Chapter 2

CHAPTER 2

Rose

“Okay, this is beyond a joke.” I toss my dinner plate into the frothy water in the sink and wipe bubbles from my cheek with the back of my arm.

I know where the instruction came from without waiting for my dad to elaborate.

Mr. Weiss.

The man in the gray silk suit.

The man who was horrified by a few fingerprints on his goddamned perfectly pressed pants. I’d bet his kids only get to speak to him from a safe distance. I can picture him standing in the doorway of their bedrooms and wishing them goodnight with a relieved smile at surviving another day without getting his hands dirty.

“He looked at Izzie like she was something I’d dragged in off the sidewalk,” I grumble over my shoulder. Something smelly. Something that he would no doubt have his assistant remove from the soles of his shoes to save him from getting his fingers soiled.

No, scratch all the above—Mr. Weiss isn’t the paternal type. I’d bet he never ate watermelon without a fork either.

I’m angry at myself for wasting any emotion on the guy, but seriously, who does he think he is? He could’ve asked me politely to take Izzie outside, but instead, he gets his assistant to suggest that Dad use the café across the street the next time he forgets his lunch.

“Hey, Rosie, it’s okay,” Dad says. “Mr. Weiss has an image to maintain. It’s my fault. I shouldn’t be so forgetful in the mornings.”

“Don’t apologize for him, Dad.”

I inhale deeply and plunge my hands into the hot water. I don’t like it when my dad bows down to his bosses like this. Running a corporation is one thing, and sure, the guy is probably under a lot of stress, but it doesn’t give him the prerogative to treat people unkindly.

“He can’t dictate what you eat, Dad,” I say, swallowing my initial response. “Izzie wasn’t even being noisy. Thirty seconds later, and we’d have been out of there, and Mr. Weiss would’ve been none the wiser.”

“Bad timing, Rosie. That’s all it was. You can’t diss the man for doing his job.” Dad cleans ketchup from Izzie’s face with a baby wipe and gets her down from the table.

Maybe Dad’s right. The guy probably didn’t give the incident a second thought while he sat through his dull afternoon meetings, and scrolled through his emails, and added his illegible signature to a ream of classified documents. He probably doesn’t even remember the call he asked his assistant to make.

Maybe this anger bubbling inside my chest isn’t even about him.

The doorbell rings. I grab a towel to dry my hands and take it with me to the front door, Izzie almost tripping me up along the way.

It’s Jess, Izzie’s mom. “Sorry I’m so late,” she says. She bends down, scoops her little girl into her arms, and smothers her face in kisses while Izzie squirms and tries to push her away. “Have you been a good girl for Auntie Rose?”

“Yes, Mommy.” She wraps her arms around her mom’s neck and rests her cheek on Jess’s.

Jess and I have been friends since middle school.

As eleven-year-olds we became inseparable over our shared love of Fleetwood Mac songs, flared jeans and disco boots, Scooby Doo and Ghostbusters . As we grew older, Jess became more athletic and captained the high school basketball team, while I grew a pair of breasts the size of melons and realized that winning the 200-meter sprint was never going to happen.

We didn’t hang around with the popular kids, but neither were we relegated to the bottom of the school hierarchy, floating along somewhere in the middle with our quirky obsessions and silly sense of humor. I always thought that we were tolerated by the jocks and the trendy girls because of Jess’s love of sports, while she put it down to my breasts.

Whatever the reason, our friendship survived high school, relationships with boys, college, and everything else that life has thrown our way since.

“She’s been an angel as always.” I hold the door open wide to let her in.

“Hmm.” Jess wrinkles her nose. “Will someone please explain to me why you get the angel and I get the demon?”

“I don’t believe you,” I say, tickling Izzie’s waist and making her giggle. The child will break hearts when she’s older.

“Okay.” Jess sets her daughter down and eyes me suspiciously. “What’s happened? And before you say ‘nothing’, I can feel the heat of your wrath from here.”

Dad pokes his head around the kitchen doorway and calls out, “Come on in, Jess. I’ll make coffee.”

