least in the same place?"

She actually rolled her eyes. "No, your office space is now in the area where Philip and Michelle had their working spaces. We didn't change anything from the last set of blueprints."

She returned to whatever it was she said she was doing. I guess she was training a receptionist. Which made sense considering Clarissa spent her afternoons being the department intern. If I recalled correctly, we had had some issues with keeping a temp in the afternoon receptionist position.

My new office had more square footage than I had ever worked with before. I remembered when we were designing it, feeling that sense of achievement in my career where I would finally have all the space I needed to not only work but display models and hold meetings in one place. The furniture looked sad and minimal as it was overwhelmed by the magnitude of the size of the office. I was going to have to talk to somebody about having some interior design work done as I dropped my briefcase on my desk. Who the hell would that be since Alayna quit?

I had just unpacked my laptop computer when Jenna walked in.

"I'm really surprised to see you here. I thought you were going to be in Hong Kong for a while," she said.

"Well, when Alayna notified me that Nick was leaving and that she quit, I figured maybe I needed to come back and do some damage control."

Jenna stood in the door to my office with her arms folded. She shook her head. "You might be a little too late for that. Alayna was very definite when she quit. She left me with a stack of files and contacts to go through, but I've barely had time to catch up."

"Why isn't there anybody here?" I asked.

"Technically, the office is closed for the week. Everybody has taken a few days of vacation. We weren't able to shut down the week between Christmas and the new year like James used to do because of the buyout and other business items that needed to be wrapped up before the end of the calendar year. We were all hands on deck putting in a lot of hours the week after Christmas, so he went ahead and closed for this week."

"Nobody told me that was happening," I complained.

"Well, nobody told me you were going to show up," she pointed out.

"But you're here," I mentioned.

"I'm here because it is my job to make sure the office is up and running. I've been interviewing and hiring a new receptionist and an additional office assistant so that when I take my two weeks at the end of the month and go to Jamaica, I know that phones are being answered, invoices are being sent, payroll has been managed, and projects are properly filed. We aren't in a position for me to have the luxury of taking off at the same time as everyone else just yet."

"Is it really so bad?" I asked.

"We've been hemorrhaging employees for a month. For a firm this small, it's that bad, and with Alayna gone, it's probably worse than that. She did the work of at least three people."

"Isn't James managing the clients properly?"

"James has been running this company for years. He's not the problem."

"Let me guess, you're going to say the problem is me," I quipped sarcastically.

"I'm not gonna say you're wrong." I did not miss the bitter tone in her voice.

"When you say hemorrhaging, other than Nick and Alayna, are we really so strapped?"

"Considering that Clarissa left as soon as she graduated, we're down thirty percent. When there's only ten of us to begin with, that's a heavy hit."

"What do you mean, Clarissa left?"

Jenna shrugged. "Just that. She got all of her employment time here applied to her internship hours, and she up and quit."

I just stared at her for a long moment. It was bad enough that I returned to Chicago and was unable to rely on Alayna to keep me updated. But now I found out that Clarissa had left the firm, and I came back in the middle of a week when everybody was gone…

"Did Clarissa leave her contact information?"

Jenna just shrugged again. "I have her employee files, if that's what you mean."

"That's exactly what I need. Can you get that for me?"

"Sure, but I don't see how it will do you any good, since apparently, she's also left Chicago."

My heart stopped beating in my chest. I couldn't wrap my mind around what Jenna was telling me.

Everything was going from bad to worse.

When Alayna called and chewed me out on New Year's Eve, she had failed to mention that Clarissa was gone from the firm, let alone from Chicago.

"Are you certain?"

"It's what I heard from James."

"Hasn't she given you her new address?" I asked.

"Not yet. She can pull her tax forms straight from the online service that takes care of payroll. It's not like I need to mail her anything."

"What about her last paycheck?" I asked.

Jenna huffed out a chuckle through her nose. "How much of your business did Alayna take care of for you? We haven't written checks here for a very long time. Everything is handled by online transfer of funds. We don't even write checks for the small things anymore. Everything gets auto billed through James's credit card. That way, he has plenty of points to use for travel."

"You have no way of contacting her?" I asked.

"As far as I know, her phone is still the same. You can always try to call or text her," she suggested.

"I don't know if I ever had her number," I lied. Clarissa had blocked me several weeks ago.

"Right, of course not," Jenna said with dripping sarcasm. She probably knew there was something going on between us just as Alayna had figured it out.

"Can you just bring me her file?"

With an eye roll and another shrug, Jenna turned and walked away. Within a few minutes, she returned with a file folder.

"This is all I've got," she said as she dropped a manilla file folder on my desk.

I sucked in a breath as I opened the file to learn more about Clarissa than she had ever told me herself. I laughed out loud when I read her address.

All this time, she had lived in Oak Park without telling me. I closed the file and carried it out, handing it back to Jenna as I left the office.

"I guess I'll come back in a couple of days when everyone has returned from their little vacation."

Jenna exposed her teeth to me more than smiled. "That would probably be best unless you have a project that requires peace and quiet."

I left my office uncertain how to proceed. I couldn't go home because there was a short-term rental in my place for another week or two. I found myself in Oak Park. Somehow, I was able to find that same house Clarissa had shown me back in the early fall. I ended up walking past her apartment building and realized it was only a block from the playground where I had first seen her with our son.

Their absence was an infinite void in my gut. I needed to find them. I needed to fix this.