We go through to the kitchen where Dad already has the coffee brewing.

“Hi, Mr. Carter,” Jess says. “I can’t stay long. I need to get this little one into bed. Dave’s on babysitting duties tonight, and I’m going out for a couple of drinks with my cousin.”

“You should go with them, Rose.” Dad’s shameless when it comes to forcing my company onto others. “It’ll do you good to get out.”

Jess’s gaze hops between the two of us. “Yes, come, Rose. You can tell me all about what’s got you so rattled.” Her eyebrows dance independently. “My guess is it’s man related.”

Dad chuckles, and I shoot him a glare that goes unnoticed. “It’s not what you’re thinking.”

“Oh, sweetie, you tell yourself that if it makes you feel better.”

“Okay, I take it all back. Sounds like this guy wears his boxers too tight.” Jess downs her glass of wine and asks the bartender for a refill after I recount the incident in the lobby of Weiss Tower.

The bar is busy, but not so noisy that we have to shout to hear ourselves speak; it’s buzzing, and the urge to run home and hide behind a book in my pajamas is real.

“I just wish Dad would speak up for himself,” I say, rubbing my thumb over the condensation on my glass.

She shakes her head. “Rose, your dad is a grown man. He has worked hard all his life, raised a quite spectacular daughter, and he doesn’t need you to hold his hand.”

I sip my drink, swallow, and feel the familiar sting behind my eyes. Dad meant well, suggesting that I get dressed up in something other than a T-shirt and faded jeans and spend some time with my best friend, but alcohol always produces the same result.

Jess’s warm hand covers mine.

“I miss her so much,” I say as the first tear trickles down my cheek. I catch it on the tip of my tongue and sniff loudly.

“I know.” Jess nods. “You did everything you could for her, Rose. Your mom knew how much you loved her. You even dropped out of college to care for her.”

“So, why do I feel so guilty?” I shake my head, swallow a larger mouthful of wine to blur the edges of what’s going on in my head. But still the same old emotions drag up from somewhere deep inside like water being drawn from a well.

You go through life smiling at people, trying your best to be a good person, to be kind and thoughtful and compassionate, and it works. At least on the surface. No one sees what’s going on beneath the bright smile because they have their own stuff to deal with, and that’s okay. It’s how it should be.

So, you keep going, tell yourself that you’re coping, that finally, you’ve moved on from grief and guilt and loneliness, and then one glass of wine and wham! It all comes flooding back.

“She never got over it,” I murmur. Jess has heard this all before, but she’s the kind of friend who listens and doesn’t tell me to let it go and move on.

“It isn’t something you ever really get over, Rose, losing a baby. But you know what, your parents doted on the baby they did have—you! They poured double the amount of love into you, which makes you a very lucky person.”

The bartender slides Jess’s drink across the bar towards her, and she flashes him a grateful smile. He looks at my almost empty glass, raises an eyebrow, and I down it in one. He pours another without prompting.

He’s good looking, dark hair, olive skin, high cheekbones, the kind of guy I’d be attracted to if my heart was in it. I turn around to face the room which is still filling up.

It’s early evening. The place will be busy later, and that will be my cue to leave.

It isn’t that I don’t like crowds, I’m just out of touch with partying since Mom died and everything started sliding downhill. Robbie. My career. Marriage. Jess says it’s because the universe is picking up on my negative energy, and maybe she’s right, but I can’t seem to drag myself out of it, and the bad news just keeps on coming.

“There she is!”

Jess points out her cousin Mindy who has just stepped through the doorway looking fabulous in an emerald-green pantsuit and strappy silver heels. Like Jess, she’s tall and athletic with long raven-black curls that tumble over her shoulders and turn heads wherever she goes.

Even so, I’m not looking at her. I’m looking at the couple walking in behind her, holding hands, the huge diamond on the woman’s wedding ring finger casting light signals around the room.

Robbie and his new fiancée.

I’d seen the engagement on our mutual friends’ social media posts, but I’d buried that one deep too; in a city this size, you can go through life without ever bumping into someone you want to avoid.

“Rose?” Jess’s voice penetrates my thoughts. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.” It’s the standard response that spills out with minimal effort.

I have no right to feel jealous or bitter or any other kind of emotion now that Robbie has moved on with his life. I was the one who called off our engagement. There was too much going on at the time—my mom was sick, my grades were falling in college, Dad was a mess—at least that’s what I told Robbie. The truth was, we’d been together since high school, and I always felt like something was missing, like I wasn’t ready for marriage and kids and a home of our own. So, I handed back the ring and walked away.

I’ve spent the last few years convincing myself that I did what was right for me at the time, that I wanted all those things, but not with Robbie. Only now, I’m not so sure.

Blurry eyed with tears, I slide off my stool—I need to get away before Robbie spots me. My elbow connects with a glass. I gasp and hold my breath, watching the scene behind me play out in Jess’s eyes and the way she flinches.

I whirl around, an apology on my lips, and realize that I’m face to face with the man in the gray suit from Dad’s workplace.

Mr. Weiss.

He’s still wearing the same clothes, but instead of mucky fingerprints, the front of his jacket is now wet and turning the same shade of red as the wine that was in his glass a moment ago. Recognition dances across his features.

“Do you ever watch where you’re going?” I ask.

“Where I’m going?” He holds the glass away from him as if preventing the final few drips from landing on his jacket might somehow save it from being irreparably damaged.

Jess steps in and grabs my arm. “What my friend meant to say is she’s sorry. She’ll pay for your jacket to be dry-cleaned.” She waggles her fingers in the general direction of his chest.

“That isn’t what I meant.” I straighten, facing him squarely.

Twice in one day—how is that even possible? Until this morning, I didn’t even know this guy existed, and now he’s everywhere, like a bad smell that refuses to blow away even when the windows are opened.

“This is the guy I was telling you about,” I say, “the one who knocked Izzie over this morning.”

“Okay.” His jawline juts like he owns the place. Maybe he does own the place—it would just about sum up my luck right now. “Firstly, I didn’t knock Izzie over this morning, she ran into me.”

Jess is still clinging to my arm, but now she’s watching him carefully, her expression unfathomable.

“Secondly, the kid shouldn’t have even been inside the building.”

Jess’s eyebrows almost slide into her hairline, and I swallow the hysterical laughter that’s threatening to spill out of my chest. I’ve seen that look before, and I wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of it, especially where it concerns Izzie. She’s daring him to keep going.

And he does. “Thirdly, the suit is ruined, and I doubt she could afford to replace it, although I’m tempted to have another one made and send her the bill.”

“Let’s go,” I say to Jess, turning around to leave. “It’s not worth it.”

Jess doesn’t take her eyes off Mr. Weiss. When she speaks, her tone is cold. “Firstly, the kid, Izzie, you know the one who ran into you this morning, is mine. Secondly, if there’s no sign on the front door saying NO CHILDREN ALLOWED, then she has as much right to be in that building as the next person.”

“BEWARE THE OWNER would be more appropriate,” I mutter under my breath.

“And thirdly…” Jess hesitates, a smile tugging the corners of her lips. “You should try buying washable suits, it makes life a lot easier.”

I suck my lips in to smother my smile. I bet Mr. Weiss wishes he’d chosen any other bar to walk into tonight but this one.

The bartender has been lingering over the customer closest to us, following our interaction with a lopsided smile on his face. All around us, eager faces are turned our way, sensing the argument brewing.

“Hey, guys.” Mindy, looking utterly gorgeous, appears next to Jess. “What’s going on? What did I miss?”

“We’re leaving,” Jess says. “This bar is a little overcrowded.”

“But I just got here.” Mindy is still talking and glancing over her shoulder at Mr. Weiss as Jess leads her away.

I chance one final look at him before I follow them. Our eyes meet, only it isn’t anger I see in them, it’s something else. Pity perhaps? I walk away and I don’t look back.